2 L.A. traffic engineers must face trial

[question everything]

Source: LA Times

By Tami Abdollah
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 13, 2007

A judge on Friday ordered two high-ranking Los Angeles transportation engineers to stand trial on felony charges of allegedly gaining unauthorized access to the city's computer system in order to sabotage traffic flow at four busy city intersections in August 2006.

Gabriel Murillo, 38, and Kartik Patel, 34, both engineers with the city's Automated Traffic Surveillance Center, were charged in January with illegally accessing the computer system that controls 3,200 of the city's 4,300 traffic signals.

Prosecutors said the men changed computer codes preventing transportation managers from reprogramming and reactivating traffic lights for four days at four intersections. No accidents were attributed to the outage.

(snip)

The illegal access occurred hours before a job action by members of the Engineers and Architects Assn., which represents 7,500 city workers. About 1,500 union members walked off their jobs. City officials had temporarily blocked engineers from access to the computer system during the labor dispute.



Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-traffic13oct13,0,3789577.story?coll=la-home-center

[Pavulon]

1. Forgot Rule 1

nothing in anonymous on a computer system.

I wonder if they still think doing something that screwed over everyone was worth their career?