A person allegedly breaks several different laws in different jurisdictions; is prosecuted for each alleged violation in each jurisdiction. What's wrong with that?
A more extreme counterexample would be that a case where a person broke into an office and stole a USB stick, kidnapping an employee and shooting a guard on the way out. There's IP theft (federal), kidnapping (federal), and homicide (local). Which should that person not be prosecuted for? How do you choose?
There should be some kind of "reverse class-action" clause that enables a defendant to bring in every potential plaintiff into the suit: i.e. if I'm being prosecuted for stealing code by a federal prosecutor, I should be able to bind New York State to the same trial so that all the verdicts are delivered at the same time.
Feel free to divide the actions arbitrarily if you really want to. Charge then with half the jewels federal, half the jewels state. It's when the charges overlap that I feel justice isn't best served.
Also you'd need to try to mitigate nonlinearity in punishment somehow. At the very least figure out a way to punish any details like "armed robbery" only once.
We can try to reinvent longstanding law here on HN, or we can look for a library on CPAN (or in a law library?) that already implements it. These questions have come up many times before, with many sets of specifics. This is what many smart people came up with, which has stood the test of time.
Trying to unravel longstanding law is kind of like poking at a piece of code that's been running for 20 years and deciding you can do better. Then realizing that the only way to make it better is to rewrite it from scratch, because there are reasons for all of the funkiness in the code. And rewriting fails spectacularly in code much of the time (see TextMate 2, for instance). Imagine how much success non-programmers would have at rewriting a complex system from scratch. That's roughly how much success I'd expect HN users to achieve at rewriting longstanding law.
I'm just saying, the outcomes may seem capricious, but picking at one string isn't going to improve things. If you think otherwise, you may have a bright career in the legislature.
You're right, trying to specify anything new is destined to fail. So I'll stick with this:
Charging the same crime twice is unfair, where "same" is not something I am qualified to define in detail.
There. That seems good. I am not suggesting what to do about it at this point in time. By the way, I find it rather hyperbolic of you to look at a report of an uncommon bug and claim it calls for a total rewrite. No way in hell do I want to change the entire legal system. But if you're afraid to adjust something at all it just gets clunkier over time.
I think the problem here is we're not lawyers. I have no idea how often this comes up. Is it an uncommon bug, or something that happens daily? I have no idea because I am not a lawyer.
But, thinking as much like a lawyer as I can: you're never charged for the same "crime" more than once. There are overlapping laws, and one action can cause you to break more than one law (each of these is a separate "crime"). So I believe that legally speaking, Aleynikov is not being charged twice for the same crime, because he is not being charged again with breaking the same law.
So I'm saying that your simple tweak that "seems good" may have other problems, and may cascade in ways that we cannot predict (because we're not seasoned jurists). Also, I'm saying that lots of smart people who have dedicated their lives to the study of problems like this just may have stumbled on the simple adjustment you have stumbled across in 3 minutes of armchair quarterbacking, and thrown it out for a reason that is not immediately obvious to the layperson. You may have had similar experiences with non-programmers trying to redesign the guts of software; it's about as productive as this exchange. So you might not need to redesign the legal system from scratch, but step one in making adjustments is certainly deep knowledge and experience with the existing statutes and their application. (Similarly, you wouldn't be allowed to commit to the mainline branch of Git if you don't know C.)
If I had more time, I'd grope for an analogy in computers where two things appear the same to a layperson, but is actually different to programmers. I'm sure you can come up with several if you try.
To me the biggest problem for an individual is that they incur the cost of defending themselves twice.
For state and federal governments the cost of 2 trials is inconsequential.
For an individual the cost of two trials can easily push them into bankruptcy. Now if the individual is guilty you might not have that much sympathy for them, but consider that innocent people have to defend them selves in court as well.
I agree with the general issue of the cost of defending oneself. But today, in New York alone, hundreds of poor people will be arrested and charged with crimes they may not be guilty of. Many will have been singled out because of their appearance. They will not have access to attorneys (except the public defender flunkies), and most will serve jail time. I have a lot more concern and sympathy for the breakage of the system for these guys than for the multimillionaire banker who was charged essentially only because he got caught.
He was originally charged by US Attorney and found guilty by a federal jury, then released by federal appeals court. The new case has been filed by Manhattan District Attorney in NY state court. Apparently double-jeopardy does not apply in this case.
I think the theory goes that it isn't double jeopardy if the municipal, state, and federal don't work "in concert". I only just read the article, so I can't explain what "scientific espionage" even is.
