Strange comment.
Are the engineers who made the code change responsible?? Do engineers need to be lawyers and financial gurus too, and evaluate every ticket they are given for possible illegality in every country the software is used??
This is very odd special pleading by programmers. Every industry needs to do this: journalists learn media law in their university degrees, architects have to learn the building regulations. Why is programming any different?
That's absolutely ridiculous, and no court would expect it.
I expect other engineers to know laws when creating things (not like having a JD). Accredited business schools in the US teach business law to their undegrads. It's absolutely not ridiculous or a stretch to have a similar expectation.
> When it's something seemingly egregious like this
You don't even know what "this" is. So the BI engineer that stitches together data for a report should have known that combining these two values was illegal? What silliness.
Have you ever looked at media law or libel law? It does not have clear boundaries, but journalists are still expected to follow the law. Journalists are not absolved of the responsibility because it’s complicated.
You just need to not break the law. It’s how it works. If you don’t want exposure to liability, you need to acquaint yourself with relevant law.
They absolutely have boundaries that a lawyer or prosecutor can use to make a case in a court of law. How do you think the law works? Interpretation of laws is a big part of how the common law system works.
You can't prosecute someone for murder just for insulting you. You can't prosecute someone for robbery if all they did was jaywalking. Media laws have clear boundaries sufficient for legal professionals to do their job. Building codes have clear boundaries sufficient for legal professionals to do their job.
In this Chancery case from 2021, the judge mulls over what it means that a defendant is “unaware”. He considers the distinction between someone who knows about the relevant law and misunderstands it vs someone who doesn’t know at all. And the judge briefly wonders whether someone working in regulated activity (like finance) and completely unaware poses the most risk to the public.
The judge left the issue unsettled, but it raises the possibility that ignorance might count against a defendant. The Chancery Division handles business disputes, though, and I imagine the criminal courts have their own rules.
Paragraphs 22-25 are most relevant: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2021/995.html
Complete nonsense. This is criminal law. Google "Mens rea".
This is not an argument against programmers, like other professionals, learning the aspects of the law which are relevant to their job. Why should programming be the one profession where this is not required?
You can still get sued in civil court of course, but that's not the state trying to put you in a cage and so the standard goes from beyond reasonable doubt to most likely.
If you're a coder coding shady shit for your shady employer, you most likely know you're doing so and there's typically some trace or record left. But coders are not investment bankers and in fact may not even know anything about investment laws and regulations. And it's completely unreasonable to expect them to know. I worked on many projects, including medical and education... if I had to question and investigate every executive decision impacting my work then I wouldn't get anything done.
E.g. if I take your wallet off of a table because I thought it was mine, I’m probably not guilty of theft. If I took it because I didn’t know theft was illegal, I probably still am.
Furthermore, even in cases where mens rea is required, it gets satisfied if you intended to achieve the prohibited result even if you thought that the result was permitted. "Intent" is not about intent to break the law, it's about the intent to do the thing that happens to be illegal. In this case, it matters if you knew what the thing you're making was going to be used for (e.g. hide some stuff from auditors) but your knowledge or ignorance of the relevant laws and regulations doesn't matter at all - as another poster noted, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat .
Or think about people who build bridges. They just follow the orders they get from higher ups. Bridge collapses. The higher-ups should be held accountable not the workers. The question I think is did the engineer here just follow orders? Perhaps he understood very little about finance, only about programming.
I would guess the compensation structure at FTX included a lot of their own crypto tokens, since the company can mint those at no cost. And Alameda was a big holder of those FTT/Serum tokens.
So you're a software engineer who owns theoretically millions of dollars worth of FTT tokens, and then the boss comes to you and asks to make an exception for Alameda... Since you work at FTX, you're probably aware that Alameda holds and trades a lot of FTT. If you do the code change to make Alameda look better and maintain the value of your own crypto portfolio, there's no question that you're a part of the fraud.
A code change excluding a known, named entity from safety checks is more like rigging a bridge to explode when your enemy crosses the bridge.
Zero ambiguity.
That’s not the question — as in, it won’t be an element of any of the crimes he’s eventually charged with. The question is whether he was knowingly or recklessly involved in a scheme to defraud people.
And just generally, legal reasoning does frequently use analogies but they need to be tighter than the ones you’re using. This case isn’t much like building a faulty bridge.
Murder-in-first-degree means you didn't just recklessly cause the death of somebody, it means you did it intentionally, on purpose.
See Mens Rea, "Criminal Intent" https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea
Was this engineer knowingly and intentionally helping to commit the crime? We don't know because we haven't seen many details or testimonies in this case. He must be assumed innocent until proven guilty. And proving him guilty must include proving he had criminal intent, Mens Rea. The court of public opinion as in Hacker News is of course a different matter.
I think what's up to debate is to what extent the developers were lied to regarding the purpose of the code. Maybe they were told it was for testing purposes only, or the higher ups managed to convince them that it's ok despite them questioning it. I suppose those things will come up during investigation and will certainly affect their sentences, but I don't think they will be off the hook that easily.
Your gun analogy is not fair and it does not translate well to the actual situation at hand. A gun engineer is not responsible for all the deaths the weapon causes. But said engineer will be very much accountable if the weapon blows up in the wielder's hands during normal use (even though practically this might not be the case due to liability disclaimers and all that).
We have case studies where deaths were caused by shit software, where the engineer of that wrote the software is clearly the accountable one.
You could make this argument for literally every profession.
However, "do this bad act and we'll all get rich" seems a bit ... harder to sympathize with.
I work in another regulated industry today, and throughout the year sign off on understanding various regulations and trainings of 3 letter agencies, that are essentially in place to indemnify the company in case of a violation. I’d expect financial services follows similar steps.
Yes, you are. Splitting responsibility between those who give orders and those who follow them to avoid penalties is exactly why both are persecuted and put in jail.
That sounds like Julian Assange. Did you mean "prosecuted"?
The person who commissioned this change, knowing the potential financial ramifications that it opened them and their depositors money up to, is the one who should be charged.