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Comment by mellosouls | Hacker News Reader

But in a series of recent interviews from his $4.5 million home in Dubai, Shah was unrepentant.

“Bankers don’t have morals,” the 50-year-old said on a video call. “Hedge-fund managers, and so on, they don’t have morals. I made the money legally.” [...] “Prove that any law was broken,” Shah said. “Prove that there was fraud. The legal system allowed it.”

At least he's honest in his contempt for normal ethical mores - there's none of the vacillating bull we associate with PR from say, big corporate tax dodgers.

Naive, idealistic me has often wondered how possible an abstract law of last resort for prosecuting people who exploit loopholes in what a jury of their peers would consider to be an unethical way; but I guess it would be to open to abuse by dodgy governments and other entities and presumably not compatible with a democratic legal system.

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We have laws like this for computer hackers. No-one ever defends themselves by saying "everything I did was enabled by the poorly designed system, therefore I am not a criminal". Why not for the financial system?

The CFAA is a terrible law that has been used to prosecute people over very questionable cases. Let's not bring (any more of) that level of subjectivity to finance.

> No-one ever defends themselves by saying "everything I did was enabled by the poorly designed system, therefore I am not a criminal".

This is a pretty common argument, actually, when it comes to questions of "allowed" API access.

Exploiting loopholes is virtuous for many of the people in the industry. It demonstrates your attentiveness to the rules.

> No-one ever defends themselves by saying "everything I did was enabled by the poorly designed system, therefore I am not a criminal".

People charged with hacking defend themselves this way all the time. And other people defend them in the same terms.

Recently a guy was charged for accessing public URLs. Sure, they were specifically made available to the public, but the public wasn't supposed to look at them.

The weev case was a travesty from start to finish. The failure on ATT's part is legendary. The "secret" information was only ever exposed to a professional journalist, who didn't pass it on to anyone. Nothing happened in New Jersey. And of course, as the appellate court found:

...no evidence was advanced at trial that the account slurper ever breached any password gate or other code-based barrier. The account slurper simply accessed the publicly facing portion of the login screen and scraped information that AT&T unintentionally published. [0]

[0] http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/weevru...

I think it is pretty clear from the context that a) Tronno is referring to people exploiting vulnerabilities for nefarious purposes, and b) successfully defending themselves with that argument.

but should our legal system prosecute those hackers that didn't break any law on the books? I'd argue they shouldn't - sure some of the bad guys get put away, but so to do good* guys because of the legal precedent being followed

*good as being defined as likely a net positive value on society similarly bad as being defined as a net negative for society

No such law is needed, at least in this case. This guy is up to his neck in lawsuits and the only reason he isn't cooling his heels in a Copenhagen jail is that he's on the run in Dubai

For computer hackers, we have clear laws citing unlawful access to computer systems. Plus, computer hackers don't tend to consult with lawyers before doing their thing.

For traders, we don't have all-encompassing laws covering tax avoidance. Plus, traders have money for hiring professional for finding loopholes.

That's the difference.

>We have laws like this for computer hackers. No-one ever defends themselves by saying "everything I did was enabled by the poorly designed system, therefore I am not a criminal". Why not for the financial system?

Because the CFAA is pretty universally hated and makes for bad outcomes.

Or we could fix these financial zero-days when they are found instead of letting them run for years.

“Financial Zero-days” - Excellent analogy :)

This should be a thing.

But think about what that will do to the zero-day market! It will surely crash from such an action!

And further, reward people who responsibly report them early instead of exploiting them.

> "Naive, idealistic me has often wondered how possible an abstract law of last resort for prosecuting people who exploit loopholes in what a jury of their peers would consider to be an unethical way"

Heaven help those who are unpopular or of a class that is widely discriminated against under such a system.

Perhaps GP meant to account for it by 'of their peers', as in equals.

For example, in the UK peers (of the realm) used to have the right to trial by jury of fellow peers (of the realm).

They are now the victims of inequality - while commoners have the right to a trial by their commoner peers, peers (of the realm) have only the right to a trial by commoners!

Ancient Chinese law worked that way; people whose acts were considered blatantly unethical would routinely be charged for violating an imperial decree. Not an actual imperial decree, but everyone acknowledged that the Emperor would have made such a decree if he'd been aware of the circumstances.

selective application of the law (aka, a lynchmob) has a very chilling effect on the populous. They will not take risks, nor try new innovations for fear of such reprisals.

You end up with a "can't go wrong buying IBM" mentality, but for society.

It wasn't a case of lynch mobs - the court administration were properly appointed officials, and there were checks and balances in place (by the standards of the time). But the mentality that the rules had to be written down ahead of time and any loopholes were fair game just wasn't there.

At some point the disease is worse than the cure.

You also use this word "democratic" in a way that does not mean "rule by the majority".

I just meant legal systems as exist in developed democracies but that's more long-winded and potentially open to red-herring discussions on which countries are democratic etc.

Perhaps, "rule of law" is what you were looking for?

I think that probably also has room for interpretation. Anyway, hopefully most will have known what I meant.

> You also use this word "democratic" in a way that does not mean "rule by the majority".

I’ll take the bait. “Democratic legal system” is, according to you, an oxymoron because of the “rule by the majority” part? A common sentiment although easily debunked, since there are always rulers in any system with legal codes. In any case this seems pretty off-topic.

Another in any case (since I can’t help myself): when political scientists talk about “modern democracies” they mean liberal democracies with rule of law etc. Even though very few modern countries are truely democracies.

I totally agree and questioned if I should just leave that part out.

However words are important and are used to disguise what is occurring. Had the parent wrote "presumably not compatible with a non-democratic legal system." they would have been more accurate.

Rule of law is not accurate either. Purely democratic states can fall well within rule of law. The issue here is that there is some law that democracies cannot pass because it violates a higher law.

Piketty writes about this issue in regard to slavery. To free slaves (in the USA) without compensation was regarded as not following within the higher law which is ~ the law of property.

The same issue would be faced with trying to free the "ill gotten gains" of "bankers" from their holdings. The childish subtext of our propertarian legal system is "new rules dont count".

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