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Comment by dpratt | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if any of the executives involved with this deal will have a moment of clarity and make a public statement - "I was directly told by representatives of the U.S. Government that if we did not take this deal there would be direct and material consequences for both my company and myself. Here is the names of the people I met with, here is a log of the meetings. If I am jailed or in some other fashion publicly discredited through an otherwise seemingly unrelated matter in the future, you should always remember that I have made this public statement."

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Other executives have.

Look at what happened to Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio after challenging illegal NSA warrantless wiretapping requests. (Hint: he just got out of federal prison about two months ago.)

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230398390... Mr. Nacchio said he still believes his insider-trading prosecution was government retaliation for rebuffing requests in 2001 from the National Security Agency to access his customers' phone records. His plans to use that belief as a defense at trial never materialized; some of the evidence he wanted to use was deemed classified and barred from being introduced. To Mr. Nacchio, the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents saying the agency monitors the email and phone records of Americans, have justified his own stance. He contended the NSA's request was illegal. "I feel vindicated," he said. "I never broke the law, and I never will."

Nacchio defrauded shareholders out of millions of dollars. Let's be careful about who we're valorizing.

I'm generally curious about this. I have no idea how to judge Nacchio's career. Can you point some facts proving this point of view?

Or maybe: How was his position any different than yours, if you had a request from the NSA that you wouldn't want to fulfil, knowing that rejecting it could destroy your company, what would you do?

The issue is, imo, very murky but as I understand it:

NSA approached Nacchio and Qwest to do what they were doing with AT&T and Verizon. Qwest had previously helped the NSA intercept all comms in Salt Lake City during the Olympics but told the NSA they weren't interested in cooperating. Nacchio sells some stock. Qwest is suddenly dropped as the favored vendor for a huge government contract leading to a drop in Qwest's share price and earnings.

The US federal goverment's position was that Nacchio knew the contract was going to get dropped and cashed out early - insider trading. Nacchio contended that he was just selling stock and that the government had pulled the contract to entrap and prosecute him in the current case.

Read the indictment. Nacchio was convicted along with several other executives of running a pump and dump scam.

Despite being specifically prohibited from trading based on insider information, Nacchio first became aware that their earnings guidance was "a huge stretch", that to meet them would involve growing revenue from a line of business that had been failing to grow revenue and that had actually been underperforming that year, that they had (apparently) lost important contracts, and that it had become essentially impossible for them to hit their numbers. Then, after learning all that, but before any of it was disclosed to investors, Nacchio dumped over $100MM worth of his stock.

Nacchio controlled the earnings targets for Qwest. He set them dishonestly high and allowed them to be released to the public over the objections of many of his own executives. The stock performed as a result. Then, when it became obvious that the public would soon learn that those projections were impossible to meet, he sold his stock for $100MM.

Nacchio went down within a year of Enron and just a few years after Worldcom. It was the end of an era in which the big accounting firms had conspired with large corporations to swindle the public out of billions of dollars. Nacchio was a crook, not a Fourth Amendment hero.

Are the executives at JPMC crooks? I don't know. If they are, which is not outside the realm of possibility, they should go down too. But what JPMC people do has nothing at all to do with the fact that Qwest's executives defrauded the public to the tune of over $100MM.

So now his character is even bigger enigma. If the guy was a crook and fine with ripping stockholders out of 100MM tune, then how come he didnt want to play along with NSA? If he was greedy then he should have gone along with NSA offer. What could be his motive to say no to NSA? Wouldn't he know, at the time, saying no to the Gov may result in his contracts being shut off??

> Are the executives at JPMC crooks?

Yes. (Edited for reasons)

Too bad he didn't work for a Chase.

> Let's be careful about who we're valorizing

So perhaps this guy is indeed a slimeball.

Fabricated up claims are by their nature nearly indistinguishable from real ones, and outright fabrication isn't the only unethical recourse: there is always panopticon powered selective prosecution— how many felonies have you committed this month?

Regardless, we can observe now that the result will be time in prison and tptacek on HN diligently countering any claim of governmental misconduct. The insight here isn't related to Nacchio's character, it's that claiming that the government is retaliating for failing to comply with their unlawful demands doesn't provide protection.

Think of it from the executives perspective:

Option A: keep mouth shut, make a shit ton of money

Option B: become a martyr, face prison time

People like Snowden are rare.

