Although hindsight is always brilliant, I think there was a simple way to solve his dilemma. All he had to do was write the passwords on a piece of paper, put them in a manila envelope and seal it, then right "City Network Systems Passwords - Confidential" on the outside and hand them over to the city's lawyers and get a receipt. Anyone not entitled to open the envelope and read the passwords would be guilty of a stealing information, breaking into a network or similar. There are ways to use the system to your advantage.

The one America does not use is the passport. True story: I went to America to buy some building materials. I was in Home Depot and bought about $700 worth of tools. When I tried to pay with my credit card, they cashier requested identification so I handed her my British Passport. She refused to accept it as a valid form of identification so I walked out leaving them with the tools.
The idea that an easily obtainable driver's license is a reliable form of identification is ludicrous, and that the internationally accepted form of ID that gets people into the country is not good enough for a hardware store is equally ridiculous.

Don't you understand what a shill is?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"A shill is an associate of a person selling goods or services or a political group, who pretends no association to the seller/group and assumes the air of an enthusiastic customer. The intention of the shill is, using crowd psychology, to encourage others unaware of the set-up to purchase said goods or services or support the political group's ideological claims. Shills are often employed by confidence artists. The term plant is also used."
Shills in marketing: See also: Astroturfing

It is subterfuge. There's a huge difference between puffery, obviously overstating your values, and pretending to be a dispassionate third party in order to trick people. We know marketing overstates the product, that's built in to our reactions, but we tend to trust impartial thrid party recommendations. Everyone in marketing knows it is wrong to cross that line.

>As far as I know, all known life on earth is left handed
Your left or my left?

Properly installed UTP does not get "old" in any real sense unless there is some environmental issue such as excessive heat or chemical attack.
However, as many other posters have mentioned, a great deal of cabling installations are not properly done. UTP should always be installed by certified installers to the latest revision of TIA/EIA-568, currently revision "C". the installation should be certified with a proper cable analyzer such as a Fluke DSP-4300 and the installer should be required to produce a test report for each cable run. Once you know the cabling has been installed to meet the performance requirements of the standard, you know you can rely on it and should not have to worry about problems with your cabling.
This is what I do for a living.

People have to trust people. Doctors, lawyers, finalcial advisors, accountants, we all have to trust experts and base our selection on reputation. Some of those experts are crooked some of the time. Unless you are also an expert, how can you always tell?

Your car mechanic installs no parts but charges you $500 for new parts. Short of having another mechanic take the engine apart, how would you know?

Everyone has been taken at some point or other. In most cases, it was not that important. For some, it was their life's savings.

Madoff was one of the elite, a previous NASDAQ chairman and a prominent public figure. People trusted him the way they trust their bank, their brokerage account, their doctor. Even accountants and auditors and others who should have known better trusted him. They are the ones I would now be looking at. They must have known it was too good to be true. The ordinary person had no clue, and you can't expect they would be able to tell something was up.

That you know of.

Often, they are not idiots, they are desperate and don't know where else to turn. Desperate people are ready to believe there is a benefactor willing to help them survive. Walk a mile in their shoes before you condemn them.
Madoff's "clients" where not idiots, they were conned by one of the most sophisticated conmen ever. ANYONE can be conned, no matter how smug and clever you are.

"Armed with the policy, I could point to that when anyone asked me to install non-legal software without fear of retribution. "
Should be "Armed with the policy, I could point to that and refuse when anyone asked me to install non-legal software without fear of retribution. "

I had this situation with a company I was contracting to. Knowing that the IT guys were installing pirated software, I wrote the management of that company and recommended that the company established a policy that all software was legally obtained and licensed. At that point, management had only two choices, acknowledge the issue and agree, or document that they approved of piracy. Armed with the policy, I could point to that when anyone asked me to install non-legal software without fear of retribution.

It must be remembered that Word and it's relatives are only word processors. If you want to combine documents and images and have proper styles and typograpic control, use a layout program. InDesign is the best of the bunch, I have used it for numerous publications and have not found anything it can't do.
As for collaboration, InDesign will use WebDAV and will auto-update linked documents.

And interestingly, the head of the Public Utilities Commission in this island made it very clear to me that they do not regulate Internet, only PSTN, Cellphone, and Electricity. So it is not clear how can they require a license for VOIP if they do not regulate Internet? The reality is that the legal structure does not know how to handle VOIP. Is it telephpony, does it constitute providing Dial Tone? If that is the issue, use Dial-tone-less dialing and get around it. In my mind, VOIP is an internet service and should be viewed as such. It is DATA - nothing more. If the user owns a device to convert voice to DATA and back, and uses this device to do so over the internet, this is nobodies business. If you pay for an internet feed, then you should be free to use it how you wish (providing you are doing anything offensive).
The VOIP issue has illustrated the intent of the so-called Public Servants to protect the revenues of the multinational monopolies over the interests of the public. Tell me again why we vote for these guys?

In the C&W controlled monopoly islands of the english speaking Caribbean, VOIP was always a gray area. Anyone wanting to offer VOIP services required a telco license and C&W would not sell them an internet connection, but they did not block VOIP use by users. The Governments did not have any real stance on the issue as they did not understand it. Eventually, C&W accepted the inevitable and offered their own service, known as NetSpeak, but only to private users and only tied to a hardware device.
There is a large move to VOIP by companies and now I am seeing quasi-governmental pan-caribbean agencies implementing IP PBX installations using Open Source PBX equipment. The last bastion of TDM is the hotels and I think a shift to VOIP is inevitable there also.
The incumbent Telco will likely move to entertainment and content as long distance revenue dwindles and they are stuck with the losses of maintaining low return infrastructure. They are already slimming down operations, laying off staff and becoming a sales driven company rather than an engineering company.
VOIP will remain legal and radically change the Caribbean, telcos will become content providers and TDM will fade into the past.

You have to ask, who were his supervisors? Did they not know they had no documentation or passwords before they decided to fire him? If you had a key admin who had sole access to vital information, wouldn't you review your position prior to firing him, such as, implement a policy to store passwords and configs in a secure safe, update your backups, etc. What was the rush to fire him? In my opinion, they got what they deserved. This is a case of bad management and hasty decisions and they should have been censored for their lack of foresight and for elevating this to a ridiculous level. The fact that Childs set conditions under which he would turn over the information indicated he was not keeping the information for malicious reasons. Game over.
By and large I regard System Admins like Doctors. They have a right to special access to computer systems, and by implication, special responsibilities to protect that information. They should be held accountable for any misdeeds, punished more harshly for misuse of information, and trusted to access data in a way no layman would be.
I had a situation where there was insinuations I had access to emails I should not of. When I explained I had access to the whole server and any information that passed through it, they realized it was ridiculous to make such accusations. I have had clients give me access to their bank account passwords, credit cards, just about every confidential document they own.
If you don't trust System Administrators, then how will you have computer systems? Someone has to be trusted and with that trust comes an overriding responsibility to protect those systems, and that's what I see at play here. Childs may have overplayed his own responsibilities but that's not criminal.
The reality is, most of the legal system is completely lost with regard to information systems and is terrified of the computer boogey man. They have no idea what they are dealing with.