A SpaceX engineer's dark web insider trading sparks an SEC first
wired.com
wired.com
You know what? I'm getting a bit tired of things that smell an awful lot like entrapment. Way too many things where you have a law enforcement official seemingly start an interaction, and the "actual crime" only happening later in the sequencing.
I'm not going to shed too many tears at people getting arrested for like... fake insider trading or whatever. But there's a lot of stories of people getting put away for really nasty stuff where the details make it _extremely probable_ that the undercover agent was extremely important in moving things forward.
I feel like there needs to be some stronger requirements before pulling off these kinds of schemes, instead of LEO seemingly trying to fill some quota by going out hunting for people to fall into these traps.
The police can also break down your door without a warrant and use anything they find against you. Them having entered illegally may have consequences for their unemployment(though it won't), but the evidence is still admissible in court.
Did you spend even 5 minutes thinking about what you just said?
Civilians rely on cops for instructions and directions. Furthermore a cop can order around civilians under threat of force.
If a cop forces you to commit a crime and then jails you, they can extort you for money corruption will be through the roof.
Thats what we have in Russia, the security services are superbly corrupt and regularly extort people. At least there they are breaking the law while doing so. You are suggesting we make it legal here.
In most countries "entrapment" requires that the suspect is unwilling, unlikely or under no suspicion of committing a crime. The guy they caught was actively looking for buyers and had been selling information on a purpose build board before he was kicked out of it for selling bad info.
If a cop asks me if I want to buy drugs and I say yes, they most definitely have no case whatsoever here in Denmark even though I were willing to buy. Luckily we don't have these insane laws that cause police to get people in a bad place and then punish them for it.
USA, circa 1993: I was in a car with a couple friends going to a neighborhood simply called "Temple", where meth labs were prevalent and you could procure any sort of drugs you wanted, if you knew where to park. Cops were everywhere and they stopped us, as we tried to turn around. "What are you white kids doing in Temple?" Before our driver could answer, a friend stuck his body between the front seats and yelled "we are here to buy drugs but you guys fucked it up!" - The cop did not laugh, but they let us go on our way.
That is also exactly how it works in the US. Intention and action, both are required.
If a cop asks you if you want to buy drugs, you say yes, he pulls out a baggie of white powder he claims is an 8-ball and then you hand over a wad of cash you are going to jail as soon as you accept the baggie in exchange for the cash. It was not a crime until you paid for the 'drugs'. The cop is giving you the opportunity to commit the crime, but the choice to do so is entirely made by you. That is not entrapment.
The key factor in most cases is if the actions of the police officer would have coerced a normally law-abiding citizen into breaking the law. An easy test for entrapment (but by no means a conclusive one) is if you swap out the cop with a criminal would the same transaction have occurred -- if you are ready to buy drugs from the cop it is likely that you would have bought them from a street dealer as well. Who was on the other side of the transaction didn't matter to you.
I’m reviewing the few countries listed in the Wikipedia page on entrapment ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment ) but I don’t see how this would trigger any of the exclusions listed.
The criminal in question was advertising his services across the dark web. Officers simply bought his product and sold him something he was advertising himself as buying.
They didn’t go out and encourage him to do these things. He was doing them and the agents engaged as customers so they could unveil his identity.
In this engineer's case, this is more like the engineer being a well-known drug dealer and the cop asking if the engineer can sell the cop drugs, then the engineer (willingly!) giving the cop some drugs and the cop then arresting the engineer. You have it backwards here.
Just think about it a bit - if a cop asking you to commit a crime tainted the investigation then bad-guys could prove they weren't police by telling you to commit a crime. "Hey, buy some drugs from me." "Well, he must be legit, there's no way a cop could say that!"
Also, "this sneaky entrapment is a very American thing and won't be accepted by most courts." You're both lacking for world perspective, and an understanding of the purpose of law. If Country X made this illegal, I as a resident of Country X would be upset, not happy, because it would make my legal system worthless. So even if the law were this silly, somewhere, it would change right away by overwhelming citizen demand.
You know, we the people elect those who write the laws. The laws aren't something done to us, they're our tool for making the world work.
I.e. If a police officer talks you into selling drugs you're totally on the hook unless he said something along the lines of "I'm from the police, it's fine / you must".
