> Yes of course they need to know the law. Anyone who might potentially break the law during the course of their work needs to know what that law is.
Complete nonsense. This is criminal law. Google "Mens rea".
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 .