The exception to this exception exists between city and state sovereignties located within the same state. Although cities are different sovereignties than the state they are located within, the two are not permitted to attach jeopardy more than once cumulatively.
If you ever wondered, this is what it looks like when a corporation has politicians in their pocket. Goldman Sachs is the extreme example of capitalism gone wrong. So powerful they can't lose money and so powerful they can treat legislators and law enforcement like the employees they are.
This is a case where someone has done something wrong, but the aggressiveness of the response is proportional to the size of the victim's wallet.
Also, the NY State Attorney General's Office probably smells blood in the water, with a ton of the work (discovery, etc) done for them by the Federal prosecutors. It's probably viewed as low-hanging fruit in racking up convictions.
While he did do something wrong, I'm sure it doesn't really help many publicly-elected officials much to do Goldman a favor right now. I for one am not sure whether or not to be cynical and think Goldman is exerting influence or believe that somebody in New York is living up to the responsibilities of their office.
Most politicians don't really care that you hate politicians in general. For example, note that Congress's approval rating is in the low teens.
If a given politician gets valuable future support in exchange for making people think less of government or their fellow pols overall, then that's a win for them.
Goldman Sachs is the extreme example of capitalism gone wrong.
I find it interesting this sort of thing is rarely, if ever, presented as government gone wrong. Not everything based on self-interest falls within capitalism. When someone steals, commits extortion, etc., no one considers it an "example of capitalism". And yet when the government engages in such at the behest of self-interested parties, "capitalism" gets the rap. Quite odd.
It's because the people that want the system this way call it capitalism. If you say "banks shouldn't be too big to fail" you are called an anti-capitalist, etc, etc. Maybe the people doing this name calling are misusing the term, but it catches on.
Interesting point in semantics. Crony Capitalism and Political Prostitution are basically different facets of the same thing. Perhaps it depends on who you blame more: the politicians for taking the money, or business people for offering it.
Either way, the main question is how do you counter it or at least balance it out so the little people don't get trampled?
> I find it interesting this sort of thing is rarely, if ever, presented as government gone wrong.
I don't think this is true. It's named as government corruption often enough, and it's framed from that direction fairly frequently in some political media, both by people who believe it's a corruption of what government should/could be and who believe it's inherent in government power.
> When someone steals, commits extortion, etc., no one considers it an "example of capitalism"
This seems truer than your first contention -- not only is it generally rare that crime is considered just another response to incentives, even people who think of it this way (myself and probably some economists included), it's fair enough to draw a line between a formal definition of capitalism and crime.
But then again, in this kind of discussion it's probably worth recognizing that terms like "capitalism" (or "socialism", for that matter) are usually used as shorthand in a heavily context-dependent sense, rather than as anything formally defined. I think it's better to be more precise so as to avoid hang-ups like this, but then again, being prescriptive or pedantic can have it's own hangups. Capitalism may not simply mean any laissez faire system founded largely on self-interest, but it's easy enough to accept it as a label for a class of possible systems for the sake of discussion about whether or not it's unfair to blame a private party for capture of a democratic/republic nation-state, or whether to blame the state for being there to capture.
If this guy hadn't successfully appealed the federal charges, could the state have waited until he'd finished that sentence before prosecuting?
If yes, it's like you can get punished twice for the same crime in America.
Except that they are different laws and therefore different crimes. Let's use something more obvious: a bank robber who fatally shoots a guard on the way out. That's one event but several crimes. This person can absolutely be tried and sentenced for any/all of the crimes committed in that event, separately, in separate courts (federal and state). While I think the prosecutions are typically sequential, they wouldn't be combined (different jurisdictions).
Similar logic applies to a criminal who commits crimes across several states.
At first I was thinkign "double jeopardy" but the article explains why that isn't the case. Basically the federal law was misapplied so the state of New York can bring their own charges (actually, they could probably do this anyway).
This does seem wrong to me because he's essentially being charged for much the same crime on the same set of facts. It seems like when the dual-sovereignty Federal-State system was created the idea was that that the Federal and State governments would be responsible for different things such that you would be violating either Federal or State law (or possibly both but for different offences).
This seems like prosecutorial abuse.
That all being said, if you consider the facts int his case: the code in question was highly sensitive and as much as the article calls the action of sending it to a server in Germany (IIRC) a "mistake", it seems fairly clear to me that it was or was intended to be theft.
Just don't take code from a former employer. Ever. This is a good rule of thumb for every engineer to follow,. Even if what you're doing isn't (likely to be) criminal conduct, you can then run afoul of copyright claims and so forth if you ever implement something similar.
