6 ms·

It's funny... if an engineer fucks something up, s/he can be personally responsible for the fuckup.... doctors need personal malpractice insurance for their fuc

It's funny... if an engineer fucks something up, s/he can be personally responsible for the fuckup.... doctors need personal malpractice insurance for their fuckups... professional drivers can easily go to jail if they fuck up... ...but if a government worker, paid by the taxpayers, fucks up... the worst that can happen is, the taxpayers have to pay for eventual lawsuit cost and damages to the people who got fucked by that worker. For something like this, atleast a few people should end up in jail for a long time.

system2 4y ago
System is rigger for them. That will not happen in 1000 years.
heyflyguy 4y ago
I agree and though much of the outrage has some political ties to it, I think and assume you agree that this is a pervasive problem for everyone not within the ranks of a federal agency of some kind.
reset-password 4y ago
Right. This is nuts that this is happening in America. Lynne Zellhart is disgusting and people like her should be imprisoned.
elcritch 4y ago
At the least the senior FBI and US Attorney’s should be liable to be held in contempt of court. Yes they might need some protection in carrying out their lawful duty but lying and misleading the judiciary isn’t lawfully carrying out those duties.
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
>if an engineer fucks something up, s/he can be personally responsible for the fuckup Except software engineers :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- melony 4y ago
  Most SaaSes have much more lower stakes. Biomedical/automotive/aerospace are already covered by existing regulations.
nine_zeros 4y ago
It happens not just in judiciary or criminal cases, but also in DMV, state permits, immigration etc. Even a typographical error or minor delays by the government official has asymmetric consequences for the human but no consequence to the officer. You can be perfect and do everything correctly but still fall off a cliff because some government officer made a typographical error.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
I think what you might be suggesting is to remove prosecutorial immunity. There are so many cases of wrongdoing by prosecutors and judges, and there’s really very little that can be done to punish them.
jmyeet 4y ago
It's worth noting that this case wasn't a screw up. It was a deliberate act of deception. You may well understand this but "fuck up" is an ambiguous term that might allow for negligence or an error rather than actual malfeasance, which was the case here.
koheripbal 4y ago
This is not a correct comparison. Firstly, if an employee of a company fucks up at work, the company is responsible, not the employee. In certain regulated fields, if a licensed individual fucks up, even when employed, their licence can be impacted and they can be fined (this is common in the financial industry). If a prosecutor intentionally misleads a judge, there is a misconduct process that can impact their license and career. When the article says "fbi", they mean an attorney acting on behalf of the FBI, and that person can be held accountable if the judge decides to.
- barelysapient 4y ago
  Not entirely true. It depends on the role the employee. Employee who are officers or directors of the company, or lawyers for the company, can absolutely be held personally responsible. That's why it's common for employee's in those position to be covered by E&O insurance.
  - dcow 4y ago
    How do I jump to this timeline?
    - koheripbal 4y ago
      This happens all the time. It's just not reported on social media. If you own shares in companies directly, you often receive updates on lawsuits against C-level execs.
    - barelysapient 4y ago
      I tried to find some statistics on this hit came up empty. Here’s a recent example. https://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/news/2022/09/09/lawsuit-accuses-kohls-executives-directors.html https://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/news/2022/09/09/lawsui...
- lurquer 4y ago
  > Firstly, if an employee of a company fucks up at work, the company is responsible, not the employee. That’s utterly wrong. The employee is always a potential defendant. Legal doctrines such as respondeat superior and principal/agent and the like extend the liability to the employer. Nobody bothers to sue the employee as they’re generally broke. The goal is to sue the employer. But, there is no ‘immunity’ that arises from being an employee.
plantain 4y ago
Risk isn't free, if you want government workers to bear the risk of jail for their mistakes, you'll have to pay them like engineers or doctors.
- okwubodu 4y ago
  Most people, regardless of salary, already bear the risk of jail for intentionally committing fraud and rights violations. Government employees are the only ones consistently exempt from this.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- FpUser 4y ago
  What FBI did was not a mistake and people of the level that had made those criminal decisions are definitely paid enough.
- greedo 4y ago
  My neighbor is a sergeant in a small city's police force. Roughly 300K folks in our burg. He pulls in an average of $140K/year due mostly to overtime. Cry me a river about our poor overworked police who face deathly threats on a daily basis.
pibechorro 4y ago
This is how gov works. Its why we need as little as possible. Its very difficult to hold them accountable when their funding is essentially guaranteed regardless of performance.
- egberts1 4y ago
  I concur
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Once you learn that sovereign immunity exists, it makes you think differently about the role of government.
- mcphage 4y ago
  Wait until you learn how hard it is to hold corporations accountable, let alone specific individuals at those corporations.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- IntelMiner 4y ago
  What do you propose as an alternative? History both old and new shows how irresponsible corporations across the planet have been
  - redeeman 4y ago
    very true, but corporations tend to not come to your house armed with guns if you dont pay protection money. sure, there have been such, but nobody ever considered them legitimate like people do with "governments"
    - dylan604 4y ago
      Have you ever heard of the Pinkertons? There are other corporations in history that had a "security" force of some sort that absolutely was used as a means of intimidation
minhazm 4y ago
I've always felt that people working in law enforcement related fields should be required to carry their own liability insurance. Just like if you're in an at-fault accident your rates go up, the same should happen for law enforcement. If you're a repeat offender the rates go up sufficiently that it will no longer make financial sense for you to remain in the job.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  That kind of insurance is there to cover accidents. A doctor's malpractice insurance would be irrelevant if the doctor had been taking cash from people's wallets - that's not malpractice, it's just theft. Similarly, if you lie to trick a judge into letting you "legally" take money, that's fraud, theft, and armed robbery - not any kind of malpractice. This article says that the FBI agents and US Attorney incorrectly accused a safe deposit company of being a criminal enterprise (case was later dropped, nobody convicted, no real evidence). The FBI then lied to a judge, disregarded their warrant they obtained under false pretenses, and stole money and valuable from hundreds of people, almost all of whom were entirely related to the crimes the FBI was ostensibly investigating. The problem here is not a lack of insurance, it's that the FBI is brazenly acting like a criminal gang and none of the people who perpetrated the crimes will face consequences.
  - abeyer 4y ago
    > incorrectly accused a safe deposit company of being a criminal enterprise (case was later dropped, nobody convicted, no real evidence). That's not quite correct, I think: the company itself plead guilty to the money laundering part and was fined... but it was also unable to pay the fine, and the government chose not to go after the owners/officers personally. So the individual charges were dropped, but not against the company. That seems like even more of an indication that this was primarily/just a fundraising via forfeiture expedition. Civil forfeiture laws need to be changed to require a criminal conviction first, and to impose mandatory multipliers of damages on the government when a forfeiture is found improper, or there is no motivation for law enforcement to stop padding their own budgets this way.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
PhineasRex 4y ago
Congress did pass a law decades ago allowing federal prosecutors to face civil suits for cases like this but the Supreme Court subsequently just said nah, prosecutors are exempt from the law while performing their job.

