The San Francisco city has regained control of its computer systems after Mayor Mayor Gavin Newsom paid a secret visit to imprisoned IT expert Terry Childs. At the meeting which took place at the city jail, Terry Childs made the mayor’s day and gave him the modified passwords.

Meanwhile, Erin Crane, Terry Childs' defense attorney, claims that his client was trying to protect the City's IT systems from incompetent city hall officials, who were in fact trying to make him leave his job, by damaging the system and preventing Terry Childs from maintaining it. "None of the persons who [previously] requested the password information from Mr. Childs ... were qualified to have it," she said in a court filing.

It appears that Childs saw the Mayor as the only person he could trust in the situation. The password as he provided it to Gavin Newsom did not work outright, but another call to Childs' attorney reportedly fixed the situation, as more information was needed to use it. Currently, the City's computer systems is working fine and Cisco engineers have regained full administrative access to the network.

Department of Technology employee Terry Childs has been arrested and charged for tampering with the city's FiberWAN (Wide Area Network) by creating a secret password for his own use, while preventing access of other administrators. Terry Childs, 43, is held on a huge $5 million bail. It appears that his actions were triggered by a conflict with a superior and he pleaded not guilty.

Terry Childs allegedly was part of the team which planned the router system for the city's FiberWAN, and worked as a network administrator for five years with a salary of some $130k a year. The information system on which the employee of the city's Department of Technology worked reportedly stored 60 percent of all municipal data, including the city's 311 system, employee e-mail and law enforcement records.