You mean Goldman calling up a friend at the FBI doesn't count as probable cause??
It also reminds me of the AT&T case where someone accessed records on public URLs and instead of AT&T getting a black eye for being so incompetent the dude went to jail. When will a corporation metaphorically go to jail? They steal, they lie, they cheat, they launder money, but yet they're always "too big to prosecute."
For those not in the know, that someone was weev [1].
http://www.sjgames.com/SS/topten.html
(Not quite public URLs as the WWW was quite new at the time, but public information all the same.)
I'd like to see how corporate behavior changes if "jail" was a real possibility. For a crime that an individual would get two years in prison, shut down the company for two years. They can try to pick up the pieces after that period, just like the individual.
Nazi guards tried that defense. Didn't work for them either.
(Some of them were relatives of mine.)
I searched but didn't find anything about BoA home invasion. Link to story?
While malicious intent may be absent, to the victims that does not matter one iota.
Except if you have some information that I don't outside of the scope of my comment above.
Especially when the case relates to intellectual property, they have no special position in the society, and the crime may not be a crime but a civil case.
Of course it doesn't. That's the job of the FBI and legal system to determine.
How so? Anybody can contact the FBI.
And when that "someone" happens to be a massive, multi-billion dollar bank reporting a "crime", then I sure hope that they have the FBI's ears.
Action taken: none.
Your unverifiable anecdote doesn't hold much weight, I'm afraid. But do you really believe random-guy calling the FBI should warrant as much attention as multi-national financial institution reporting a potential crime?
People are complaining as if GS putting the FBI on people is rampant. As far as I'm aware it has happened this once (though I'm open to other tales) and an over-zealous investigator tried to make a name for himself and messed it up royally.
I agree, what they did to this poor fellow is disgraceful, but let's not pretend that the justice system doesn't have a habit of railroading people when they desire a suspect. That's the real tragedy.
Well, yeah, if corporations are people with equal rights, that means that the law should treat them equally to other people.
Or would you put just as much faith in Joe Programmer as you would in Steve Woz?
But in an account of a burglary - yes I would.
It seems you've accepted that justice favors those with high status over those with low status.
Perhaps you don't find that troubling. I do.
On the other hand if young female student is raped, her newborn daughter brutally murdered and house burned to the ground, I expect half the police to be on high alert and FBI to get involved.
GS report of theft of software that produces billions in profits falls somewhere between these two extremes. Police/FBI does not have resources to investigate all crimes equally so they have to prioritize. The same way as browse remote-execution exploit is fixed way faster than small UI glitch.
The question wasn't "should a person reporting a potentially wide-ranging crime doing lots of damage and impacting potentially large number of victims be treated differently than a person reporting a crime with lesser impacts".
There is a difference between asking if the magnitude of the crime reported should result in a different response and what actually was asked, which was whether who is reporting the crime should result in a different response.
Except that I could provide a complete paper trail of where the money went (to a local scam artist) -- that's how the financial system works.
It would be analogous to providing and end-to-end video of a car being stolen to a previously unknown chop shop.
What the police actually did would be analogous to ignoring that video but then arresting a car thief on a GS executive's say-so.