On Monday, following a secret meeting between San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and imprisoned IT man Terry Childs, the former was finally given the passwords for the city’s computer network.

Terry Childs, former city network administrator, has been kept in custody for ten days now; he is accused of having taken control of the entire network and having locked the other administrators out.

Although he initially refused to hand over the codes, he suddenly changed his mind and requested to see the mayor. At the meeting which was put together at the city jail, Terry Childs made the mayor’s day and gave him the modified passwords.

During the court hearing taking place on Wednesday, Erin Crane, Terry Childs' defense attorney, will probably bring forward his decision to cooperate, in an attempt to reduce the $5 million bail that was set a little while back.

As he knew the system had no backdoor, he did what was necessary in order to gain control of it; later on, Cisco engineers tried to break the codes for days in a row, but managed to get very little done. 

Erin Crane’s take on the case is that his client was simply protecting the city’s network from several incompetent city hall officials, who were in fact trying to make him leave his job, by damaging the system and preventing Terry Childs from maintining it. He feels he was the one person in the entire department "capable of running that system."

Terry Childs (43), certified Cisco Systems network administrator, was chief designer of the system's FiberWAN (Fibre Channel-connected WAN), which brings together more than half of San Francisco’s payroll and human resources information. He had worked in his former position for five years, with about $130,000 annually.