The employer owns the copyrights, patents, etc. Just like a journalist can take articles or emails from a former employer, neither can scientists take materials from a work-for-hire position.
Goldman gives a lot of money to political campaigns (#1 donor to Obama[1], #2 to Romney[2] in last election). NY mayor Michael Bloomberg seems to fawn over Goldman[3], offering $1.65B in tax breaks for them to set up an office at Ground Zero[4]. My guess is Goldman's gold, regardless of the means in which they've acquired it, is a significant factor to Manhattnan DA's sudden interest in prosecuting white collar crime.
Another example: Michael Vick was prosecuted in the state of Virginia for dogfighting. The primary evidence against him: his plea bargain with the federal prosecution.
Doesn't anyone believe in the concept of grace any more? Aleynikov made a mistake. Can't we move on? Goldman is subverting true justice. And if the code is so powerful, why should Goldman be able to continue using it in the first place?
Crime and punishment discussions aside, are you serious about forbidding them to use their code? How would that work out? Who would get to decide? What if someone deploys a too powerful team of humans to do the same thing?
Sergey made their "secret sauce." If he had been more aware of who the laws were made for, and how they've had them written, he'd have never made such a stupid mistake in taking the actual code. It's not like he couldn't have completely recreated that sauce, from scratch with improvements, within a month or two.
Sergey was the secret sauce. Erlang + OCaml might be a match made in heaven. It's just too bad that he works in a profession where the exact way you've gone about something is owned by your employer. If some fund manager brought his trading strategies to another firm, even if he came up with them at the previous firm, he wouldn't be spending a year in prison.
Of course, this is just what I think - I'm not allowed to see the code in question, so all I can do is guess.
All pledge allegiance to The United States of Goldman Sachs. The power this company has to do whatever it wants is absolutely atrocious. This is nothing more than a company trying to hide the fact a low-level employee gained access to highly valuable source code that is regarded as the secret-sauce of Goldman Sachs which should never have happened in the first place. I've worked for small companies that have better security than that.
58 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 96.1 ms ] threadIt still seems pretty vindictive.
A more extreme counterexample would be that a case where a person broke into an office and stole a USB stick, kidnapping an employee and shooting a guard on the way out. There's IP theft (federal), kidnapping (federal), and homicide (local). Which should that person not be prosecuted for? How do you choose?
In any case, I'm not an attorney and this appears to be settled law and not really up for debate.
Also you'd need to try to mitigate nonlinearity in punishment somehow. At the very least figure out a way to punish any details like "armed robbery" only once.
Trying to unravel longstanding law is kind of like poking at a piece of code that's been running for 20 years and deciding you can do better. Then realizing that the only way to make it better is to rewrite it from scratch, because there are reasons for all of the funkiness in the code. And rewriting fails spectacularly in code much of the time (see TextMate 2, for instance). Imagine how much success non-programmers would have at rewriting a complex system from scratch. That's roughly how much success I'd expect HN users to achieve at rewriting longstanding law.
I'm just saying, the outcomes may seem capricious, but picking at one string isn't going to improve things. If you think otherwise, you may have a bright career in the legislature.
Charging the same crime twice is unfair, where "same" is not something I am qualified to define in detail.
There. That seems good. I am not suggesting what to do about it at this point in time. By the way, I find it rather hyperbolic of you to look at a report of an uncommon bug and claim it calls for a total rewrite. No way in hell do I want to change the entire legal system. But if you're afraid to adjust something at all it just gets clunkier over time.
But, thinking as much like a lawyer as I can: you're never charged for the same "crime" more than once. There are overlapping laws, and one action can cause you to break more than one law (each of these is a separate "crime"). So I believe that legally speaking, Aleynikov is not being charged twice for the same crime, because he is not being charged again with breaking the same law.
So I'm saying that your simple tweak that "seems good" may have other problems, and may cascade in ways that we cannot predict (because we're not seasoned jurists). Also, I'm saying that lots of smart people who have dedicated their lives to the study of problems like this just may have stumbled on the simple adjustment you have stumbled across in 3 minutes of armchair quarterbacking, and thrown it out for a reason that is not immediately obvious to the layperson. You may have had similar experiences with non-programmers trying to redesign the guts of software; it's about as productive as this exchange. So you might not need to redesign the legal system from scratch, but step one in making adjustments is certainly deep knowledge and experience with the existing statutes and their application. (Similarly, you wouldn't be allowed to commit to the mainline branch of Git if you don't know C.)
