This is a fairly insane situation.  According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a disgruntled city systems engineer apparently gave himself exclusive root access to systems in the city’s computer network.  Apparently, this was some sort of an “insurance policy” against disciplinary action or termination for poor performance.  It appears as though his poor performance was related to personal motivation not inherent skills, as he was smart enough to engineer a monitoring system to track what others were saying about him.

Insider threats have always been an issue.  Generally insiders try to evade system controls, but given how reluctant corporations are to report and prosecute computer crime, what is to prevent more mafia-style shakedowns by narcissistic systems administrators and Dr Strangeloves of the IT department?  Maybe we should think about renaming the “superuser” account so prevalent in many systems to the “systemwideaccessbutdontletitgotoyourhead” user.