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Comment by redm | Hacker News Reader

I see what you're saying, the consequences don't outway the benefit of breaking the law; Congress can solve that through tougher penalties. That said, I feel confident the answer is not putting MORE people in Prison, especially for civil cases. The US already incarcerates far too many people. It's out of control as it is. [1] [2]

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

[2] "Comparing some countries with similar percentages of immigrants, Germany has an incarceration rate of 76 per 100,000 population (as of 2014),[25] Italy is 85 per 100,000 (as of 2015),[26] and Saudi Arabia is 161 per 100,000 (as of 2013).[27] Comparing other countries with a zero tolerance policy for illegal drugs, the rate of Russia is 455 per 100,000 (as of 2015),[28] Kazakhstan is 275 per 100,000 (as of 2015),[29] Singapore is 220 per 100,000 (as of 2014),[30] and Sweden is 60 per 100,000 (as of 2014).[31]"

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We could focus on putting DIFFERENT people in prison, though. We could prioritize crimes that treats human beings as chattel for personal gain, or by the number of people an action harmed.

If we applied the same laws around not profiting off of violent crimes to white collar crime AND extended that to company stakeholders as well, investors would make executives knock off that sort of behavior real quick.

Are you suggesting that invasion of privacy become a criminal offense? Effectively, that's what happened here, and even though its Uber, its individuals who did it. Your neighbor could do it to you as well. This seems like a slippery slope of criminalizing far too much.

For example, maybe Nick Denton should have gone to jail for invasion of privacy against Hulk Hogan? I don't agree with that either.

Violating HIPAA and PII when your a company carries steep penalties; why not against individuals as well?

Why mention individuals? This wasn't something dudeface did for his own entertainment. It was done specifically because the rapist was an uber driver. This was a company mishandling HIPAA data in that they never should have had access to it in the first place, let alone been sharing it around the exec staff like a pulp comic.

I will say this clearly and I mean it: If you use uber, or you work for uber, you are morally wrong. You are choosing to enrich people and a company who have shown you multiple times that they are terrible human beings who lack even the concept of a moral compass.

HIPAA's civil and criminal penalties already apply to individuals.

OTOH, Uber and it's employees are not HIPAA covered entities, nor, generally, are doctors in India. So I don't see how anyone could have violated HIPAA here.

I appreciate you taking the time to point out loopholes that need fixing.

I don't think that HIPAA not applying outside of the United States is a loophole. Each country is a different environment, and the laws need to be tailored for the environment.

There seems to be an insatiable need for Americans or Westerners to project their laws/moralities to other countries, and then refuse the accept the reverse, except for certain cultural minorities logical inconsistencies.

The US extends sex trafficking laws outside the country. Why not other laws?

How exactly do they do that? Do they extend the american laws outside our borders and let our police raid international sites without international knowledge/assistance?

Mainly because our laws are voted on by our own citizens and because the rest of the world doesn't accept our laws and doesn't have a say in creating them. Your statement seems nonsensical.

If there is an action that breaks the law of two countries there can be joint law enforcement activities. The US cannot punish actions that are legal in one country but illegal in the United States by acting in that foreign country.

If you leave the US and engage in underage sex tourism, you will be prosecuted upon return.

https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/extraterritorial-sexua...

Also, the US government will arrest you on US soil or while transiting an airport in the US for certain crimes that take place outside the US.

My post you replied to said "sex trafficking"; I meant sex tourism. Mea culpa.

Sure, and the point is that HIPAA is only applicable to the health organization. If you were to sue somebody under HIPAA, it would be the records organization, for exposing information it shouldn't have, or not logging the access to information properly.

However, in this case, HIPAA wouldn't apply to a purely Indian health organization, or the records of a foreign national in a foreign organization.

Note that in your situation (sex tourism) all prosecution/wrong doing is based on being a US citizen doing stuff and then returning to US soil. It does not apply to any sort of foreign national - you cannot be prosecuted for sex tourism under the US statute while on US soil if you are not a US national and the crime did not occur on US soil.

Except in this case we're talking about private medical records. There is no way for them to have gotten those legally. They had to have bribed someone or coerced someone to get them, and that certainly is a crime.

I'll echo other replies and agree that we should put different people in prison, not more. I'd argue that white collar crime hurts more people than consensual and most violent crimes and it should be punished as such.

Yeah, I'd agree that it's out of control. But fiscally dangerous might not be enough. Can help the problem by not jailing petty crime.

I'm confident that putting more white collar criminals in prison is a solution to both problems.

The percentage of white collar criminals would still be low (ie, won't change the incarceration numbers much), and it would connect more influential families to the problems with our prison system instead of having a classist divide on who it impacts.

I propose that we institute "murder" enhancements: any financial crime that causes more than $9mil in damages (the cost of a life [0]) must carry the same penalty as a murder (with the same level of intent, eg, planned versus unplanned); add multiplier for every additional $9mil in damages (ie, $9mil-17.9mil is 1x, $18-26.9mil is 2x, etc); leaders of organizations should be charged equivalently to leaders of other criminal enterprises -- if your organization committed $9bil in fraud, you should be charged as a leader of an organization which committed 1,000 murders.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#United_States

You can't directly equate lives and dollars. This is an arbitrary thing you're attempting to define, and the flip side of the argument is that a wealthy person should be able to pay $9MM instead of being incarcerated for murder.

I would be more than happy to exchange many of the non-violent offenders who ended up doing not much harm on an absolute scale with these white collar criminals who end up harming many, many more people.

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