If I had more time, I'd grope for an analogy in computers where two things appear the same to a layperson, but is actually different to programmers. I'm sure you can come up with several if you try.
For state and federal governments the cost of 2 trials is inconsequential.
For an individual the cost of two trials can easily push them into bankruptcy. Now if the individual is guilty you might not have that much sympathy for them, but consider that innocent people have to defend them selves in court as well.
The exception to this exception exists between city and state sovereignties located within the same state. Although cities are different sovereignties than the state they are located within, the two are not permitted to attach jeopardy more than once cumulatively.
There might be no evidence of corruption, but this stinks.
Also, the NY State Attorney General's Office probably smells blood in the water, with a ton of the work (discovery, etc) done for them by the Federal prosecutors. It's probably viewed as low-hanging fruit in racking up convictions.
The more work by the USDOJ they use the more they will be accused of 'acting in concert' and the more likely the issue becomes one of double jeopardy.
This isn't about the application of law, this is about the application of political will.
If a given politician gets valuable future support in exchange for making people think less of government or their fellow pols overall, then that's a win for them.
I find it interesting this sort of thing is rarely, if ever, presented as government gone wrong. Not everything based on self-interest falls within capitalism. When someone steals, commits extortion, etc., no one considers it an "example of capitalism". And yet when the government engages in such at the behest of self-interested parties, "capitalism" gets the rap. Quite odd.
Either way, the main question is how do you counter it or at least balance it out so the little people don't get trampled?
Which is an oxymoron; government favoritism is the antithesis of capitalism. The fact that money is involved doesn't make it capitalism.
Libertarianism is a different concept that includes economic policies and non-economic policies.
I don't think this is true. It's named as government corruption often enough, and it's framed from that direction fairly frequently in some political media, both by people who believe it's a corruption of what government should/could be and who believe it's inherent in government power.
> When someone steals, commits extortion, etc., no one considers it an "example of capitalism"
This seems truer than your first contention -- not only is it generally rare that crime is considered just another response to incentives, even people who think of it this way (myself and probably some economists included), it's fair enough to draw a line between a formal definition of capitalism and crime.
But then again, in this kind of discussion it's probably worth recognizing that terms like "capitalism" (or "socialism", for that matter) are usually used as shorthand in a heavily context-dependent sense, rather than as anything formally defined. I think it's better to be more precise so as to avoid hang-ups like this, but then again, being prescriptive or pedantic can have it's own hangups. Capitalism may not simply mean any laissez faire system founded largely on self-interest, but it's easy enough to accept it as a label for a class of possible systems for the sake of discussion about whether or not it's unfair to blame a private party for capture of a democratic/republic nation-state, or whether to blame the state for being there to capture.
Similar logic applies to a criminal who commits crimes across several states.
This does seem wrong to me because he's essentially being charged for much the same crime on the same set of facts. It seems like when the dual-sovereignty Federal-State system was created the idea was that that the Federal and State governments would be responsible for different things such that you would be violating either Federal or State law (or possibly both but for different offences).
This seems like prosecutorial abuse.
That all being said, if you consider the facts int his case: the code in question was highly sensitive and as much as the article calls the action of sending it to a server in Germany (IIRC) a "mistake", it seems fairly clear to me that it was or was intended to be theft.
Just don't take code from a former employer. Ever. This is a good rule of thumb for every engineer to follow,. Even if what you're doing isn't (likely to be) criminal conduct, you can then run afoul of copyright claims and so forth if you ever implement something similar.
Or get your company's lawyercats to give you the OK.
Goldman gives a lot of money to political campaigns (#1 donor to Obama[1], #2 to Romney[2] in last election). NY mayor Michael Bloomberg seems to fawn over Goldman[3], offering $1.65B in tax breaks for them to set up an office at Ground Zero[4]. My guess is Goldman's gold, regardless of the means in which they've acquired it, is a significant factor to Manhattnan DA's sudden interest in prosecuting white collar crime.
[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cid=N00009638
[2] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/contrib.php?id=N00000286
[3] http://www.salon.com/2012/03/16/mayor_bloomberg_personally_c...
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg#Economic_issu...
Sergey was the secret sauce. Erlang + OCaml might be a match made in heaven. It's just too bad that he works in a profession where the exact way you've gone about something is owned by your employer. If some fund manager brought his trading strategies to another firm, even if he came up with them at the previous firm, he wouldn't be spending a year in prison.
Of course, this is just what I think - I'm not allowed to see the code in question, so all I can do is guess.