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> The actual work of entering this transaction into Flexcube fell to a subcontractor in India named Arokia Raj.

> Citibank's procedures require that three people sign off on a transaction of this size. In this case, that was Raj, a colleague of his in India, and a senior Citibank official in Delaware named Vincent Fratta.

The names of these individuals seems like an unnecessary detail, especially since the article names the software interface as the culprit. I can't help but think about the recent NYT/SSC incident.

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Agreed, especially considering the article's title blames UI.

They aren't naming the designers of the software, the devs who implemented it, or any number of other middle managers and other folks involved in building it and maintaining it. Just these 3 unfortunate individuals who failed to use it properly...

A comment on HN the other day referred to this as the 'moral crumple zone:' how responsibility for an action may be misattributed to a human actor who had limited control over the behavior of an automated or autonomous system.

Seems like it works for design as well.

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

Yeah, as long as they were naming and shaming, they should have at least mentioned Larry Ellison.

The names are public knowledge anyway given they were listed in the lawsuit. Anybody who blames Arokia Raj, his boss, or Vincent Fratta is either lazy or a fool.

The blame rests on the software vendor who built such an atrocious product and decision makers at Citibank who chose that software, in my opinion.

> The names are public knowledge anyway given they were listed in the lawsuit.

Just because their names are relevant to the court case doesn't mean they are relevant to readers of an article reporting on that court case - especially when that article doesn't even bother to identify the court case itself or the software vendor implied by the article to be responsible for the root cause of the matter.

> article doesn't even bother to identify the court case

The court case is public record.

The first non-social-media result on Google for this person is a Bloomberg article about this case.

The court case itself is not in the first five pages of results.

Mentioning the name in this context links this person to one event which arguably isn't even their fault.

This has real consequences for this person in terms of professional reputation alone.

> Anybody who blames Arokia Raj, his boss, or Vincent Fratta is either lazy or a fool

Both laziness and foolishness are in ample abundance, so the two men now will have to live out their lives marred in this scandal for no good reason.

Had the names been withheld the same lazy fools would run out of their attention span before they could find the names in the court papers.

That is a very good point. I'm not necessarily opposed to their names being mentioned personally, but you're right that had they not been mentioned, those peoples lives might be quite a bit less stressful.

Agreed, I expected better from Ars.

The UI bug and the impact is interesting, but the names of the individuals or where they are from add no value to this article.

I read this article a few hours ago and I could swear that it didn't mention the names of bank employees then. But I can't verify that anymore.

Here is the earliest snapshot on the Internet Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20210217190305/https://arstechni...

It does indeed mention the names, even in this version from yesterday.

This made me re-check the article. I am consistently getting served a redacted version of this article that does not contain names. The only way for me to see the version with names is through the wayback machine. This makes it look like there are different versions of this article for different regions.

Just checked and the names are now gone for me too. Seems like they removed them (again?)

I think it drew attention to the fact that it was a real human that was involved, and made the story a bit more personal, as if to say this could happen to anyone. But I do think that they could have used a pseudonym to the same effect, maybe something like "fell to a subcontractor, let's call him Raj." blah blah blah.

I think this has something to do with journalistic standards -- verifiability of the story, sources, etc.

Couldn't they have used short names or pseudonyms? Those who want to trace and verify can always contact the paper for actual details

The names are already public record in filings. My gut says that if they left the names out, people would be yelling that there's a conspiracy to protect individuals.

I doubt it, given the individuals listed aren't to blame.

That said - if people want to yell, so what?

If the intent is to help readers verify the story, surely an identifier for the court case would be more useful. However, the article does not explicitly identify the case (Citibank NA v Brigade Capital Management, 20-CV-6539). It does at least name the Judge (Jesse Furman) and includes a link to a "Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law" PDF document from courtlistener.com which identifies the court case as well as the identities of the two individuals named in the article. I hope that link stays operational for the sake of anyone who intends to actually verify the article.

If the intent is to just provide the reader with more relevant information, surely the identity of the development firm behind Flexcube would be more relevant. Again, that information is conspicuously absent. It seems Flexcube was developed and distributed by Oracle.

