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Ex-Goldman Programmer Is Arrested Again
- Cieplak 14y agoWhat is the prosecution's justification for this not being double-jeopardy?
- chollida1 14y agoDifferent jurisdictions, Federal and state. It still seems pretty vindictive.
- gte910h 14y agoI really hate that this is allowed.
- runako 14y agoA person allegedly breaks several different laws in different jurisdictions; is prosecuted for each alleged violation in each jurisdiction. What's wrong with that? A more extreme counterexample would be that a case where a person broke into an office and stole a USB stick, kidnapping an employee and shooting a guard on the way out. There's IP theft (federal), kidnapping (federal), and homicide (local). Which should that person not be prosecuted for? How do you choose?
- arjunnarayan 14y agoThere should be some kind of "reverse class-action" clause that enables a defendant to bring in every potential plaintiff into the suit: i.e. if I'm being prosecuted for stealing code by a federal prosecutor, I should be able to bind New York State to the same trial so that all the verdicts are delivered at the same time.
- Dylan16807 14y agoThe problem is that it's two trials for one action. Your scenario is four actions. Breaking in, theft, kidnapping, shooting.
- runako 14y agoThis is splitting hairs. If a person steals cash and jewels, is that two actions? In any case, I'm not an attorney and this appears to be settled law and not really up for debate.
- sgift 14y agoIf "not really up for debate" follows from "settled law" - how do you change settled law (e.g. if it is a dumb law)?
- runako 14y agoYou convince a judge, not some guys in an online forum. That's what I meant by "not up for debate" : "not up for debate in this forum, by laypeople".
- Dylan16807 14y agoFeel free to divide the actions arbitrarily if you really want to. Charge then with half the jewels federal, half the jewels state. It's when the charges overlap that I feel justice isn't best served. Also you'd need to try to mitigate nonlinearity in punishment somehow. At the very least figure out a way to punish any details like "armed robbery" only once.
- runako 14y agoWe can try to reinvent longstanding law here on HN, or we can look for a library on CPAN (or in a law library?) that already implements it. These questions have come up many times before, with many sets of specifics. This is what many smart people came up with, which has stood the test of time. Trying to unravel longstanding law is kind of like poking at a piece of code that's been running for 20 years and deciding you can do better. Then realizing that the only way to make it better is to rewrite it from scratch, because there are reasons for all of the funkiness in the code. And rewriting fails spectacularly in code much of the time (see TextMate 2, for instance). Imagine how much success non-programmers would have at rewriting a complex system from scratch. That's roughly how much success I'd expect HN users to achieve at rewriting longstanding law. I'm just saying, the outcomes may seem capricious, but picking at one string isn't going to improve things. If you think otherwise, you may have a bright career in the legislature.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- chollida1 14y agoTo me the biggest problem for an individual is that they incur the cost of defending themselves twice. For state and federal governments the cost of 2 trials is inconsequential. For an individual the cost of two trials can easily push them into bankruptcy. Now if the individual is guilty you might not have that much sympathy for them, but consider that innocent people have to defend them selves in court as well.
- runako 14y agoI agree with the general issue of the cost of defending oneself. But today, in New York alone, hundreds of poor people will be arrested and charged with crimes they may not be guilty of. Many will have been singled out because of their appearance. They will not have access to attorneys (except the public defender flunkies), and most will serve jail time. I have a lot more concern and sympathy for the breakage of the system for these guys than for the multimillionaire banker who was charged essentially only because he got caught.
- sp332 14y agoThat was a federal case. According to the appeal, the federal law was misapplied. Now he's on trial for breaking state laws.
- njloof 14y agoThe article explains the issues clearly.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bearmf 14y agoHe was originally charged by US Attorney and found guilty by a federal jury, then released by federal appeals court. The new case has been filed by Manhattan District Attorney in NY state court. Apparently double-jeopardy does not apply in this case.
- rdtsc 14y agoSo in theory someone could be taken to court 3 times for same offense: federal, state and local?
- signalsignal 14y agoI think the theory goes that it isn't double jeopardy if the municipal, state, and federal don't work "in concert". I only just read the article, so I can't explain what "scientific espionage" even is.
- T_S_ 14y agoMax 2. Local courts are "state" offices.
- bearmf 14y agoFrom Wikipedia on Double Jeopardy: The exception to this exception exists between city and state sovereignties located within the same state. Although cities are different sovereignties than the state they are located within, the two are not permitted to attach jeopardy more than once cumulatively.
- abecedarius 14y agoDon't forget the civil option!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- staunch 14y agoIf you ever wondered, this is what it looks like when a corporation has politicians in their pocket. Goldman Sachs is the extreme example of capitalism gone wrong. So powerful they can't lose money and so powerful they can treat legislators and law enforcement like the employees they are.
- bearmf 14y agoThis looks more like US/NY attorneys' initiative. It is a case that has gotten a lot of coverage and they do not want it to end with their defeat.
- Elessar 14y agoIt already ended in defeat. Now they're dragging it back up, gaining headlines that make people ask "why doesn't double jeopardy apply", all for what? There might be no evidence of corruption, but this stinks.