A cop saying “I’m a cop and you have to smash this window or someone will die!” is indeed a form of it, but there are others.
An undercover cop who pushes and prods and begs you to get them some pot until you give in is entrapment, even if they never reveal they’re a cop.
Only if they are actually coercing you (e.g. by physically threatening you). Asking really nicely or being annoying doesn't count.
For example, California's jury instructions on the defense:
https://www.justia.com/criminal/docs/calcrim/3400/3408/
> Some examples of entrapment might include conduct like badgering, persuasion by flattery or coaxing, repeated and insistent requests, or an appeal to friendship or sympathy.
Or SCOTUS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_v._United_States
> Unanimously, the Court overturned the conviction of a recovering New York drug addict who had been repeatedly solicited for drug sales by a fellow former addict who was working with federal agents.
I m not sure I d pursue a guy who traded nothing on fake intel damaging no one, even if there was a potential in his character. We have to accept people arent perfect and we may only be able to punish crimes after they happen and damage people.
In France I was taught that the only goal of the justice system is to repair tort created to a victim, not cleanse society of evil thoughts.
1. To deter future crimes. If something is punished heavily people will be more reluctant to do it.
2. To reform the criminal. Time spent in jail might provide people with the opportunity to ‘turn their life around’. This time spent will prevent the criminal from doing any future crimes in the outside world both while in jail and after their release.
3. To provide justice to the victims. If something was stolen then it must be returned. Knowing a murderer is caught/safe will provide some relief to the victims. Justice is important to a civil society.
We know this doesnt work, we have been running this experiment in imperial britain for hundreds of years - in 1700 you would be hanged for stealing groceries. Executions were a public holiday, so everyone could see and be impressed.
It worked so well that while thiefs were being hanged, pickpockets cleared out wallets of the oblivious crowd watching.
Extra history has an excellent series that lends serious perspective on the subject: https://youtu.be/XvMQY_y4qx8
Comvined with the fact that most EU countries have much lower crime rate than US and have no death penalty, it shoupd be clear that death penalty is totally ineffective at reducing crime. There is literally no place on earth where you can demonstrate "we introduced death penalty and crime has fallen" by any significant amount. We do, however, have ironclad proof that rehabilitation makes a difference. We have proof that quality of investigators that make sure the perpetrator is caught for sure makes a difference.
Recently in UK our inconpetent government has reduced the amount of police resources avaliable to investigate crime. More crimes are unsolved, crime rates increase because criminals are unounished, and they are hoping to compensate with tougher sentences. And that iduotic because we know it doesnt work, it never did
Comparing US to EU is not valid in this context because we have different demographics and culture surrounding most criminality in the US. And deterrents have different levels of effectiveness depending on the individuals and cultures onto which they are introduced.
> And that iduotic because we know it doesnt work, it never did
I would question statistics on the subject given that, presuming "tougher" means more likely and longer imprisonment, literally reduces crime by removing criminals from society. There is an enormous confounding factor in that policing has been reduced, so it's going to be very difficult to tease out how much more (or less) crime would have increased without stiffer penalties.
Again this is not a value judgement, just pointing out that the fact that crime exists does not mean that deterrents don't work. That said, I presume the kind of person willing to commit a crime with punishment in range of the death penalty is probably not likely to be the kind of person who responds to deterrent - but I wonder how likely such a person can possibly be "rehabilitated".
In a society where life is cheap and legal advancement is painful and opportunities are rare, you'll have the situation you mention. If the law is always fatal but rarely applied, why consider it at all?
In a comfortable society that has free food for everyone, a wider range of punishments actually does tend to control crime. In my country Murder can get you (effective) life, and selling marijuana on the street can't. You can buy joints easily but hitmen remain scarce.
That's not exactly right. Effective deterrence has more to do with the certainty of punishment than the severity of punishment.
> To provide justice to the victims.
Agree 100% here. The justice system is a tool of the people, and if the people believe it is ineffective they are far more likely to take matters into their own hands. In a civil society we definitely don't want that.
In the US we definitely have trouble with #2 however. Maybe some of our puritan roots. Punishment is more important than rehabilitation. And we stack the deck against ex-cons and make it very difficult for them to successfully return to society and be a productive member.