If this sort of behavior is the result of "journalistic standards", then maybe it's time for those standards to be revised.

Looking at it now, it appears names have been removed from the article.

They are still available in the archive though: https://archive.is/MQTXQ

Well, not much Ars can do about that.

Agreed. That’s like pointing out the name of the pilot after a plane crash caused by a hardware malfunction.

It's a strange new world we are living in where people don't understand why journalists report the names and details of notable and newsworthy things that people do.

The information is drawn from public court documents and the incident is something with nearly a billion dollars in consequences that affects multiple publicly traded companies.

What do people think the word "news" means if not this?

It means "The people's names are irrelevant to the actual event that happened. Especially when they're rank-and-file engineers and not people in positions of power."

They were not even engineers, they were glorified data entry officers and their boss.

Umm, who exactly cares about what 'mistake' Vincent Fratta made at work?

But who cares that Citi lost half a billion dollars because of an interface mistake?

The latter is news. The former is not. The story loses none of its impact or relevancy leaving the names out.

Court proceedings are public.

If Vincent Fratta is alleged to have urinated in a public park and gets arrested for it that's public information, and those kind of things often end up in police blotters, even if the charges are later dropped. If Vincent Fratta is overwhelmed by medical debt and files for bankruptcy that's in the public record as well.

But we should concern ourselves with Vincent Fratta's privacy when he botches a financial transaction in a way that has hundreds of millions of dollars in consequences for public companies and involves an interesting and newsworthy legal precedent?

The information is already public - why distribute it widely when there are potential negative consequences for the named in doing so?

Are you the judge to rule whether the individual has lost his right of privacy?

Yet you comment here under a pseudonym. What if you made a mistake, would you want to be named?

> Are you the judge to rule whether the individual has lost his right of privacy?

I mean, there is an actual judge. This is a major legal case, and they've placed the info in the public record. The judge has in fact made a ruling.

I'm not saying it's always a perfect system, but it's definitely a very well established system in the U.S. that all court proceedings are very public. It's one of the core founding principles of the judicial branch, and it's also been a staple of American journalism for hundreds of years.

I personally think the European approach is much better on this specific issue, and that right to be forgotten laws and similar are justified.

But the reason I mentioned it in this context is that the idea that journalists naming people who are clearly notable in the context of reporting news only seems to generate a critical response when it's someone that the average HN reader identifies with.

(Your last sentence is a fine point, but they aren't pseudonymous. Their bio contains personally identifiable information.)

nobody except the person who approved GUI botched anything here.

And just because you can name the persons, doesn't mean you should.

It's different, if person is caught doing something illegal, that his name does add to the story.

But this was just big oopsie, and individuals did nothing wrong. (or you can bet, Citibank would try do divert blame on them)

Undoubtedly this mistake and the media coverage has ruined this employee’s life, for something that’s surely a very poorly run operation. Anyone who has ever worked in operations knows this type of error happens daily and repeatedly.

I don’t think those first two examples should be done either. In many countries in central and Northern Europe, it’s common journalistic practice not to print the names of those accused of crimes. Innocent until proven guilty, right? I think we’ll look back at the NYT et al publishing mugshots and full names of the accused as downright barbaric.

If a journalists writes "Vincent Fratta did X", this is something that can be verified or disputed by Fratta or his colleagues. If the journalists writes "A low-level employee did X", then it's much, much more difficult to verify or dispute.

Similarly, if a journalist writes "A judge ruled X for court case Y", this is something that can be verified or disputed using public records for the court case... but that court case is never identified in the article except for a link to a PDF document hosted by a third-party organization. The public records for that court case (including the linked document) identify those individuals - along with many more useful details - for anyone seeking further validation.

Anonymous contributors where all the craze during the Trump admin, I'm not sure how dedicated the papers are to 3rd party verification.

Also, it's possible to reach out to Fratta and ask for comment beforehand - then you can either include that response, or lack of response, without naming them.

The risks involved of naming someone have gone up quite dramatically. Today, anyone can take a random person and, from anywhere in the world, cause them direct pain. Swatting, slandering them as a pedophile, bank fraud, etc.

