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Comment by dinp | Hacker News Reader

The impact this organization had was incredible. I doubt they would have been able to do this work if they were based out of any other country, which makes me wonder how the US legal system, regulators and law enforcement in general are not extremely corrupt. What reasons or incentives make the system work in the US? Of course there are many instances of corruption and injustice, but in comparison to almost any other country, it seems to work surprisingly well.

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I think there is a really nuanced check-and-balance system that has extreme visibility for the federal legal system:

- investigators need approval from a prosecutor to move forward with investigations, and ultimately have to present their evidence in sales calls to their boss/peers. It’s a lot of red tape.

- prosecutors have bosses and reputations to uphold, they don’t want to take on risk.

- judges act as a procedural review for the prosecutor and watchdog for civil liberties

- the defense is red teaming the prosecutor and investigators for fraud etc

- the appeals court acts as a second level review for everyone + original judge

- it’s all public so journalists can poke around.

which is all good, because it is better to let 9 guilty men free, than to wrongfully imprison 1 innocent.

There are many reasons for this but primarily its simply that it is a wealthy country with a functioning legal system. US courts are generally fair; if biased. This has changed with many recent rulings by the SCOTUS. But there exists a culture of generally respecting laws (and an apparatus to enforce those laws).

> I doubt they would have been able to do this work if they were based out of any other country

Here's a British one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viceroy_Research

There were a _number_ of British and German ones involved in the whole Wirecard mess.

Hindenburg's probably the world's most prominent, but there's nothing about the model that inherently requires being in the US.

And those German short-sellers (and to a lesser extent their British counterparts) were aggressively bullied by their local government market regulators https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/germanys-long-lon...

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