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Comment by YCode | Hacker News Reader

Offhand, this kind of sounds like a parent asking their teenager to go and search their own room for drugs.

"Nah, I didn't find anything. I found this plastic bag that looks like it mighta had something in it, but I'm pretty sure my friend left it here and it was empty when he brought it."

"Okay son, go search again."

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> Offhand, this kind of sounds like a parent asking their teenager to go and search their own room for drugs.

I have expressed this attitude to corporate lawyers before, and asked them how the system deals with bad actors.

Basically, if a judge catches you lying during discovery, they can issue a default judgement against you and impose very serious additional damages. For example:

http://newenglandinhouse.com/2015/06/09/default-judgment-aff...

Furthermore, the lawyers in question can be disbarred:

https://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/litigationnews/civil...

A sufficiently annoyed judge has a broad range of sanctions available for punishing people who get caught gaming the system. (Some of these sanctions may take years to fully play out, though.)

It's pretty hard to catch if your only search interface is through the liar.

Moreover, I've seen 'mistakes' and intentionally 'last minute' delivery of documents myself at trials, along with what essentially amounts to blatant filibustering. It was considered 'part of the game'. No one was punished.

I've seen many cases thrown out of court for this.

That's great if you're the defendant...

It's good for everyone that the police can't skirt around the rules of discovery and present 'last minute evidence' that denies peoples' right to a free trial, yes.

The context here is civil cases (I think the GP means "respondent" rather than "defendant"?)

The terminology varies quite widely from place to place, but it's common for the word "defendant" to be used in both criminal and civil cases in the USA. Respondent's correct too.

A lot of times you'll even see official documents not really pick a side on the question of terminology. They'll say things like "defendant/respondent" or "petitioner/plaintiff".

The context here is all cases.

Respondent is the term for the party advocating against overturning a previous ruling during an appeal. Defendant is correct in this case because this is not an appeal.

If finding and reporting the documents already threatens bankrupt the defendant, imposing additional sanctions for lying about finding the documents isn't much of a threat.

Sanctions against a company, sure. But sanctions against a lawyer, up to and including the threat of disbarment, threatens a person's entire career and livelihood. Not that you can't find a lawyer willing to stomach the risk of walking close to that line and use their career as table stakes, but you'll pay them accordingly.

A federal judge calling out your defendant's shenanigans so strongly raises that personal risk of sanctions to the lawyer of continuing to defend that client. And the defendant will keep having lawyers bail out until they either get their act together or the case ends (probably not in their favor, since they can't even keep a lawyer around for long).

Penalties or no, law firms have certainly participated in covering up illegal behaviour in the past.

For example, during the News International phone hacking scandal [1] a law firm hired by NI participated in the cover-up, providing a sham "internal investigation" and "clean bill of health"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...

For an example of a sufficiently annoyed judge using all the sanctions available, see what Judge Otis Wright did to Prenda Law: https://www.popehat.com/tag/prenda-law/ (especially https://www.popehat.com/2013/03/06/what-prenda-law-is-facing...).

Which is so absurd on the face of it that it almost certainly can't be what's happening here.

Having had an inside view into several situations which received public coverage, it's clear to me that the old adage of, “a man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one, and the real one,” applies not just to people, but to the entities they wield.

Also, there is no reason to believe that a bad actor would steal 14,000 documents from a previous company, and then on the first day on the job go and upload them to the company git server.

If I knew I was being nefarious, I would keep those documents on a completely airgapped computer in a private (non-company) space, only reference them when I was alone, and then bring information into the company only through my brain(and probably, with a reasonable parallel reconstruction already determined).

I don't disagree with your assessment in general, the problem is that when you take the set of "criminals", and then further drill in to "criminals that actually get accused", you rapidly change the ratio of "clever" to "think-they-are-clever".

I'm not saying all criminals are stupid [Edit: stupid, careless, ignorant, poor at prediction, poor at risk calculation, take your pick] ...just that many are. And the really clever ones are often able to do it without even getting accused. So you're left with a group that has a LOT of facepalm-inducing members.

And sad to say, even filtering the list for people in high ranking positions doesn't help that much. Apparently "actually be a clever criminal" and "be a successful business person" don't overlap a lot. (I imagine "ABLE to be a clever criminal" has more overlap...but most decide not to.)

Side story: When I was a young kid (8?) my mom sternly told me "I don't EVER want to hear of you...committing a crime you can't retire on". Oddly enough, that was far more valuable than just saying "don't commit a crime". It had a logic my young brain could understand more easily than base morals or even evaluating the odds of getting caught. It inured me to a fair amount of peer pressure until I was old enough to decide for myself (and kids have few opportunities to commit huge crimes). Each kid is different, of course, but I recommend this to all parents of young children.

I think you should change stupid with careless, or calculated risk or something like that.

I think we need less auditing of other people's word choice, to be honest.

/meta

This isn't about criminals exactly. It's about an engineer thinking "My future job is going to be a huge pain without access to the shared drive that has all our notes and matlab scripts and research papers. Maybe I'll just make a copy and keep it for occasional reference in case I need to look something up.".

"Also I'll set up a company through a straw man and convince my employer to buy it for a few hundred million, in case I ever need a few hundred million.

Then, I'll abscond with those documents and few select google employees and start my own thing. With matlab and LIDARS! Which reminds me: I should really take a long walk with this Travis guy. Maybe he has a need for 'occasional reference'".

I don't disagree, but my point is this: Finding these files on Uber servers certainly is, if not proof of guilt, at least very damning. However, lack of files on Uber servers isn't proof of innocence.

> I'm not saying all criminals are stupid [Edit: stupid, careless, ignorant, poor at prediction, poor at risk calculation, take your pick] ...just that many are. And the really clever ones are often able to do it without even getting accused. So you're left with a group that has a LOT of facepalm-inducing members.

Right, it's a classic example of survivorship bias.

When you take the set of "criminals", and then further drill in to "criminals that actually get accused", you rapidly change the ratio of "clever" to "think-they-are-clever".

There's a DOJ investigator for white-collar crimes who has a sign in his office/interrogation room: "If you're here, you're not as smart as you thought you were."

I've got a feeling that if you plot intelligence along the x-axis and "self-assessed probability that I can get away with it" on the y-axis, you'd see a classic bathtub curve.

If you look at the evidence Google presented, I'm really not convinced he thought things through at all. For someone seemingly trying to do something illegal, he's been curiously inept:

> Summer 2015 - Anthony Levandowski told Pierre-Yves Droz, a colleague at Waymo, that he had talked with an Uber executive about forming a self-driving car startup and that Uber would be interested in buying that startup.

.. whole bunch of stuff around retrieving the design data from Waymo/Google ...

> January 5, 2016 - Levandowski took a walk with Droz. In Pierre-Yves’ deposition, he claims that Levandowski “told him that he planned to ‘replicate’ Waymo’s technology at a new company he was forming.” (Droz 27)

.. another bit of downloading ..

> January 14, 2016 - Levandowski was seen meeting at Uber’s headquarters and the news travelled back to Droz. Droz asked Levandowski about this, and he admitted he had met with Uber and was looking for investors for his new company. (Droz 29, Filing 48)

> January 15, 2016 - Levandowski officially forms 280 Systems (in stealth mode). Note that this was one day after his meeting with Uber. (Filing 49)

> January 27, 2016 - Levandowski resigns from Waymo without notice. (Filing 49)

> February 1, 2016 - Levandowski forms Otto Trucking (this is also in stealth mode). (Filing 49)

I have to...completely agree with you on your analogy. You forgot to mention the part about the urine sample.

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