My source appears to believe that Childs' motivation was the antithesis of tampering, and that Childs did everything possible to maintain the integrity of the network, perhaps to a fault:

“He's very controlling of his networks -- especially the FiberWAN. In an MPLS setup, you have 'provider edge' (PE) routers and 'customer edge' (CE) routers. He controlled both PE and CE, even though our department was the customer; we were only allowed to connect our routers to his CE routers, so we had to extend our routing tables into his equipment and vice versa, rather than tunneling our routing through the MPLS system.”

Dedicated engineer
Like so many other high-level network administrators, Childs seems to have taken his job extremely seriously, to the point of arrogance and, perhaps, burnout.

“Terry was very dedicated to his career as an engineer. He is a CCIE (probably the only one in the City government), and spent much of his free time studying and learning more -- the MPLS for the FiberWAN, VoIP some of the departments are rolling out, other new technologies for our 311 and E911 systems, etc. He worked very hard, evenings and weekends in addition to full-time 8-5 work, and rarely took vacations. His classification is 'professional,' so he doesn't earn overtime pay, only comp time -- which like many of us he never really had the opportunity to use. He was on standby more or less 24-7-365; whereas in the private sector, in a company of 20,000 or more employees, you'd expect to find multiple engineers rotating that standby status, I'm pretty sure he was always the guy on call.”

This attitude is, again, not uncommon among high-level IT administrators. Neither is the fact that they tend to eschew what they perceive to be unnecessary questioning and bureaucratic “nonsense.”

“Terry also, obviously, had a terrible relationship with his superiors. I should point out that he's not just a network engineer -- he was the lead network engineer for the entire City. His bosses were all managerial rather than technical, and while the other engineers did not actually report to Terry, they did defer to him in any technical matters. Even the network architect left it to Terry to actually figure out implementation. Terry felt that his direct superior was intrusive, incompetent, and obstructive, and that the managers above him had no real idea of what was going on, and were more interested in office politics than in getting anything done.

"[Childs] complained that they spent more time doing paperwork -- change requests, documentation, etc. -- than actually implementing or fixing anything (a common complaint among engineers, I know). He complained about being overworked (which he was, and which his colleagues are even more now) and that many of his colleagues were incompetent freeloaders (also not entirely without basis).