If my sister was caught doing something illegal, the last thing I would do is reveal more details about her inside leaks online (that could be further used against her in court).
It feels like a cautionary tale for would-be leakers inside of Apple.
Whenever I hear people say some variant of "criminals aren't very smart", there's a part of my brain that says "how do we know? Surely the smart ones aren't getting caught so we never hear about them."
>"how do we know? Surely the smart ones aren't getting caught so we never hear about them."
This only works if you exclusively consider crimes that have zero discernible external effect ("victimless crimes" in common parlance). Some percentage of copyright infringement or drug use would be good examples. But most crimes people really care about have external effects, and that is indeed precisely why they're crimes. If someone robs a house, they need not ever be caught for everyone to know a house was robbed. In turn, one can consider the ratio of crimes to criminals-caught-for-those-crimes. Further, since trials are all fully public, one can look at why exactly those criminals were caught. If most get caught, and it tends to be for stupid mistakes, then one can reasonably argue "criminals aren't very smart".
Leaks by definition are self-revealing, that's the point of them. If secret information is appearing in the general world, the organization knows their are one or more leaks, even if the exact nature of them could be a number of things (ie, could be an insider, could be a partner, could be an external break-in).
To a degree, but just because a crime was noticed doesn't mean that that the culprit was found. There's an awful lot of unsolved crimes out there.
But I also remember what a police officer told me once -- that unless you're a total idiot, you can get away with almost any crime, provided that you only do it once and never break any law again. Most criminals are caught because they do it repeatedly.
Personally, I do think that most criminals are dumb, based on the fact that if you're smart, you can make more money in the long run through legal means.
Let me get this straight. The sister gets caught. The sibling expresses concern for impending legal action, but in spite of this, goes online to share EVEN MORE details that could be used against them in court, and cries "woe is me" and "farewell".
This canary story feels like a contrived story intended to scare potential leakers inside the company.
I don't know, the stupidity here seems very believable. Someone whose proverbial uncle works at Nintendo wants to earn prophet points on one of the top Apple rumor forums? I'd buy it.
There's also the possibility that this information is just made up by the leaker in an attempt to look better for a coming lawsuit.
A possibility: analyst941 and the Apple employee are the same person. They leaked for whatever reason. After they were caught/fired, they fabricated this story about analyst941 actually being the sibling (with a real sibling's blessing). The sibling will not be in any trouble, because they didn't sign a confidentiality agreement - so it seems a loving sibling might sign on to play this role.
The ex-employee could face a lawsuit, and the lawsuit will look much better for the ex-employee if they merely told a sibling all these things(who then had loose lips), vs if the ex-employee specifically went to MacRumors message board to leak the info to the general public.