- pyre 14y agoThis is a case where someone has done something wrong, but the aggressiveness of the response is proportional to the size of the victim's wallet. Also, the NY State Attorney General's Office probably smells blood in the water, with a ton of the work (discovery, etc) done for them by the Federal prosecutors. It's probably viewed as low-hanging fruit in racking up convictions.
- fleitz 14y agoYup, but a good question is going to surround why they didn't bring these charges earlier. The more work by the USDOJ they use the more they will be accused of 'acting in concert' and the more likely the issue becomes one of double jeopardy. This isn't about the application of law, this is about the application of political will.
- Zikes 14y agoWouldn't the use of the Federal government's work in this case constitute enough of a linkage to qualify their double jeopardy defense?
- barking 14y agoIf this guy hadn't successfully appealed the federal charges, could the state have waited until he'd finished that sentence before prosecuting? If yes, it's like you can get punished twice for the same crime in America.
- runako 14y agoExcept that they are different laws and therefore different crimes. Let's use something more obvious: a bank robber who fatally shoots a guard on the way out. That's one event but several crimes. This person can absolutely be tried and sentenced for any/all of the crimes committed in that event, separately, in separate courts (federal and state). While I think the prosecutions are typically sequential, they wouldn't be combined (different jurisdictions). Similar logic applies to a criminal who commits crimes across several states.
- sjtgraham 14y agoCan't help but think they won't stop until they get their man, by hook or by crook.
- cletus 14y agoAt first I was thinkign "double jeopardy" but the article explains why that isn't the case. Basically the federal law was misapplied so the state of New York can bring their own charges (actually, they could probably do this anyway). This does seem wrong to me because he's essentially being charged for much the same crime on the same set of facts. It seems like when the dual-sovereignty Federal-State system was created the idea was that that the Federal and State governments would be responsible for different things such that you would be violating either Federal or State law (or possibly both but for different offences). This seems like prosecutorial abuse. That all being said, if you consider the facts int his case: the code in question was highly sensitive and as much as the article calls the action of sending it to a server in Germany (IIRC) a "mistake", it seems fairly clear to me that it was or was intended to be theft. Just don't take code from a former employer. Ever. This is a good rule of thumb for every engineer to follow,. Even if what you're doing isn't (likely to be) criminal conduct, you can then run afoul of copyright claims and so forth if you ever implement something similar.
- smashing 14y agoThe employer owns the copyrights, patents, etc. Just like a journalist can take articles or emails from a former employer, neither can scientists take materials from a work-for-hire position.
- jrockway 14y agoJust don't take code from a former employer. Ever. Or get your company's lawyercats to give you the OK.
- mcantelon 14y ago>This seems like prosecutorial abuse. Goldman gives a lot of money to political campaigns (#1 donor to Obama[1], #2 to Romney[2] in last election). NY mayor Michael Bloomberg seems to fawn over Goldman[3], offering $1.65B in tax breaks for them to set up an office at Ground Zero[4]. My guess is Goldman's gold, regardless of the means in which they've acquired it, is a significant factor to Manhattnan DA's sudden interest in prosecuting white collar crime. [1] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cid=N00009638 http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cid=N00009638 [2] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/contrib.php?id=N00000286 http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/contrib.php?id=N00000286 [3] http://www.salon.com/2012/03/16/mayor_bloomberg_personally_cheers_up_goldman_sachs/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/16/mayor_bloomberg_personally_c... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg#Economic_issues http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg#Economic_issu...
- leoh 14y agoDoesn't anyone believe in the concept of grace any more? Aleynikov made a mistake. Can't we move on? Goldman is subverting true justice. And if the code is so powerful, why should Goldman be able to continue using it in the first place?
- emiliobumachar 14y agoCrime and punishment discussions aside, are you serious about forbidding them to use their code? How would that work out? Who would get to decide? What if someone deploys a too powerful team of humans to do the same thing?
- joahua 14y agoXmen?
- vexxt 14y agoGoldman Sachs is above the law.
- pessimizer 14y agoSergey made their "secret sauce." If he had been more aware of who the laws were made for, and how they've had them written, he'd have never made such a stupid mistake in taking the actual code. It's not like he couldn't have completely recreated that sauce, from scratch with improvements, within a month or two. Sergey was the secret sauce. Erlang + OCaml might be a match made in heaven. It's just too bad that he works in a profession where the exact way you've gone about something is owned by your employer. If some fund manager brought his trading strategies to another firm, even if he came up with them at the previous firm, he wouldn't be spending a year in prison. Of course, this is just what I think - I'm not allowed to see the code in question, so all I can do is guess.
- Irishsteve 14y agoJust going off memory here, but I believe he was found to have been ftp'ing code or snipplets of code to a server he had in Germany.
- pessimizer 14y agoHis code, to a pastebin-type site.
- DigitalSea 14y agoAll pledge allegiance to The United States of Goldman Sachs. The power this company has to do whatever it wants is absolutely atrocious. This is nothing more than a company trying to hide the fact a low-level employee gained access to highly valuable source code that is regarded as the secret-sauce of Goldman Sachs which should never have happened in the first place. I've worked for small companies that have better security than that.