https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojS4zGDc4JI - QWest
http://www.wired.com/2010/08/nsl-gag-order-lifted/
Does QWEST CEO going to jail for refusing to cooperate ring any bells?
- He's an executive, not a hacker.
- It's easy to believe a CEO is guilty of insider trading, because all CEOs are guilty of insider trading. (Few people take the next step to wonder why insider trading is a crime at all.)
- He's actually in prison, which makes him less sympathetic.
- He's a Bellhead, which makes him less sympathetic to me. (I've worked at multiple descendants of Ma Bell, so my prejudice was earned.)
- The biggest thing, I think, is most of us imagine that if we just behave in socially-accepted ways, that's enough to keep us out of trouble. It's uncomfortable to consider the possibility that isn't true.
It's unlikely his prosecution even had anything to do with the NSA, as much as he likes to tell that story.
http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_25488178/past-qwest-go...
The "fraud" involved an overly optimistic assessment of Qwest's future. That might indeed legally be fraud but it's hardly blatant in the sense one might argue it's a fairly common occurrence and most instances of such behavior go to civil, not criminal court.
"In its case, the government stated that Nacchio continued to tell Wall Street that Qwest would be able to achieve aggressive revenue targets long after he knew that they could not be achieved. This helped it buy up regional phone rival US West, the government alleges."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio#Insider_trading....
The problem with your post is exactly why selective prosecution is the
very embodiment of an oppressive regime. After all they DID break the
law, and they SHOULD be punished right? Who could argue with that.
Meanwhile half of Washington is doing the same thing, with the full
knowledge of people like the NSA, and the facts are sure to come out if
they take a meaningful stand against their agenda.
The example of the soviet election is also an excellent one. They knew
every bit of information about every candidate, and merely had to expose
the ones that didn't toe the line properly as the criminals or terrible
people they were.
Just like every single other person ever, they did something illegal or
unsavory at some point in their life.
Make no aspersions, the kind of information the NSA holds is complete
and total political power.
You an absolutely be sure that at the bare minimum a large minority of CEOs of large company are in or have been in a similar situation. Laws on insider trading are very all encompassing and are broken on a regular basis by practices that are considered normal. It may have been fraud, and it may have been illegal, but that dosen't make it any less of a leveraging tool for people like the NSA.
And individuals run the risk of being arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and killed, depending on the issue and the area. If civil disobedience was risk-free, it wouldn't be necessary.
How much can you really discern about the situation from a few tweets without context?
That's why I think regular investigative journalism should still be the norm.
Sorting out the truth from this is itself a challenge. Economic historian Philip Mirowski has interesting comments on how neoliberals see deliberate distortions of the media as an arguably good thing (Mirowki, and I, disagree with this). Determining credibility (and advertising who is credible) remains a challenge, even with social / decentralized media.
Sadly, it would be easy for the story to fit the existing narrative of "evil corporations seeing themselves as above the law."
If these are not actual laws, but rather gray-area interpretations of laws being used, then each company can decide whether to challenge them and have their days in court.
But, if the government is clearly operating within the law, then it is the law/lawmaking itself that should be challenged.