system2 4y ago

System is rigger for them. That will not happen in 1000 years.

heyflyguy 4y ago

I agree and though much of the outrage has some political ties to it, I think and assume you agree that this is a pervasive problem for everyone not within the ranks of a federal agency of some kind.

reset-password 4y ago

Right. This is nuts that this is happening in America. Lynne Zellhart is disgusting and people like her should be imprisoned.

elcritch 4y ago

At the least the senior FBI and US Attorney’s should be liable to be held in contempt of court. Yes they might need some protection in carrying out their lawful duty but lying and misleading the judiciary isn’t lawfully carrying out those duties.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

>if an engineer fucks something up, s/he can be personally responsible for the fuckup Except software engineers :)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
melony 4y ago
Most SaaSes have much more lower stakes. Biomedical/automotive/aerospace are already covered by existing regulations.

nine_zeros 4y ago

It happens not just in judiciary or criminal cases, but also in DMV, state permits, immigration etc. Even a typographical error or minor delays by the government official has asymmetric consequences for the human but no consequence to the officer. You can be perfect and do everything correctly but still fall off a cliff because some government officer made a typographical error.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

I think what you might be suggesting is to remove prosecutorial immunity. There are so many cases of wrongdoing by prosecutors and judges, and there’s really very little that can be done to punish them.

jmyeet 4y ago

It's worth noting that this case wasn't a screw up. It was a deliberate act of deception. You may well understand this but "fuck up" is an ambiguous term that might allow for negligence or an error rather than actual malfeasance, which was the case here.

koheripbal 4y ago

This is not a correct comparison. Firstly, if an employee of a company fucks up at work, the company is responsible, not the employee. In certain regulated fields, if a licensed individual fucks up, even when employed, their licence can be impacted and they can be fined (this is common in the financial industry). If a prosecutor intentionally misleads a judge, there is a misconduct process that can impact their license and career. When the article says "fbi", they mean an attorney acting on behalf of the FBI, and that person can be held accountable if the judge decides to.

