The US is a pretty strange place when Bank of America can literally break into someone's home, steal everything they own, and never suffer either financially or criminally, but all a corporation has to do is point their finger at an individual and that individual will be arrested and prosecuted.
It also reminds me of the AT&T case where someone accessed records on public URLs and instead of AT&T getting a black eye for being so incompetent the dude went to jail. When will a corporation metaphorically go to jail? They steal, they lie, they cheat, they launder money, but yet they're always "too big to prosecute."
Weev is a dick, but what he did in that specific case shouldn't have been a interpreted as a crime, and I would have preferred his conviction be overturned on that basis, rather than the venue issue.
While I don't think weev should have gone to jail, I can't help but think there was a sense of "we have to get this guy for something," like locking up Al Capone for cheating on his taxes.
Weev probably should be in jail, just not for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#Trolling I probably would have been OK with them nailing him for "something", but the AT&T case set a bad precedent.
I'm uncomfortable with allowing prosecutors the leeway to just kind of decide who should be in jail based on gut judgements but I'm clearly in the minority because that's not the way the law or politics are moving (like look at the guys getting nailed for mail fraud because of Massachusetts patronage scandals that technically were probably not illegal).
And when they do get prosecuted, the punishment is laughable, typically a fine equal to weeks of profit, maybe months if it's something really terrible.
I'd like to see how corporate behavior changes if "jail" was a real possibility. For a crime that an individual would get two years in prison, shut down the company for two years. They can try to pick up the pieces after that period, just like the individual.
The problem with that is it would put lots of innocent employees out of work. You'd have to sell the company to a competitor or something so that the operation kept going but shareholders got wiped out. Make shareholders feel the pain and the behavior will change.
The same sort of thing happens when individuals go to jail. Family members lose their means of support, children lose their parents, etc. One person going to jail can potentially devastate an entire innocent extended family. That doesn't stop us.
I think at a minimum firing all CXX level employees and the loss of all stock options/pending bonuses is a good compromise. Fines harm investors, but the actual people that decide to break the law are rarely impacted.
Investors should be harmed if they invest in enterprises that engage in criminal acts. Perhaps then there will be a bit more appetite for some ethics at the expense of a little profit.
Not only that but you'll get shorts interested in criminal companies because they can profit by exposing wrong-doing. And, on the other side, the market will discount a company's stock if it is criminal which kills the executives incentives to take these actions.
Hamstringing the company is going to do a lot of collateral damage to innoccents. I mean, if all CXX level people are guilty then so be it- but purely punitive beheading of a company's leadership? Come on.
If your actions are destroying other people's lives and unlawfully disposessing them of their homes, then the word you're looking for is "criminally negligent". Not "innocent".
Nazi guards tried that defense. Didn't work for them either.
I'm talking about people like [Schindler](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler) who was a Nazi but obviously not following orders. In a corporation with tens of thousands of employees, not all of them will have conspired to break the law. Those are the people that shouldn't be subject to putative measures.
A much better idea than that is to actually imprison all the top level executives of the company if their company commits a crime that would get an individual thrown in prison.
He's referring to several cases where they "foreclose" on the incorrect home. They break into homes, take everything in them, and auction it off and throw away anything they can't sell.
While malicious intent may be absent, to the victims that does not matter one iota.
Goldman Sachs was entirely within their rights to contact the FBI if they believed proprietary information was stolen from them by an ex-employee. It's the government (read: FBI) that screwed up here, as is most often the case.
I personally think that large financial organizations should have this privilege given their role in the financial markets. They are prone to fraud and theft, i.e. a large target.
Except if you have some information that I don't outside of the scope of my comment above.
Just because a bank says you're stealing doesn't make it so.
Especially when the case relates to intellectual property, they have no special position in the society, and the crime may not be a crime but a civil case.
I've reported a crime to the relevant FBI division, in which I could point out exactly where the money was went (same city, local bank) and provide proof of the fraud.
Your unverifiable anecdote doesn't hold much weight, I'm afraid. But do you really believe random-guy calling the FBI should warrant as much attention as multi-national financial institution reporting a potential crime?
People are complaining as if GS putting the FBI on people is rampant. As far as I'm aware it has happened this once (though I'm open to other tales) and an over-zealous investigator tried to make a name for himself and messed it up royally.
I agree, what they did to this poor fellow is disgraceful, but let's not pretend that the justice system doesn't have a habit of railroading people when they desire a suspect. That's the real tragedy.
> But do you really believe random-guy calling the FBI should warrant as much attention as multi-national financial institution reporting a potential crime?
Well, yeah, if corporations are people with equal rights, that means that the law should treat them equally to other people.
Magnitude of crime is different. If somebody breaks into my car in San Francisco and steals a bag, I totally expect police to laugh at me if I ask if they plan to investigate it.
On the other hand if young female student is raped, her newborn daughter brutally murdered and house burned to the ground, I expect half the police to be on high alert and FBI to get involved.
GS report of theft of software that produces billions in profits falls somewhere between these two extremes. Police/FBI does not have resources to investigate all crimes equally so they have to prioritize. The same way as browse remote-execution exploit is fixed way faster than small UI glitch.
The question wasn't "should a person reporting a potentially wide-ranging crime doing lots of damage and impacting potentially large number of victims be treated differently than a person reporting a crime with lesser impacts".
There is a difference between asking if the magnitude of the crime reported should result in a different response and what actually was asked, which was whether who is reporting the crime should result in a different response.
>Magnitude of crime is different. If somebody breaks into my car in San Francisco and steals a bag, I totally expect police to laugh at me if I ask if they plan to investigate it.
Except that I could provide a complete paper trail of where the money went (to a local scam artist) -- that's how the financial system works.
It would be analogous to providing and end-to-end video of a car being stolen to a previously unknown chop shop.
What the police actually did would be analogous to ignoring that video but then arresting a car thief on a GS executive's say-so.
Huh? My parent is upset that Joe-Random has less clout. My point is Joe-Random has no credence, which has absolutely nothing to do with "high status". Woz has credence about disk controllers. Big banks have credence about finance and trading. That is as it should be. Joe-Random does not deserve equal clout on matters of disk controllers, finance, or trading.
So you need to be the Steve Woz of crime victims before you should expect any law enforcement action whatsoever on a crime with an enormous paper trail?
