Just some thoughts on the Terry Childs situation and SysAdmins in general. Terry Childs is the SysAdmin arrested on July 12, 2008 for disrupting San Francisco’s wide-area network and is currently sitting in the City of San Francisco’s county jail.
(1) Every good SysAdmin has to be a bit of "evil". Many plot lines out there describe the good guy turning into a bad guy to learn how to defeat the evil organization. Same concept applies to network security. No one knows the flaws and holes better than the SysAdmin. Thinking like a potential hacker, the SysAdmin can take a proactive approach to prevention and more effectively investigate suspicious behaviour. That being said, what the SysAdmin does not know can be just as dangerous.