> As far back as 2016, the account with that moniker bought names, addresses, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers on the underground marketplaces that traffic in illicit online goods. He took that personal info to open banking accounts in the names of unwitting strangers, and used those accounts to make trades based on insider information he gleaned from others
The reason they do things like sell fake information is that they need to engage with the person, who is already committing these crimes on their own, in some way that produces the least amount of additional criminal activity. Hence the fake info sale and then the purchase of real into, both of which the guy was advertising online before the agents engaged him.
This isn’t entrapment. He was advertising illegal services by his own choosing. The police didn’t make him do these crimes on the dark web (before they even got involved). They simply engaged with him as another one of his dark web customers to build a case.
I tend to always assume the police are lying in the United States. How do we know they weren't doing this longer than they say?
There's some irony in getting caught with real insider info, when most of the complaint seems to center around this person lying and making up insider info.
Of course, Bundy went on to do other crazy stunts later on. But given the information available to the jury at the time, they decided that the government had gone too far in the Oregon case.
But when evaluating claims of entrapment, it is really important to pay attention to narrative manipulation. Where you start the story, for instance, matters a lot. If there are people undercover, there are going to be colorable ways to paint just about anything as entrapment.
That said, it does happen, and it is both horrifying and counterproductive.
https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-is-manufacturing-terrori...
This guide enumerates the misunderstandings about entrapment, and (if you're not already a lawyer) it will likely teach you something that could prove valuable: https://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-w...
This is FBI Agents Association representative Rey Tariche responding to an observation that look like they’re entrapping in order to justify their budget.
https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1555616344.323_producermattca...
> As far back as 2016, the account with that moniker bought names, addresses, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers on the underground marketplaces that traffic in illicit online goods. He took that personal info to open banking accounts in the names of unwitting strangers, and used those accounts to make trades based on insider information he gleaned from others
The claimed amount of Bitcoin he earned from these activities is low. Certainly low in the context of what a talented engineer should be earning. Either he’s hiding his actual profits, or he was simply doing this for the thrill of doing criminal things on the dark web. Strange case.
It’s possible that he just enjoyed the thrill of doing crimes and getting fun money. During the first crypto-mining boom, my friend in corporate IT caught multiple people trying to use office electricity and networks to mine Bitcoin with hidden hardware. One person even tried to hide their mining machine above the drop ceiling tiles. They couldn’t have been making much money relative to their salary, but they liked the idea of being clever enough to get free money for themselves at the expense of someone else.
If you want to make easy money, you need to find something that is (or appears to be) one or more of evil, dull, embarrassing, pointless, or incomprehensible.
Also, e.g. Google TAG does amazing security work, I'd be happy to work there -- if I had a clockwork mind like taviso! But we can ethically rank working at the various tech Zaibatsu another time.
Maybe? Obviously there are people at SpaceX who don't work directly on rockets, and there are people at Google who aren't SWEs. People might find some prestige or glamour even in jobs that aren't the ones you think of.
Right now it appears SpaceX is hiring customer service people for Starlink, and an HR rep to work at Cape Canaveral. And a network operations analyst in Washington, and so on. They also have "rocket engineer" positions, but there are plenty of other things.
The only time I was contacted by a Google recruiter, it was for a job in their legal department, so the experience was completely unlike what you hear about them.
SpaceX has a focus on rockets, so anything critical to that is first line. But being a systems admin isn't that, even if it is important. They don't have SREs, or people who work on languages or ML. Traditional rocket dynamics predominates. (Worryingly, they don't seem to have any formal methods / MC / validation jobs either, which is a bit of a red flag, cf Ariane failures. Human factors also seems a bit lite.)
In contrast Google is focused on the things CS/EE love, and mech eng/physics takes a back seat. Just far more roles available.
Because I suspect the very few things that surface up, are only a very small tip of a very big iceberg anyway, with all the elite managers/politicians interacting in pretty much closed circles, I cannot imagining it is not happening on a large scale and only some small fish like this one get caught now and then.
So, how could things work out, if this would just be legal? Devastating to the economy? Much more manipulation of the stock market? Or even less, as people are more aware of it?
Also, I cannot imagine myself not doing it, if I would have valuable information, I also do not really understand it all, when it would be considered insider trading and when not - but I can imagine this is the case for many people. The term seems just not clear defined to me, so maybe it is then doing more bad than good?
