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Excellent rebuttal and good links. But they are both for one-offs - single events or single rogue employees. One offs always happen. Systematic, Enron-style in

by beachy 5y ago

Excellent rebuttal and good links. But they are both for one-offs - single events or single rogue employees. One offs always happen. Systematic, Enron-style ingrained fraud is quite another. The idea that Apple is systematically reading people's emails - with all the multitude of supporting rogues employees, right down to SREs to keep things running that would need to be in on the act - is absurd, truly a ticket on the consipiracy theory train.

vba616 5y ago
>One offs always happen. Systematic, Enron-style ingrained fraud is quite another. The fines for wage fixing totaled over $400 million, and although I realize that was collective and not only Apple, how can you possibly say it's not systematic Enron-style ingrained fraud? It wasn't $400 million stolen from one employee! There were all those other companies involved too! As I see it, it's arguably not Enron-style only because the company didn't collapse as a consequence. But that makes it more like compromised emails, not less! The more remote serious punishment is for something, the more likely the thing is. Is it plausible that the worst possible breach of privacy would lead to Apple going under? I think not. I also think you're arbitrarily excluding the possibility of anything between an all-encompassing plan and a "rogue employee". Pretty much everything that happens falls in between! Many things that are hardly planned at all happen anyway! A thing that was in the news recently, that did not relate to Apple, was that thousands of PwC (Canada) employees were sharing answers to internal training. The auditors were cheating on the exams that were supposed to test auditing ethics and skills! Clearly everybody was not aware this was going on, but also clearly it was not an isolated rogue employee! Management apparently said "whoops, we'll add controls to prevent this" and got assessed a not-very-huge fine. Which seems to evade the question and problem of how they hired so many people with no ethics to watch over the proverbial henhouses of other companies! If you've worked for any large organization, you've seen how they declare they adhere to the dogma of finding the root cause of a failure and preventing it going forward. And yet, how often do you see people fix the exact thing that failed a test and blatantly ignore the wider implications? It seems kind of frightening that the PCAOB (I think) doesn't really seem to see an issue with a slap on the wrist and a promise to do better being the penalty.

by beachy 5y ago

vba616 5y ago

>One offs always happen. Systematic, Enron-style ingrained fraud is quite another. The fines for wage fixing totaled over $400 million, and although I realize that was collective and not only Apple, how can you possibly say it's not systematic Enron-style ingrained fraud? It wasn't $400 million stolen from one employee! There were all those other companies involved too! As I see it, it's arguably not Enron-style only because the company didn't collapse as a consequence. But that makes it more like compromised emails, not less! The more remote serious punishment is for something, the more likely the thing is. Is it plausible that the worst possible breach of privacy would lead to Apple going under? I think not. I also think you're arbitrarily excluding the possibility of anything between an all-encompassing plan and a "rogue employee". Pretty much everything that happens falls in between! Many things that are hardly planned at all happen anyway! A thing that was in the news recently, that did not relate to Apple, was that thousands of PwC (Canada) employees were sharing answers to internal training. The auditors were cheating on the exams that were supposed to test auditing ethics and skills! Clearly everybody was not aware this was going on, but also clearly it was not an isolated rogue employee! Management apparently said "whoops, we'll add controls to prevent this" and got assessed a not-very-huge fine. Which seems to evade the question and problem of how they hired so many people with no ethics to watch over the proverbial henhouses of other companies! If you've worked for any large organization, you've seen how they declare they adhere to the dogma of finding the root cause of a failure and preventing it going forward. And yet, how often do you see people fix the exact thing that failed a test and blatantly ignore the wider implications? It seems kind of frightening that the PCAOB (I think) doesn't really seem to see an issue with a slap on the wrist and a promise to do better being the penalty.