The Story Behind San Francisco's Rogue Network Admin

Dedicated Engineer

Like so many other high-level network administrators, Childs seems to have taken his job extremely seriously, to the point of arrogance and perhaps to the point of burnout.

"Terry was very dedicated to his career as an engineer. He is a CCIE (probably the only one in the City government), and spent much of his free time studying and learning more -- the MPLS for the FiberWAN, VoIP some of the departments are rolling out, other new technologies for our 311 and E911 systems, etc. He worked very hard, evenings and weekends in addition to full-time 8-5 work, and rarely took vacations. His classification is "professional," so he doesn't earn overtime pay, only comp time -- which like many of us he never really had the opportunity to use. He was on standby more or less 24-7-365; whereas in the private sector, in a company of 20,000 or more employees, you'd expect to find multiple engineers rotating that standby status, I'm pretty sure he was always the guy on call."

This attitude is, again, not uncommon among high-level IT administrators. Neither is the fact that they tend to eschew what they perceive to be unnecessary questioning and bureaucratic "nonsense."

"Terry also, obviously, had a terrible relationship with his superiors. I should point out that he's not just a network engineer -- he was the lead network engineer for the entire City. His bosses were all managerial rather than technical, and while the other engineers did not actually report to Terry, they did defer to him in any technical matters. Even the network architect left it to Terry to actually figure out implementation. Terry felt that his direct superior was intrusive, incompetent, and obstructive, and that the managers above him had no real idea of what was going on, and were more interested in office politics than in getting anything done.

"[Childs] complained that they spent more time doing paperwork -- change requests, documentation, etc. -- than actually implementing or fixing anything (a common complaint among engineers, I know). He complained about being overworked (which he was, and which his colleagues are even more now) and that many of his colleagues were incompetent freeloaders (also not entirely without basis).

"You could see him getting red in the face whenever he started talking about his department. And once you were on Terry's bad side (which thankfully I never was), that's where you stayed, and you'd get only the most grudging assistance from him from then on. Whether any of his complaints were valid or not, I can't really say, but I don't think that's as relevant as how Terry felt."

Keys to the Kingdom

If Childs' sole proprietorship of the FiberWAN network was normal operating procedure, how did the tensions between Childs and his managers come to a head? Why was Childs arrested on Sunday? There have been reports that the city's newly-hired head of security may have pushed for Childs to open the FiberWAN doors to other admins. My source doesn't know for sure, but offers some insight:

"I don't know much about his actions in the last few weeks. It's been a couple of months, at least, since I've even spoken to him, and even then it was probably only in reference to some specific request or ticket. But I can imagine that being the subject of disciplinary action by his supervisors for "performance" issues would be absolutely infuriating to him. I can imagine that his response would be, "How can you say my performance is poor when I've been doing what no one else here was willing or able enough to do?"

If Childs was pressured to give up the keys to the network that he had built and cared for so long, would he go so far as to explicitly prevent anyone else from tinkering with his charge?

"I can imagine that [Childs'] response to a demand to open up authentication to the FiberWAN would be, "Why? So you can screw it up and bring the Citynetwork crashing to a halt?" I can even imagine that, under so much pressure, he'd take steps (deleting or hiding config backups, for instance) to make sure he was the only one in control."

These tales offer significant insight into what may have occurred between Childs and the FiberWAN network hostage situation. Rather than a case of a rogue administrator attempting to cause damage to the network by locking out other administrators, this may be a case of an overprotective admin who believed he was protecting the network -- and by extension, the city -- from other administrators whom he considered inferior, and perhaps even dangerous. One important fact seems to be in Childs' favor, if reports that the network has continued to run smoothly since his arrest are true.. My source corroborates this.

"As for the impact of [Childs'] actions to the rest of the City, the mayor's statement basically has it right. The network is completely up and running. No servers that I'm aware of are affected. No one has had any downtime (yet). But until they get back into those routers, they can't make any changes. I don't know yet if Terry's lockout applies only to the FiberWAN or also to the other routers, firewalls, switches, etc. in the City network."