…circa 1985 or so. This looks like a good set-up for a tehcno- thriller, doesn’t it?

S.F. officials locked out of computer network

A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco’s new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail, authorities said Monday.

Terry Childs, a 43-year-old computer network administrator who lives in Pittsburg, has been charged with four counts of computer tampering and is scheduled to be arraigned today.

Prosecutors say Childs, who works in the Department of Technology at a base salary of just over $126,000, tampered with the city’s new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials’ e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates’ bookings are stored.

Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn’t work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said.

Granted, to make an effective thriller out of this, you would need for the computer system in question to be vital to national defense. Being down, it would open us up to attack by terrorists or the Soviets (1985, remember.) Or maybe it would just be a system controlling a dam — with humans completely locked out of control — with a devastating flood likely if the authorities can’t regain control. Or, come to think of it, maybe it would be a security system protecting people from dinosaurs.

In any case, the warning inherent in this kind of story would be that technology allows some individuals to disproportionately empower themselves, with potentially devastating results if the individuals in question are criminal or sociopath types. This is undoubtedly true. But while an effective theme for a techno-thriller, I don’t think it’s the right lesson to take away from a real-life incident such as this one.

I would prefer we learn something like this:

Technology can allow some individuals to disproportionately empower themselves if it isn’t managed correctly. So whatever we do, let’s make sure that no one individual is ever holding all the marbles.

Granted, this approach will require those sourcing and managing technology projects to understand, if not the technologies themselves, at least the risks involved. No doubt it’s a lot easier just to hand the keys to the kingdom over to the first geek who comes along who persuades you that he or she can solve all your problems, but the ease of that decision comes at the cost of entrusting that individual with an awful lot of power.

So instead of wringing our hands and saying, “Oh my, technology makes bad people too powerful,” how about if we hitch up or trousers and say, “Oh my, technology requires good people to be smarter?”

Just a thought.

(Hat-tip: GeekPress.)