There’s a couple of key components to insider trading. First, you must be an insider. That is, loosely, anyone who has a some duty of trust. This can include public officials who are supposed to be serving the public and deciding to profit in times of crises instead of doing their job. This was not always the case. Furthermore, there is some notion of gaining information via illicit means also makes you an insider. The other is trading on material non-public information. “Valuable information” is only half the equation. For this, I’m going to use Matt Levine’s (I think that’s where I got it) example of how grey it can get. If a CEO harasses you, you are perfectly free to take out a massive short before suing the company. If the CEO harasses an employee, depending on the seniority and location of the crime, it could and could not be considered insider trading. Anyway, this is why we have the courts.
I'm not saying there's no loophole, but I'm pretty sure there is now a law.
source: I can be very smart and incredibly stupid too
These are very different qualities.
In modern societies, we try to keep unpredictable people away from anything important. In the most extreme cases, we lock them up in prisons and mental hospitals. In less extreme cases, we gatekeep: for example, you have to go through a psychological evaluation to get your pilot's license, driver's license, to be allowed to own a firearm, or be employed in certain positions. Degree of such gatekeeping is usually proportional to the damage wrong behavior can cause.
And then in general, we have laws and cultures and social customs that slowly grind us into shape, every day of our lives, making us ever so slightly more similar to each other with every interaction, so that we can predict each others' behaviors and cooperate effectively.
(I bring this up sometimes in context of AI/ML, where I complain that modern ML is made of black boxes with unpredictable failure modes. The usual reply is, "but humans are black boxes too!". Well, they aren't completely opaque - thanks to shared hardware architecture and "theory of mind", and to the degree it's not enough, society ensures predictability is maximized.)
Where? Wasn't required for me to fly or drive...
> to be allowed to own a firearm,
Not true even of a lot of restrictive jurisdictions. (even the UK).
> or be employed in certain positions
Sometimes this is true of being e.g. law enforcement or somewhere that requires a security clearance. But not very common.
Nobody can be smart at everything.
I've done interviews where companies have told me their revenue growth, their next year plan with very specific partnerships and the technical challenges around achieving it, and I've had employees during the interview straight up explain how the company optimized their R&D to maximize their tax avoidance.
It makes no sense to say that a congressman is "insider trading" because they are given a report on the outbreak of disease in China.
There is no such thing as "insider trading" for geopolitical or macroeconomic events.
If I hear from a friend at X that company X is about to Y and trade off that, that's insider trading. Right? If a congressman heard in closed testimony that a bad thing is about to happen to X and trades off that...
They know who's about to win big contacts in their district. They know who is about to be affected be legislation that was snuck into the budget last minute without debate.
It is a very specific legal term that deals with the internal information of public corporations - eg: their quarterly sales revenues.
It doesn't make sense out of that context.
Also, there were TONS of people talking about the outbreak in China when those Congresspeople sold shares. I sold at the same time. The information was out there - it's just that the Western MSM wasn't covering it.
Also, the notion that Congress found out about COVID-19 before everyone else is ludicrous. People who took the time to read the reports out of China sold WELL BEFORE even congress sold. I know - I was one of them.
The problem is that MSM did NOT cover the outbreak in China. Many accused those who did of racism and posts on social media were squashed from brigades more concerned with "fear-mongering".
"Insider trading involves trading in a public company's stock by someone who has non-public, material information about that stock for any reason. Insider trading can be either illegal or legal depending on when the insider makes the trade. It is illegal when the material information is still non-public, and this sort of insider trading comes with harsh consequences."
That is not correct. It has to be non-public *company* information - not just ANY non-public information.
If you discover a comet in outer space that is going to crash into McDonalds HQ. Shorting that stock does not make you an insider.
That's why it's called INSIDER trading. Because it's all about the non-public information INSIDE the corporation in question.
I would agree that it's not legally insider trading, because of course the people who wrote the laws on insider trading excluded their privileged knowledge from being considered insider trading in the law.
Does this mean they are no longer using TOR, or they are just operating a more low-key onion site?
Are there even indexes of tor sites?
What this looks like to me is just the SEC with it's well known hate for SpaceX looking to hurt them any way they can.
Insider Trading isn't some vague catch-all for non-public information. It has a specific meaning that relates to publicly held corporations.
Sounds like you need to catch up to date on modern law. The STOCK Act passed in 2012 makes this "insider trading".