barelysapient 4y ago
Not entirely true. It depends on the role the employee. Employee who are officers or directors of the company, or lawyers for the company, can absolutely be held personally responsible. That's why it's common for employee's in those position to be covered by E&O insurance.
- dcow 4y ago
  How do I jump to this timeline?
  - koheripbal 4y ago
    This happens all the time. It's just not reported on social media. If you own shares in companies directly, you often receive updates on lawsuits against C-level execs.
  - barelysapient 4y ago
    I tried to find some statistics on this hit came up empty. Here’s a recent example. https://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/news/2022/09/09/lawsuit-accuses-kohls-executives-directors.html https://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/news/2022/09/09/lawsui...
lurquer 4y ago
> Firstly, if an employee of a company fucks up at work, the company is responsible, not the employee. That’s utterly wrong. The employee is always a potential defendant. Legal doctrines such as respondeat superior and principal/agent and the like extend the liability to the employer. Nobody bothers to sue the employee as they’re generally broke. The goal is to sue the employer. But, there is no ‘immunity’ that arises from being an employee.

plantain 4y ago

Risk isn't free, if you want government workers to bear the risk of jail for their mistakes, you'll have to pay them like engineers or doctors.

okwubodu 4y ago
Most people, regardless of salary, already bear the risk of jail for intentionally committing fraud and rights violations. Government employees are the only ones consistently exempt from this.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
FpUser 4y ago
What FBI did was not a mistake and people of the level that had made those criminal decisions are definitely paid enough.
greedo 4y ago
My neighbor is a sergeant in a small city's police force. Roughly 300K folks in our burg. He pulls in an average of $140K/year due mostly to overtime. Cry me a river about our poor overworked police who face deathly threats on a daily basis.

pibechorro 4y ago

This is how gov works. Its why we need as little as possible. Its very difficult to hold them accountable when their funding is essentially guaranteed regardless of performance.

egberts1 4y ago
I concur
dehrmann 4y ago
Once you learn that sovereign immunity exists, it makes you think differently about the role of government.
mcphage 4y ago
Wait until you learn how hard it is to hold corporations accountable, let alone specific individuals at those corporations.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
IntelMiner 4y ago
What do you propose as an alternative? History both old and new shows how irresponsible corporations across the planet have been
- redeeman 4y ago
  very true, but corporations tend to not come to your house armed with guns if you dont pay protection money. sure, there have been such, but nobody ever considered them legitimate like people do with "governments"
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Have you ever heard of the Pinkertons? There are other corporations in history that had a "security" force of some sort that absolutely was used as a means of intimidation

minhazm 4y ago

I've always felt that people working in law enforcement related fields should be required to carry their own liability insurance. Just like if you're in an at-fault accident your rates go up, the same should happen for law enforcement. If you're a repeat offender the rates go up sufficiently that it will no longer make financial sense for you to remain in the job.

ALittleLight 4y ago
That kind of insurance is there to cover accidents. A doctor's malpractice insurance would be irrelevant if the doctor had been taking cash from people's wallets - that's not malpractice, it's just theft. Similarly, if you lie to trick a judge into letting you "legally" take money, that's fraud, theft, and armed robbery - not any kind of malpractice. This article says that the FBI agents and US Attorney incorrectly accused a safe deposit company of being a criminal enterprise (case was later dropped, nobody convicted, no real evidence). The FBI then lied to a judge, disregarded their warrant they obtained under false pretenses, and stole money and valuable from hundreds of people, almost all of whom were entirely related to the crimes the FBI was ostensibly investigating. The problem here is not a lack of insurance, it's that the FBI is brazenly acting like a criminal gang and none of the people who perpetrated the crimes will face consequences.
- abeyer 4y ago
  > incorrectly accused a safe deposit company of being a criminal enterprise (case was later dropped, nobody convicted, no real evidence). That's not quite correct, I think: the company itself plead guilty to the money laundering part and was fined... but it was also unable to pay the fine, and the government chose not to go after the owners/officers personally. So the individual charges were dropped, but not against the company. That seems like even more of an indication that this was primarily/just a fundraising via forfeiture expedition. Civil forfeiture laws need to be changed to require a criminal conviction first, and to impose mandatory multipliers of damages on the government when a forfeiture is found improper, or there is no motivation for law enforcement to stop padding their own budgets this way.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

PhineasRex 4y ago

Congress did pass a law decades ago allowing federal prosecutors to face civil suits for cases like this but the Supreme Court subsequently just said nah, prosecutors are exempt from the law while performing their job.