I understand that being in the public eye makes you a target, but the news that Sam Liccardo’s former intern, Eric Hernandez, was arrested for hacking into the City Hall e-mail system still caught me by surprise. However, as I read the story, it was clear that something just didn’t add up. Why would an 18-year-old be so angry with his former boss—Liccardo Chief of Staff Jessica Garcia-Kohl—that he would intend to hurt her and expose her relationship with Sam Liccardo? Just because she denied him access to a few rooms? Why would that make Hernandez fly off the handle? That doesn’t seem logical.
I remember when I interned I was just happy to be there. I was excited to get the chance and didn’t question a thing my boss said. Plus, if you want a job later on, why would you burn bridges? As an 18-year-old you don’t really have the wherewithal to feel slighted, do you? And common sense would tell you that a kid (because that is what he is) just wouldn’t do this on his own. Hernandez must have been sought out by people who really want to bring down anyone inside City Hall because they themselves aren’t in it. What it really seems like is the kid took the fall for something others got him to do.
The bottom line is: how does any of this help our city improve, grow and change? It’s sleaziness that stalled things from happening when Gonzales was mayor, and now it seems the sleaziness has morphed into actions that are malicious and hateful. I fear that things such as this will discourage those who would want to step forward and be of service to their city, all because of the actions of a few.
Here’s hoping Sam Liccardo gets a G-mail account. Stat.
This case is a mass of contradictions. There may have been personal or emotional-based causes that precipitated the accused’s actions, but take a larger view.
Everything in City Hall is now covered by a very broad sunshine & transparency policy…at what point does someone’s actions become objectively whistleblowing in support of sunshine & transparency, and cease being criminal?
I see Single Gal has laid out a kind of conspiracy theory that marks the accused as a mere tool for a larger, out-of-City Hall clique. But I think a case can be made that the objective outcome of the accused’s actions will be an increase in sunshine & transparency.
If Single Gal’s alternate suggestion is correct that the accused wished to expose misconduct by a Council Member and staffer, we have some recent examples of misconduct by elected officials which would have been better disclosed earlier than later.
And we praised those who finally broke through the wall of silence in 2005 & 2006 regarding City Hall wrong-doing at the top levels.
Ask yourselves: Will legal punishment for the accused enhance whistleblowing, or will it send a message to all city employees: “Shut up!” And which outcome do we really want?
on the actual act of hacking/whistleblowing:
if mr. hernandez had been an employee and blown the whistle on the mayor or anyone else, that would have been one thing.
however, he was not still an intern in the office or an employee of the city and he hacked into the computer system and was apparently monitoring other peoples’ emails.
if a former intern or employee of cisco or apple or hp or the federal government had done the same thing, i think you would see a similar prosecution – conspiracy theory or not.
on the conspiracy theory that single gal describes:
mr. hernandez was a hold-over intern from the previous downtown councilmember.
he interned on the mayor’s race in 2006 as well as in the council office.
it is pretty clear that those that run the ‘other’ website in town had similar backgrounds.
coincidence?
This was not hacking. Hacking requires skill. You should have asked why does an intern have access to other people’s passwords. Does the city’s IT department really let interns create email accounts? The city needs to seriously review its IT security policies.
Since when do 16 and 17 year-olds intern for Councilmembers? Seems like that’s the first problem. The second is obviously the lack of security with the City Hall computer system. So much for the Capitol of Silicon Valley.
We don’t know enough about this to reach any conclution other than what you read in the paper… and even that is not always exact.
Let the process do it’s job and the Councilman do his.
Single Gal has given us the best assessment of the situation. On the Mercury News article blog of this incident, a bunch of crazies had already gotten the rope tied at St. James Park for the kid. I just remind everyone that with the Brown Act issue, this Leaky Liccardo issue, and the budget, Reed is 0-3 within his first year.
SG—One article in the Murky mentioned that the email perp had worked for Cindy C. Is that
the missing connection here? But hard to know why Cindy would need a mole to look for dirt when much of Sam’s staff was recycled from hers. There certainly was a lot of sleaze last council term, and the players, except Gonzo, are still around and about, planning to get back to where they were. George Gren
It’s a shame that someone would illegally hack into someone else’s city email address, when the information received from the hack would be available if someone had just made a public records request.
Hacking is wrong and illegal.
Public Records requests are not.
I’m with #4. Since when are 16 and 17 year olds even eligible for an internship? People that age have a good 10 to 15 years to go before they get their head screwed on right and with only a tiny few exceptions should not even be considered for such a role.
They are going to need an even bigger circus tent over at 200 E Santa Clara the way things are going under Chuck Reed. At least with Gonzo they had a ringleader. Reed quite predictably is exhibiting himself (as is the bulk of the Council body) as one of those “every minute” jobs Barnum spoke of.
Great column SG. I don’t think this young man did this without prompting from others either. Much of what he got off emails were published by San Jose Revealed, the Metro, and the Mercury news, so I think you are right in putting two and two together like you have. Unfortunately, like Cisco, and others that were involved in City scandals, San Jose Revealed, the Metro, and the Mercury News won’t be held accountable for their part in receiving stolen goods, or supporting this illegal hacking by talking to Eric, and publishing this information. They must have known he was stealing it when they took the sensationalistic tid bits from him. After all, it sold them more papers, got them more ads, and brought the infamous Reed and McEnery hating San Jose Revealed blog notoriety in the Mercury News right? So it was a real win/win for all concerned, except Eric who now has suffered the embarrassment of having his young face plastered all over the news.