And what if it were very common to take jobs just to hack the internal network, scour it for sensitive-looking data, and dump it all publicly for the sake of fame? I am pretty sure most "executives" would not be happy with that norm

My guess is that most people educated enough and promoted enough to get access to such information wouldn't risk years of efforts for potential fame. I'd say most of the whistle-blowers want to remain anonymous.

Those aren't the only options. Anyone with any smarts can figure out how to quietly and anonymously leak a lot of these details. The fact is that they were too cowardly to do even that though.

As somebody who has been in IT for almost two decades, I can't think of a safe way to get a file off our corporate LAN without leaving a trail leading to me.

I realize it's an argument from ignorance fallacy, and maybe there are such ways, but I'm not aware of them.

Curiously someone claiming to have a safe way is also arguing from ignorance: "maybe there are ways to detect this, but I am not aware of them".

With sufficient level of access, it should be possible to erase trails and to create false ones.

These aren't the details that need to be 'leaked' anonymously - the whole point for the original suggestion to work as intended requires a public claim from aranking officer of that company; the actual info isn't important but the public testimony is.

If they do it anonymously nobody will believe the docs and say they are just elaborate hoaxes by tinfoil hatters...

>>People like Snowden are rare.

In all honesty, Snowden is a 30 year old single dude, and as far as I know, he doesn't have kids. Do you think he would have done what he did if he had a family to look after?

In my opinion a person's first responsibility is to their family. So yeah, if you're married (like these executives probably are) and you're facing the choice between option A and option B, you should absolutely pick option A.

Snowden had a girlfriend, AFAIK.

A high salary, a hot girlfriend, nice house in Hawaii.

Good relationship with parents.

I'd say that is a lot to give up, in order to take the risk of being a whistleblower.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

What are you saying? That because Snowden didn't have an extension to his own bloodline that it was easy for himself to come forward and blow the whistle?

I can't vouch for whether or not that is what he was saying, but if so, it's pretty likely to be true. People with families, right or wrong, tend to place the security of their family's future above their own political beliefs.

Snowden's actions were brave, regardless of his family status, and I don't wish to downplay that even one iota, but yes, if he had a wife and three kids, it likely would have made his actions even more of a longshot.

So the nuclear family combined with a distributed economy is basically a convenient tool for justifying atrocities of all kinds. Just feeding the kids, right?

Maybe not having kids is actually the morally correct choice, then?

Don't be a fool. You would let your children go hungry and live a worse life (directly because of your actions) out of principle? It's not simple. Having a family can be a beautiful thing. Not having one and spilling the beans on something morally reprehensible can be too.

>Don't be a fool.

Classy.

>You would let your children go hungry and live a worse life

No. Read what I wrote. The words are right there.

If the choice is "have children and commit evil to feed them" and "don't have children and don't commit evil", I choose the former. As should, I think, any right-thinking person.

The question is probabilistic. What are the chances that the former happens? What are the chances that the latter happens?

Choose accordingly.

The question is also systemic. There exists the possibility that forces larger than the individual have decided to normalize the nuclear family (and also romanticize the vision of having said family) in order to serve evil ends. What is the probability that that is the case? As time goes on, it looks far more probable than we once thought. People like you think families are in themselves beautiful. Any means justify the ends of preserving them. Seems like an excellent tool for keeping a population right where you want them.

Look up the history of the nuclear family. Notice it didn't exist pre-industrialization. Why's that?

You're taking humans -> have children for granted. I'm arguing against that dogma. Because as paradoxical as it may sound, it is trite dogma at this point in wealthy societies. We don't need these additional people, we don't need this extravagant life. It's not a matter of survival anymore. So what is it all accomplishing? What's the end?

>Having a family can be a beautiful thing.

For my morality, concerns of beauty don't trump concerns of humanity. If my having children perpetuates a cycle of exploitation, murder, pain, suffering, etc. etc. etc, then I don't have children. Regardless of how "beautiful" my experience of those children may be. It really is that simple.

And if a (wo)man tells me "I just did it to feed my kids" after committing some reprehensible act, I sympathize, because (s)he made a terrible decision in having children to start with. But I still condemn him/her.

That's a good point actually. Maybe we need more ethical loners without emotional attachments in a positions of power.

Like a celibate priesthood?

I here note that one can be sexually active without reproducing. No children doesn't imply celibacy.

Certainly the case. Historically, less the case but still the case...

Tim Cook could have easily mentioned something then, if the profiles I've read of him are true.

Maybe, we, as a community, could lessen that dilemma by helping the families of martyrs.

Also, to reward the hiring of whistle-blowers. A company that hires people with a history of raising the alarm should be more trustworthy.

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