I know how much some people around here admire Sheriff Joe down in Arizona. I wonder what you all think about his recent forced takeover of the Maricopa County computer servers used for email by the Sheriff's Office, Superior Court and County Attorney's Office?

In brief, there is an ongoing lawsuit to give the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office their own computer system(s) fully under their control so civilians won't have access to crime databases and the email of the Sheriff's Office. Currently, the servers that provides those services are managed by civilian employees of Maricopa County and are shared among the above county offices. Rather than wait for the outcome of that lawsuit, on Wednesday, several sheriffs raided the server room of the county and forced out the civilian employees. They then changed the administrative passwords on the servers, so the county employees responsible for those servers cannot access them anymore.

Here's the full story on the take-over:

A judge on Friday has ordered them to reveal the new passwords or be held in contempt. Chief Deputy Hendershott  is refusing to provide the passwords. Full story on this part: www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/08/14/200908 14computers0815.html

My personal take as a techie is that the Sheriff's Office handled this inappropriately. They had a legitimate claim that they needed their own servers under Sheriff control because of the laws governing management of crime databases. Had they waited for the lawsuit to progress, it is very likely a judge would have found in their favor given the federal laws on this matter and they could have forced Maricopa County to seperate off the Sheriff's functionality onto other servers that the Sheriff's Office could manage. However, I think that the Sheriff's Office has no right to take over the servers while the servers also manage the Superior Court and County Attorney's Office systems.

They crossed the line when they forcibly took over these systems before the Sheriff's Office functionality was shifted off onto its own servers. They have now declared themselves the system administrators for the Superior Court and County Attorney's Office without the consent of those agencies. They are refusing a court order to hand control of the systems back over to Maricopa County, so they are in essence holding the servers of two other county agencies hostage. While they have a legitimate claim to their own systems, they have NO claim to the systems of these two other agencies. Since all three agencies are sharing the same physical hardware, the Sheriff's Office cannot say only they can access the hardware. They need to wait for the systems to be split onto different physical servers, not sweep in and take over the current shared servers.

What do you think? Did they cross the line?