That's inaccurate. I just read the Lewis article and there are plenty of facts recited there contradict your summary; none of those facts support it. He delete

That's inaccurate. I just read the Lewis article and there are plenty of facts recited there contradict your summary; none of those facts support it. He deleted his bash history, which many programmers do every day, indeed, that's what the justice department used as evidence that he "deleted the audit trail" Once you look at the details of this case--in fact, even just the details as recited in the public documents filed by the Justice Department--a completely different story emerges. A few facts just for context: the person arrested and later set free by a Federal Appeals Court, Sergei Alienikov, is an accomplished programmer with a long history of open source contribution, for instance, he is the author of the (original?) ZeroMQ Erlang bindings. (http://zeromq.github.io/erlzmq/ http://zeromq.github.io/erlzmq/) The code that Goldman claims that Alienikov "stole" was code that he had written while employed by them; indeed, according to Goldman SA was hired to build their HFT rig, which he did. According to the Justice Dept documents, he only took a small portion of the total codebase (~ 2%) and he took that on the last day, six weeks after he had resigned from Goldman. SA claimed that code comprised his revisions to an open source library he used to build Goldman's HFT system. Combined with the fact that he took that on his last day in the office (he had resigned six weeks before (at Goldman's request, he stayed an additional month) and was open about his plans to work for a competitor, (and which his employment agreement did not forbid). Clearly a smart guy, but a pretty dumb criminal, which pretty strongly suggests he's no criminal at all. If his plan was to steal this codebase (the one he had in fact spent the previous two years writing) he would have, to begin with, actually taken all of it, not just a small fraction, and second he would not wait until his last day. These circumstances were relevant in that case because SA was on trial for committing a felony, and to prove guilt requires proving some criminal state of mind ("intent to steal", the complaint calls it.) What's more, Goldman had absolutely no evidence that SA used any of this code or gave it to anyone. The government's complaint is astonishingly frank about that. My understanding is that trade secret theft requires some unlawful use to actually constitute an IP theft.