or, San Francisco city government internal office politics gone horribly wrong?. It’s almost one year in jail so far, and no trial yet, for the former head of San Francisco’s fiberwan department, and one of the few people writing about it, and not parroting mainstream press, is Paul Venezia
It seems that this case is going to ride along the interpretation of several rather vague California statues concerning computer crime. For instance, Penal Code section 502 states: “‘Computer services’ includes, but is not limited to, computer time, data processing, or storage functions, or other uses of a computer, computer system, or computer network.” This doesn’t explicitly define administrative access as a service, which is the crux of this particular issue, and that section seems to be specifically discussing non-administrative action, as in someone who illegally accesses computing resources, not the person who was employed to do so as part of his or her daily responsibilities.
And that calls into play another definition in the statutes: “Subdivision (c) does not apply to punish any acts which are committed by a person within the scope of his or her lawful employment. For purposes of this section, a person acts within the scope of his or her employment when he or she performs acts which are reasonably necessary to the performance of his or her work assignment.”
read full article (note the comment by a former San Francisco IT officer)
As more time passes, it looks more and more likely much of this mess is due to the infamous incompetence of San Francisco city government. It’s going to be a complicated case for the judge, with lots of technical stuff about computer networking. It may set precedent for IT employment law too
