IT chief sought access to 90 computers

Ontario’s senior IT bureaucrat asked his tech people for sweeping “administrative rights” that allowed a user access and the ability to delete or manipulate data on 90 computers in former premier Dalton McGuinty’s office.

The bombshell came Wednesday in testimony at the criminal trial of former McGuinty chief of staff David Livingston and former deputy chief of staff Laura Miller.

They are pleading not guilty to charges stemming from their alleged destruction of documents about the McGuinty government’s billion-dollar decisions in 2010 and 2011 to cancel two gasfired power plants in Mississauga and Oakville.

The witness testifying was Rolf Gitt, then a technical team leader in the IT unit responsible for the Premier’s Office and Cabinet Office (POCO).

In the end, Gitt said, the request morphed from a “many to many” (many people having access to many computers) to what one lawyer called a “Wendy to many” request, the “Wendy” in question being Wendy Wai, Livingston’s executive assistant.

But what remained constant was that the administrative rights that were granted were broad and extraordinary.

The special rights, which Gitt also called “elevated,” were used not by Wai, but allegedly by Peter Faist, Miller’s life partner, to wipe 20 computer hard drives in McGuinty’s office, an effort prosecutors say was designed to deliberately thwart the public right to know.

Gitt told Ontario Court Judge Tim Lipson that he was called to his first meeting with David Nicholl, chief information officer for the Ontario public service, and his immediate boss on Jan. 30, 2013, and asked for the first time in his then 18 years in the POCO unit for that kind of password.

The move came within days of Livingston approaching both Nicholl and cabinet secretary Peter Wallace and asking about getting such rights, purportedly out of concern that either personal information and staffers’ accounts from the departing McGuinty government would survive and be available to the new incoming government of Kathleen Wynne.

Administrative rights are nothing more than a login and password to a computer or laptop, but they grant the user the ability to download software — usually just to a single computer or laptop.

Typically, in the private sector and government both, administrative rights are assigned to IT staff who need them.

Simple rights, such as those that already had been granted to secretarial staff in the premier’s office (they needed them to make a faulty program work), are confined to only one computer.

But what Nicholl specifically asked that day, Gitt said, was this: “He asked me, and he said ‘I don’t need details,’ ‘Are you able, if I gave you a group of people and a group of computers, can you set that up with administrative rights?’

“I said ‘I believe I can,’ ” Gitt replied.

According to him, Gitt said, “If you can’t do it, let me know and I’ll get someone else.”

The rights Nicholl was seeking were different in that they didn’t grant access to one computer, presumably the user’s.

Rather, Gitt said, Nicholl’s request was that “all those users have administrative rights to all those computers… It was for all the Premier’s Office computers.”

Gitt’s testimony is important for several reasons.

First, it contradicts the version of events given earlier at trial (and in an appearance at the justice policy legislative committee) by Nicholl.

He testified that as far as he knew, there was nothing special about the access Livingston had been seeking, and portrayed himself as an IT guy who operated at “the 50,000-foot” level and not in any frontline capacity.

And Nicholl wasn’t the only one who testified that he saw the request as nothing particularly alarming. Peter Wallace, then the secretary of cabinet and the highest-ranking public servant in the province, said that’s how Nicholl portrayed the request to him.

Wallace was extremely worried by Livingston’s request.

He had for several months, as the legislature’s estimates committee had been demanding documents and the energy minister (then Chris Bentley) and his office had produced none, begun to fear that he had on his hands a government that was “erasing” gas plants records.

Bound by precedent, Wallace asked Nicholl to find out if anyone else in McGuinty’s office already had administrative rights. Nicholl returned to tell him that seven people had been previously granted the rights, leaving Wallace with the erroneous impression that he couldn’t reasonably refuse Livingston’s request, despite his gnawing fears.

But that, according to Gitt, wasn’t what Nicholl had actually asked for at all, on behalf of Livingston: Rather, he’d asked for the sweeping elevated rights, and there seemed an urgency about it.

Wallace ultimately approved the request, but with reluctance. He insisted that Nicholl brief Livingston about his record-keeping responsibilities, and asked a senior staff lawyer, William Bromm, to send a memo urging Livingston to search and preserve any gas plant records in particular.

When Gitt learned it was Wendy Wai who had been assigned the special rights, “I was quite surprised, actually.” He said he knew Wai reasonably well, and knew her to be an unsophisticated computer user who often called the helpdesk for assistance. She was not, he said, “a power user.”