A computer programmer was sentenced Friday to 6 months at a halfway house for gaining access to a military computer that tracks the combat readiness of Air Force aircraft and missiles.
Steven Liu, 24, also was fined $5,000 on a guilty plea to exceeding authorized access to a computer. He had faced up to 2 years in prison.
Liu, who worked for a military contractor in Dayton, downloaded passwords from a database at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He said he accidentally discovered the password file and used it to try to find his job-performance evaluation.
The database, which isn’t classified, has maintenance and failure-rate information about weapons systems and is used to make funding decisions.
Air Force investigators said Liu neither destroyed nor altered information and did not create a way to enter the system once the passwords were changed. They said that the Air Force couldn’t be sure he didn’t supply information to others or that others didn’t access the system.