The Internet has brought both good and bad things to us. One of its advantages in getting information out to a mass of people that ordinarily we couldn’t reach, in a very short amount of time. If used correctly, it can help educate the public on vital issues, or to help fundraise. The bad side of it is that it provides easy access to porn; racists hate groups, and other once under ground information and hate groups. One of the things I hate most is the way blogs allow some real sickos a venue to spew lies, racist remarks, and other harmful comments to a really large audience, without disclosing their real identity. By being allowed to remain anonymous, these sickos are not held publicly accountable for what comes out of their mouths. They can post and repost under a variety of different names, and mislead readers into thinking there are more people who view the topic being discussed, the same way. Blog sponsors do little to stop it, so they are as guilty as these nuts they allow to do this. A good movie to see that will shock you into seeing just how bad the Internet is getting, and has gotten is Untraceable. Frightening stuff because I do believe people would go to a website just out of curiosity, even knowing they’d be helping to kill someone. The blogs that were running on the website while this kitten, and those human beings were dying were quite disturbing as well.
Eric Hernandez was wrong to do what he did yes and he definitively needs to suffer the consequences of his actions, but the City has to take some responsibility for this too. Allowing an intern this kind of access seems very disturbing to me. And not changing access codes are even more concerning. My hope is that they’ve learned a very valuable lesson from this, and so has Eric. Stealing is stealing no matter how you try to slant it. This will follow this poor young man for quite sometime. It has hurt his family too. It is just sad all the way around. I wish him and his family the best.
I’ve been down in Argentina & Chile for a couple of weeks, so didn’t get all the SJ dirt. So now we have denial of access to free food-Gate.
“Hernandez regretted doing it and was remorseful,” according to the police report. Yeah, right. He more likely regretted that he was caught, but his lawyer probably told him that his “regret” would garner a lighter sentence.
SG said :“I remember when I interned I was just happy to be there. I was excited to get the chance and didn’t question a thing my boss said.” Oooh, that’s being a “Good German”, SG. No wonder so much cr*p goes undiscovered. How many years was what’s-his-name doing Congressional interns? Then there’s Willy-Jeff & Monica.
I don’t believe you can call it hacking if the dude had the passwords.
This wasn’t hacking, someone in IT or in his own office maybe Garcia – Kohl herself gave him the passwords to check peoples emails, it seems the process of assigning people passwords is what needs to be fixed, the city unlike other government entities only requires employees to change thier passwords every year, they should step the security up and do a password change every month to stop this invasion.
As to the comment about 16 year olds interning, the city has a longstanding relationship with our school districts and organizations such as Vision New America that have interns from highschool, these interns are not paid by the City generally. This program is vital to developing our youth to enter into public administration.
Don’t worry Single Gal Hope is coming!
Oh cripes, I can see it now! The particulars aside, the City Council and their crack staff will wind up voting to hire a team of outside consultants to: 1) heighten system security; and 2) perform a “feel good” study on the merits of hiring children as interns.
Let’s see now – two separate studies requiring two teams of consultants – that ought to cost about a half million dollars. I’m finally used to the idea that highly paid City employees can’t undertake projects this complex.
Conspiracy or incompetence – lets see 18 year old intern with ties to former Council member used passwords after he left so he can give email to San Jose Revealed etc to embarrass current Council and IT department
Conspiracy or incompetence – sounds like both by everyone involved much like of rest of our city government and elected officials
Bring on the clowns – Oh my mistake – they are already at City Circus Hall highly paid by taxpayers
He does regret doing it. Give him a break!
Single Gal,
Sam is a good person and smart, he should be able to rise above all this. He has a bright future!
We call ourselves the capital of silicon valley, but most of our so-called leaders are as IT ignorant as I am. Whew, is that scary, or what?
#13—who is Hope, and how will she help us?
Connecting the dots… well maybe.
Downtown Brown and Reality Check; remember these two?
They ran hot and heavy on SJI right up until the election results were in.
Then both went deathly quiet… never to be heard from again.
Could it be these two pen names are of one hacker?
Could these two be the young D6 supporter, intern and political activist?
Could these two be the here-to-for undisclosed voice of SBLC?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Do these dots connect?
No they opened a blog of their own: http://www.sanjosereveal.com
I just read this in the Metro:
http://www.metroactive.com/metro/03.05.08/fly-0810.html
How can this guy afford such an expensive attorney?
#21—ask Cindy Chavez or Phaedra.
Did I miss the definition of hacking? Many bloggers talk about him hacking into city computers. Hacking is when an unauthorized person gains entry to a system. He HAD THE PASSWORDS, so it ain’t hacking, as I understand it.
It’s still wrong, perhaps a crime; but now that he’s lawyered up, I see probation and community service. Hopefully, probation will include no use of ANY computer for the term of probation. That oughta hurt more than anything. Oh, and no video games, either.
Maybe even 18 year olds know its wrong for a councilmember to call in a favor to the mayor to have his girlfriend handed a job. If i were working there at that time i would have wanted to bust out that BS story too. Someone just moves over to another job in the city like that, come on..?? Not much more to it than that. I hope the kid gets a break since he was just trying to expose the personal favors elected officials do on taxpayers dime.
In response to 23, it is perfectly plausible that Liccardo’s girlfriend got a job offer from the mayor’s office without any “favors being called in” on her behalf. If she was SL’s chief of staff, obviously to some extent she was/is a figure on the political scene in her own right. I’m sure she has plently of her own contacts.