As a professional Systems Administrator who prides themself on their professional conduct, I seriously hope that you are *not* a sysadmin. Such a stubborn, immature, bratty attitude is absolutely unprofessional. If you are incapable of divorcing egotistic impulses from professional conduct, you absolutely should not ever be working near critical systems of any kind.

Any good professional in the world should have some reasonable anticipation (and possibly first-hand experience) of the possibility of dealing with employers who are unfair, wrong, or just stupid. That never, in any way, justifies a retaliatory act of damage against that employer. If you think that it does, you should not be working with critical systems.

"The password is rot13 encrypted on the bottom of the beige stapler on my desk."

"There is no beige stapler on their desk."

"There was. Then someone must have stolen it."

Seriously, how could they possibly justify locking someone up for something like that?

I can think of a million variants like this, all of which could be equally plausible and basically impossible to prove.

Then the case becomes not something about criminally witholding information. It seems like the worst thing that could be charged would be some type of professional, criminal negligence which would have cost the company money. But in that case the territory becomes so murky and the lines of responsibility between the company, management, and employees so crisscrossed that it seems like it would be very difficult to successfully litigate against someone.

Is that why, a few years ago, american farmers had to literally dump nearly 10,000 tons of rice that had been contaminated with an untested, unapproved GM variety?

To add insult to injury, in order to protect Bayer, the FDA gave retroactive approval to LL601 even though it had still not been tested. The entire european market for long-grain rice has been closed to american farmers since then.

There's nothing like a government-sponsored biological catastrophe.

Since this thread went from the topic of checks to bank Überweisungen (German word for bank transfer), I'm surprised no one mentioned TAN numbers. At least with my german bank account, each überweisung required that a valid, unique TAN number be entered. The bank would send a list of fresh numbers every so often on one of those carbon papers where you peel the front side off to reveal the text. The lists would have many dozens of number, far more than the typical account holder would probably need, and whenever the new list arrived all the numbers on the old one would automatically expire.

I guess the equivalent would be requiring a unique number for each check that one wrote, which would probably much more secure than a signature.

The only down side is that it would be an inconvenience if you lose the list of TAN numbers although you could probably just go into a branch or even call to have a new one sent.

I also recall using Überweisungen for eBay purchases, and often wonder to what extent the existence of free bank transfers in the EU has had on eBay and Paypal. I do not know how such transactions would be handled in the case of a transaction dispute. Perhaps the bank would mitigate the dispute much like they do with credit card disputes. Maybe someone else can enlighten on this issue.