The Case of Terry Childs

I was particularly interested on the case of Terry Childs because I also handled administrative passwords for many environments my entire life.

Terry Childs was the administrator that has just been sentenced to four years in prison for refusing to hand over the passwords for administrative control of the network of the city of San Francisco (see full InfoWorld coverage - http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/network-admin-terry-childs-gets-4-year-sentence-247).

I read about it in many places, but once more I fully agree with Steve Jones (see his editorial "Penalties" in SQL Server Central - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/70961). However for me there is something that doesn't match, I just can't imagine why things ended like this. Or this guy gone crazy, or there was a hidden deep reason for that.

The case is that we will never know exactly what happened, but anyway, the guy knew that he would give the passwords in one way or another. I think he went too far, things could be solved before reaching this point (and a four years sentence is too much for this).