Hacker News Reader

Comment by wladimir | Hacker News Reader

The thing that is impressive to me is how many things are accepted and not considered 'serious criminal activity' these days. Fraud and other white collar crimes aren't even considered criminal anymore since the crash in 2008. We're in a perpetual state of 'look the other way, nothing happening here'.

View on HN

For example: blow the whistle on the largest tax evasion scheme in history: go to jail. Participate in largest tax evasion scheme in history: no problem.

If we're talking the UBS case that others have alluded to here:

He went to jail because he didn't tell the whole story and tried to cover up his part. Whistleblowing rules require full disclosure of your information to prevent them just being used to take out rivals; by covering up his part in the illegal activity, he forefeited part of his protection and so is in prison. This is normal and perfectly fine.

It's not so much about the whistleblower being in jail: but rather only the whistleblower being in jail. It seems like retaliation.

If this is the UBS guy, the hole in your statement is he did both and went to jail for the latter. He was whistleblowing on his competitors while actively trying to hide the assets of his clients.

There is literally nothing in what he released that is obviously illegal to me. He says a bunch of it is illegal, but I'm no lawyer and it looks like one person just deleted a bunch of data and another person asked if that was really kosher and we don't know what happened after that.

I'm just not jumping to conclusions I'm not qualified to make. It's impressive to me, that you can do that.

I don't know enough about the situation either. But now investigators can subpoena the documents whose numbers were given in the email. The purpose in detaching the DTN's from the loans they referred to, would be to prevent finding those documents even though they could (according to the email exchange) not be entirely deleted. They say in the email that the document will now only show up if you search for it by DTN, not by the loan.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com