Sure, their names are “news” but how does the name of someone who made an innocent mistake help me understand the news? What’s the value-add? The “ROI” seems in strongly negative territory here.

> It's a strange new world

Not really. In Germany it's very uncommon to name individuals in news reports, even in murder cases. If at all the format used is Angela M.

There is always a balance between the 'personality rights' of the individual and the public's right of information.

The story here is a good example - there is zero need to know the individuals' names.

There is no public interest in naming these people since they're ordinary employees and there is no particular blame on them since it's indeed clearly a UI issue. For a high-up manager, this would be different.

Naming the developers who wrote this and signed off on it, now that might be more relevant.

How does the name of a contractor that can be hardly blamed for the mistake matter? Including the name is gossip, not news.

The status quo does not justify itself by its existence.

Who is the relevant person to name here? The one who screwed up designing the UI so much? The one who decided to enter into the contract with oracle? There are much more relevant people to this story, but this is presumably just reporting on public records without doing any legwork. If the more relevant names aren’t in there, the reporter isn’t going to go find them and will instead just go with what’s easy.

You don’t actually say what this thing we’re supposed to understand is, but I think you’re implying that it’s in the public’s interest to know it? If that’s what you meant, I’d disagree that these names are in the public interest.

US journalists (and bloggers - hello Brian) tend not think about this much. They'll publish names in their articles just because they can.

When pressed they'll blab some indefensible nonsense about their duty as a journalist, which apparently includes throwing innocent people under the bus with a flourish.

The names were in the court documents. Publicly available information at this point.

That doesn’t make it okay to amplify that information.

I’ve got no sympathy for Citi and the litany of penny-pinching that created the situation. And I loathe that their first reaction was probably to require ANOTHER layer of bureaucratic approval. But I don’t find any value in embarrassing the people who pressed the buttons.

I find that the real names improves the emotional impact of the story. Like when you watch a movie, it is just nice to know that "these are real events that occured to real people". Invented names hurt the story-telling, since it reminds you of the fact that "oh, this isn't totally real".

This is the same reason that NTSB reports are fun to read: you know that you're not just wasting your time with someone's imagination.

The public knowledge of their names also has positive impact in their circle of friends. Like, for example, now all their friends know that Oracle is a trigger to them and shouldn't be mentioned. It's a win-win-win: Society is entertained, the people named avoid getting triggered, and the friends avoid mentioning uncomfortable topics, triggering them.

Well, 3 things...

1st, this isn't a movie. getting entertainment from a real life person's drama can be inappropriate and dystopian in certain contexts, and this very well looks like it could be one of those contexts.

2nd, if an individual chooses they can share this story with their friends. an individual could feel very ashamed/embarrassed, and this comes across like the media airing their dirty laundry. it could really injure someone psychologically.

3rd, they only mentioned the Indian man's name but not the guy from Delaware which comes across as borderline racist.

Anyway it appears they took the names down from the article.

Well, it looks like Ars has censored their article of information that is part of the public record. Not exactly a great accomplishment for free speech.

How exactly do you "censor" something information that is part of the public record? It's part of the public record.

Nobody is saying they aren't allowed to publish the information. Tabloids exist and can say whatever they want, but a serious outlet like Ars is held to higher standards by their customers. I assume Ars removed the names because they agreed those details were unnecessary and only served as a potential liability for those named.

Free speech means the freedom to say or not say what you want. Ars chose to not say something of their own volition.

> How exactly do you "censor" something information that is part of the public record? It's part of the public record.

Ars censored themselves. It's the chilling effect against free speech in action.

Self censorship is nonsense. Freedom of speech entails the right to not say things you don't want to. People tend to avoid saying things others don't like - particularly businesses whose profits depend on their reputation.

> Freedom of speech entails the right to not say things you don't want to

Ars clearly wanted to say it, which is why they published what they originally did. However, because of the chilling effect, they felt the need to go back and retroactively censor themselves even if they didn't want to.

Heaven forbid Ars changes their mind on something.

Have you never said something you later regretted? Have you never corrected something after posting it?

Is every post-release edit to an article another death knell for free speech?

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