Ex-Goldman Programmer Is Arrested Again
dealbook.nytimes.com
dealbook.nytimes.com
This does seem wrong to me because he's essentially being charged for much the same crime on the same set of facts. It seems like when the dual-sovereignty Federal-State system was created the idea was that that the Federal and State governments would be responsible for different things such that you would be violating either Federal or State law (or possibly both but for different offences).
This seems like prosecutorial abuse.
That all being said, if you consider the facts int his case: the code in question was highly sensitive and as much as the article calls the action of sending it to a server in Germany (IIRC) a "mistake", it seems fairly clear to me that it was or was intended to be theft.
Just don't take code from a former employer. Ever. This is a good rule of thumb for every engineer to follow,. Even if what you're doing isn't (likely to be) criminal conduct, you can then run afoul of copyright claims and so forth if you ever implement something similar.
Or get your company's lawyercats to give you the OK.
Goldman gives a lot of money to political campaigns (#1 donor to Obama[1], #2 to Romney[2] in last election). NY mayor Michael Bloomberg seems to fawn over Goldman[3], offering $1.65B in tax breaks for them to set up an office at Ground Zero[4]. My guess is Goldman's gold, regardless of the means in which they've acquired it, is a significant factor to Manhattnan DA's sudden interest in prosecuting white collar crime.
[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cid=N00009638
[2] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/contrib.php?id=N00000286
[3] http://www.salon.com/2012/03/16/mayor_bloomberg_personally_c...
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg#Economic_issu...
There might be no evidence of corruption, but this stinks.
Also, the NY State Attorney General's Office probably smells blood in the water, with a ton of the work (discovery, etc) done for them by the Federal prosecutors. It's probably viewed as low-hanging fruit in racking up convictions.
The more work by the USDOJ they use the more they will be accused of 'acting in concert' and the more likely the issue becomes one of double jeopardy.
This isn't about the application of law, this is about the application of political will.
If a given politician gets valuable future support in exchange for making people think less of government or their fellow pols overall, then that's a win for them.
I find it interesting this sort of thing is rarely, if ever, presented as government gone wrong. Not everything based on self-interest falls within capitalism. When someone steals, commits extortion, etc., no one considers it an "example of capitalism". And yet when the government engages in such at the behest of self-interested parties, "capitalism" gets the rap. Quite odd.
Either way, the main question is how do you counter it or at least balance it out so the little people don't get trampled?
Which is an oxymoron; government favoritism is the antithesis of capitalism. The fact that money is involved doesn't make it capitalism.
Libertarianism is a different concept that includes economic policies and non-economic policies.
I don't think this is true. It's named as government corruption often enough, and it's framed from that direction fairly frequently in some political media, both by people who believe it's a corruption of what government should/could be and who believe it's inherent in government power.
> When someone steals, commits extortion, etc., no one considers it an "example of capitalism"
This seems truer than your first contention -- not only is it generally rare that crime is considered just another response to incentives, even people who think of it this way (myself and probably some economists included), it's fair enough to draw a line between a formal definition of capitalism and crime.
But then again, in this kind of discussion it's probably worth recognizing that terms like "capitalism" (or "socialism", for that matter) are usually used as shorthand in a heavily context-dependent sense, rather than as anything formally defined. I think it's better to be more precise so as to avoid hang-ups like this, but then again, being prescriptive or pedantic can have it's own hangups. Capitalism may not simply mean any laissez faire system founded largely on self-interest, but it's easy enough to accept it as a label for a class of possible systems for the sake of discussion about whether or not it's unfair to blame a private party for capture of a democratic/republic nation-state, or whether to blame the state for being there to capture.
It still seems pretty vindictive.
A more extreme counterexample would be that a case where a person broke into an office and stole a USB stick, kidnapping an employee and shooting a guard on the way out. There's IP theft (federal), kidnapping (federal), and homicide (local). Which should that person not be prosecuted for? How do you choose?
In any case, I'm not an attorney and this appears to be settled law and not really up for debate.
Also you'd need to try to mitigate nonlinearity in punishment somehow. At the very least figure out a way to punish any details like "armed robbery" only once.
Trying to unravel longstanding law is kind of like poking at a piece of code that's been running for 20 years and deciding you can do better. Then realizing that the only way to make it better is to rewrite it from scratch, because there are reasons for all of the funkiness in the code. And rewriting fails spectacularly in code much of the time (see TextMate 2, for instance). Imagine how much success non-programmers would have at rewriting a complex system from scratch. That's roughly how much success I'd expect HN users to achieve at rewriting longstanding law.
I'm just saying, the outcomes may seem capricious, but picking at one string isn't going to improve things. If you think otherwise, you may have a bright career in the legislature.
Charging the same crime twice is unfair, where "same" is not something I am qualified to define in detail.
There. That seems good. I am not suggesting what to do about it at this point in time. By the way, I find it rather hyperbolic of you to look at a report of an uncommon bug and claim it calls for a total rewrite. No way in hell do I want to change the entire legal system. But if you're afraid to adjust something at all it just gets clunkier over time.
But, thinking as much like a lawyer as I can: you're never charged for the same "crime" more than once. There are overlapping laws, and one action can cause you to break more than one law (each of these is a separate "crime"). So I believe that legally speaking, Aleynikov is not being charged twice for the same crime, because he is not being charged again with breaking the same law.
So I'm saying that your simple tweak that "seems good" may have other problems, and may cascade in ways that we cannot predict (because we're not seasoned jurists). Also, I'm saying that lots of smart people who have dedicated their lives to the study of problems like this just may have stumbled on the simple adjustment you have stumbled across in 3 minutes of armchair quarterbacking, and thrown it out for a reason that is not immediately obvious to the layperson. You may have had similar experiences with non-programmers trying to redesign the guts of software; it's about as productive as this exchange. So you might not need to redesign the legal system from scratch, but step one in making adjustments is certainly deep knowledge and experience with the existing statutes and their application. (Similarly, you wouldn't be allowed to commit to the mainline branch of Git if you don't know C.)
If I had more time, I'd grope for an analogy in computers where two things appear the same to a layperson, but is actually different to programmers. I'm sure you can come up with several if you try.
For state and federal governments the cost of 2 trials is inconsequential.
For an individual the cost of two trials can easily push them into bankruptcy. Now if the individual is guilty you might not have that much sympathy for them, but consider that innocent people have to defend them selves in court as well.
The exception to this exception exists between city and state sovereignties located within the same state. Although cities are different sovereignties than the state they are located within, the two are not permitted to attach jeopardy more than once cumulatively.
Sergey was the secret sauce. Erlang + OCaml might be a match made in heaven. It's just too bad that he works in a profession where the exact way you've gone about something is owned by your employer. If some fund manager brought his trading strategies to another firm, even if he came up with them at the previous firm, he wouldn't be spending a year in prison.
Of course, this is just what I think - I'm not allowed to see the code in question, so all I can do is guess.
Similar logic applies to a criminal who commits crimes across several states.