Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

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I dunno. Benefit of the doubt, let's go Stanley Milgram on this. He had people in authority telling him this was okay. Lawyers gave him the go-ahead. As stated in other comments, he didn't make a whole lot of money.

I feel like this guy could have been a lot of people we know. You get asked to cook some numbers, it comes in all official, legal even signs off on it, and now you're liable. Whistle blowing is not an easy thing to do. Not when you're in that deep.

I feel like the people at the top should be thrown in jail, but they can't because they're all in Germany. Meanwhile, is Germany going to let this guy rot, when really their government should offer to extradite one of the people at the top who had full knowledge and authorization over this, in exchange for commuting this patsy's sentence?

Let's go back to the Stanley Milgram experiments. Say Milgram was a sick fuck and those people did administer a lethal dosage to the guy in the other room. Who would go to jail?

These people committed the systematic, deliberate, and stealthy statistical murders of dozens of US citizens. They deserve no benefit of the doubt whatsoever. They knew exactly what they were doing. "Just following orders" was not a valid defense at the Nuremberg trials and it should not be here either.

Throw everyone we can get our hands on in jail pour encourager les autres. Once it becomes clear that anyone participating in such a scheme, at any level, faces years in prison, it will be less likely to happen again, and as a direct result hundreds of fewer Americans will not be murdered by illegal air pollution in the future.

> These people committed the systematic, deliberate, and stealthy statistical murders of dozens of US citizens.

Every car manufacturer currently does. Some even literally killed people by cheaping out on braking systems.

Yet no US car executive is in jail.

This is purely a political play.

VW actively deceived regulators in a coordinated manner for months after they started investigating and asking questions about the defeat devices. This is not normal behavior for a car manufacturer or any public company under investigation. They produced tons of fraudulent data, took regulators for fools, and went so far as to stage a recall they knew ahead of time wouldn't solve the problem, all while millions of cars continued spewing cancer-causing diesel fine particulates. It would be shocking if the hammer didn't come down hard in those circumstances.

This response is pure whataboutism. Any other people responsible for similar deliberate murder should also be similarly prosecuted.

Extraditing a German citizen to the United States? Not going to happen. Constitutionally forbidden.

By the way, Germany operates jails, as well. It's not like the United States have to prosecute everything on the planet themselves.

It seems rather reasonable for the United States to prosecute Germans for defrauding the US government and evading US air pollution law in order to sell their cars in the United States.

Kim Dotcom, a German citizen, is being extradited to a country he has never set foot in, for something that is not a crime in New Zealand.

Germany has not extradited Kim Dotcom.

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