I doubt I could convince rayiner of anything, but I'll at least refute some of the more ridiculous things he says.
>Your arguments for why the FBI agents acted improperly amount to "yeah, but it turns out that ...."
No, I've responded to rayiner's suppositions that because some activity might be sketchy, it must be.
[rayiner says](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9047068) encrypting and exporting files to a repository in a foreign land is sketchy.
I say, ssh, gzip, and svn are pretty normal tools that programmers use frequently. So are hosted servers in foreign countries.
rayiner says that deleting .bash_history is sketchy, I say it's a reasonable, nay a responsible thing to do if failing to do so would leave sensitive information (such as a password) available for others to peruse.
>This arguments are not a good reason to not arrest someone. They're a good reason to find someone innocent after trying them.
IMO if the government is going to arrest a person, attempt to hold them without bond, settle for mere $700,000 bond, (arguably depriving the person of counsel); then the government's burden of "probable cause" ought to be a bit more substantial than "some bros down at Goldman Sachs said...", and this guy uses "subversion" software. We can't have the police running around arresting everyone who might have possibly committed a crime. There needs to be actual, you know, probable cause.
>Sometimes circumstances are such that an innocent person looks highly suspicious to reasonable people with a reasonable amount of evidence. In those cases, it's reasonable, though unfortunate, that law enforcement arrest and charge that innocent person. Isn't it?
What do you make of the fact that:
>>"In the New York state case, a judge ruled the 2009 arrest was illegal. He threw out seized physical evidence, including computer hardware carrying the source code."
and
>>"New York State Supreme Court Justice Ronald Zweibel also barred prosecutors from using statements Aleynikov made to the FBI after his arrest at Newark Liberty International Airport."
Are these judges unreasonable? Sure, mistakes happen, everyone deserves a Mulligan once in a while. That's not what we have here though. The FBI had plenty of opportunities to check their work, which was shabby. Instead of doing that, they forged ahead doing the bidding of Goldman Sachs, uncritically. And, now that the federal case has failed, GS has their hand up the back of a Manhattan DA. We can quibble about these little details more if you want but this whole affair has got a stench about it.
>As far as I can tell, rayiner is right.... we have no evidence that Aleynikov was arrested improperly.
No evidence? What's Zweibel's problem then?:
>In a 71-page opinion, Justice Ronald A. Zweibel of State Supreme Court in Manhattan ruled that the F.B.I. “did not have probable cause to arrest defendant, let alone search him or his home.” The arrest was “illegal,” Justice Zweibel wrote, and Mr. Aleynikov’s “Fourth Amendment rights were violated as a result of a mistake of law.”