A disgruntled system administrator accused of locking San Francisco out of its IT network may cost the city more than $1M in upgrades, consultants and repairs to undo the damage, according to the City’s Department of Technology.

A 43-year-old Terry Childs from the Bay Area city of Pittsburgh, is accused of creating a super password for San Francisco’s new FiberWan network and locking his bosses out of the system’s maintenance points. The network provides access to confidential databases including payroll files, jail booking records, and law enforcement documents.

A Fiber WAN is a wide area network that is connected via fiber optics cables. Fiber optics cables are different from the conventional copper cables used to connect local area networks like those inside an office building. A Wide Area Network is a network that crosses metropolitan, regional, or national boundaries.

Childs at first refused to divulge the password, even after being arrested with his bail set at a staggering $5m. He was eventually convinced to cough up the correct code, when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom visited his jail cell. Childs currently faces four felony charges of computer tampering.

Childs’s attorney portrays the rogue admin as a skilled engineer who barred network access in order to protect the system from incompetent managers. She claims Childs’s co-workers and supervisors damaged the network in the past, hindered his ability to maintain it, and otherwise showed no interest in maintaining the network themselves.

Prosecutors say before the incident, Childs was the target of disciplinary action over his allegedly poor performance. They claim he rigged the system as an “insurance policy” against getting fired.