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People like Nacchio are exploiting the good work real privacy advocates do, for their own personal enrichment. Or it's possible for people to be dual-natured:

People like Nacchio are exploiting the good work real privacy advocates do, for their own personal enrichment. Or it's possible for people to be dual-natured: capable both of flagrant chicanery and abuse, as well as acts of conviction and principled defiance.

tptacek 10y ago
The entangling of the FISA order and the insider trading scandal actually makes things worse. His most significant trades came just months after he refused the FISA order --- after which he claims NSA arranged to have DoD contracts with Qwest terminated. He did something with an obvious material impact on his shareholders, and secretly profited from it. The reality, though, is that his tenure at Qwest appears broadly similar to the kinds of bullshit that was rife in corporate America at the time: accounting scandals, entirely unrelated to Qwest's government contracts, that boosted apparent growth and drove share prices higher than the fundamentals of the business could possibly justify. Google, for instance, [qwest kmc telecom].
- hackuser 10y ago
  If you know, what was his defense against the fraud case? It could have been retribution (yes, that's completely speculative).
  - tptacek 10y ago
    His claims included: * That he was simply very optimistic about the business he was running that that he believed there would be an uptick in the stock long term after the company weathered the downturn he knew to be coming. * That he was "set up" by NSA: yes, he sold at a high price anticipating a sector-wide downturn, but he did so because he'd been assured that Qwest would be part of a multi-billion NSA modernization program called "Groundbreaker", led by CSC, which contract would surely rescue Qwest's stock and even out his sale. * That his board had demanded that he sell his stock, and that such sales were routine at Qwest. * That he was distraught over the suicide of his son and sold the stock as part of an effort to immediately disentangle himself from the CEO position which he hoped to leave. Against that, you have the black-and-white record of his trades and the testimony of numerous high-level Qwest executives all saying they'd been urgently warning him to revise Qwest's targets downwards. He not only maintained the unrealistic targets, and participated in channel-stuffing-style schemes to fake up earnings numbers, but profited personally by trading against those bogus numbers.
jpfed 10y ago
Psychologists have measured this! The capacity to stop yourself from doing bad things is different from the tendency to do good things (someone, go make an improved D&D alignment system out of that...).

tptacek 10y ago

The entangling of the FISA order and the insider trading scandal actually makes things worse. His most significant trades came just months after he refused the FISA order --- after which he claims NSA arranged to have DoD contracts with Qwest terminated. He did something with an obvious material impact on his shareholders, and secretly profited from it. The reality, though, is that his tenure at Qwest appears broadly similar to the kinds of bullshit that was rife in corporate America at the time: accounting scandals, entirely unrelated to Qwest's government contracts, that boosted apparent growth and drove share prices higher than the fundamentals of the business could possibly justify. Google, for instance, [qwest kmc telecom].

hackuser 10y ago
If you know, what was his defense against the fraud case? It could have been retribution (yes, that's completely speculative).
- tptacek 10y ago
  His claims included: * That he was simply very optimistic about the business he was running that that he believed there would be an uptick in the stock long term after the company weathered the downturn he knew to be coming. * That he was "set up" by NSA: yes, he sold at a high price anticipating a sector-wide downturn, but he did so because he'd been assured that Qwest would be part of a multi-billion NSA modernization program called "Groundbreaker", led by CSC, which contract would surely rescue Qwest's stock and even out his sale. * That his board had demanded that he sell his stock, and that such sales were routine at Qwest. * That he was distraught over the suicide of his son and sold the stock as part of an effort to immediately disentangle himself from the CEO position which he hoped to leave. Against that, you have the black-and-white record of his trades and the testimony of numerous high-level Qwest executives all saying they'd been urgently warning him to revise Qwest's targets downwards. He not only maintained the unrealistic targets, and participated in channel-stuffing-style schemes to fake up earnings numbers, but profited personally by trading against those bogus numbers.

jpfed 10y ago

Psychologists have measured this! The capacity to stop yourself from doing bad things is different from the tendency to do good things (someone, go make an improved D&D alignment system out of that...).