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This is nothing compared to what allegedly happened to QWest. When the US Government was forcing telecom by telecom to install taps into their business's core r

• yuhong 12y ago
  I hasn't look it much recently, but I remember that the only sources for this claim was from Nacchio himself. I wonder what Snowden actually thinks of this claim.
  • xnull 12y ago
    Yes, this is a good caveat. This is what Nacchio claims. I do not have much in the way of a third party source. It's likely that Snowden doesn't know anything about it.
• swartkrans 12y ago
  Was he actually guilty of insider trading?
  • xnull 12y ago
    I'm not a lawyer so nothing I say below means anything. From what I can tell - yes - he was guilty of insider trading by the letter of the law. Sharing insider information as CEO about the future of the company with shareholders is by definition insider trading. Despite circumstances, warning that contracts were being gutted is still illegal.
    • Navarr 12y ago
      Is it because it was made to the shareholders? If it had instead been announced publically would it have been considered insider trading?
      • otakucode 12y ago
        No, sharing information publicly is never insider trading. What makes it insider trading is for one group to have access to information about a company that another group does not have. I believe, from the training I've had, that the standard is usually 48 hours after public disclosure of information before you are allowed to act on it. Of course, insider trading laws are broken on a minute-to-minute basis by hundreds of corporate executives and others. If you want to nail someone for insider trading, and they have a management position at a company, you could do it fairly easily. White collar crime is very rarely even investigated, let alone prosecuted or punished, though.
        • true_religion 12y ago
          On the face of it sounds like a hard to comply with rule. If you worked high-up within a publicly traded company, you'd have to tell no one anything about your job.
          • superuser2 12y ago
            You simply couldn't talk about things that are relevant to your share price. "My boss was an asshole today." Fine. "We're about to get bought out for $x million." Very much not fine.
            • true_religion 12y ago
              The problem is that you can't go into any normal level of detail without possibly infringing on the law. Well if your boss was an asshole today, because you can't make any sales that's something you can say as a realtor in a private company, but can't say as the guy trying to close XXX,000 sized seat contracts at a public company because your inability to perform is going to be reflected in the quarterly reports. > "We're about to get bought out for $x million." Very much not fine. Here's another example. If your company is in the process of a public merger, and you're publicly involved in the M&A process you can't throw a wild party the day before the public announcement of its success, because someone will inevitably ask "why are you guys celebrating?"
  • agscala 12y ago
    My understanding is that since he told major stakeholders what was about to happen, he gave them inside information to trade on and went to jail for that instead of making trades himself.
    • tptacek 12y ago
      Isn't that an interpretation refuted by the source material I just provided?
      • xnull 12y ago
        Looks like others in those branches of the thread have replies to those materials. Other thread-goers should read those branches of the discussion to craft their own informed opinions.
  • coldtea 12y ago
    Well, it's not like the governments cannot either manufacture a case to send an innocent man to jail or cover-up a wrongdoing -- they have been caught doing those things time and again. Heck, there are people that had the death penalty due to planted evidence and/or witnesses in favor of them ignored, only to be found innocent decades later, through newer findings like DNA. So who really knows, especially in particularly charged cases with special interest like this.
  • eli 12y ago
    The jury thought so beyond a reasonable doubt.
• tptacek 12y ago
  Reprising a comment from a long time ago: Nacchio was convicted of running a pump-and-dump insider trading scam that netted him ~$100MM at the expense of common public shareholders. If there's an award for "most obnoxious implication of NSA's wrongdoing", it should go to the attempted rehabilitation of people like Nacchio. Here's the indictment. It's quite straightforward. http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2007/0307/20070307_030947_nacchio_indictment.pdf http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2007/0307... Here's the cliff notes: "No later than December 4, 2000, through and including September 10, 2001, NACCHIO was aware of material, non-public information about Qwest’s business, including, but not limited to" [litany of distressing concerns about Qwest's bottom line which ultimately proved dispositive in valuing Qwest]. Note the date. Now, look at this table of Nacchio's stock sales: http://oi60.tinypic.com/2n1tgr6.jpg http://oi60.tinypic.com/2n1tgr6.jpg Nacchio claims to have believed that secret national security government contracts were going to rescue Qwest from their financial problems (note the implicit concession that Qwest had problems from which its financials needed to be rescued). One tie-in between Nacchio and NSA is the notion that by refusing requests from NSA, Nacchio lost those contracts. Stipulate that this is true; it's a plausible complaint. Nacchio still took the money and ran.
  • sampsonjs 12y ago
    I'm just glad PRISM is nothing but an extremely expensive Rube Goldberg contraption for responding to warrants. Golly, why did Yahoo bother going to court to fight the notion that when a court issues a warrant ... "Yahoo also felt that warrantless requests placed discretion for data collection 'entirely in the hands of the Executive Branch without prior judicial involvement' thereby ceding to the government 'overly broad power that invites abuse” and possible errors that would result in scooping up data of U.S. citizens as well.' Oh.
    • tptacek 12y ago
      I think you may have accidentally moved the goalposts here. The claim wasn't that PRISM was restricted to warrants; it handles what are in effect court orders (more specifically, FISA collection directives) which are not warrants. When stories about PRISM first leaked, there was intense speculation that it was a system that gave the NSA direct access to servers.
• spacefight 12y ago
  And this is exactly why we haven't had any leaks until Snowden.
• zo1 12y ago
  I'm curious why you consider government meddling, blackmail, coercion and manipulation as an "invisible hand"? Purely because it's not known to the populace?
  • xnull 12y ago
    For many reasons, but I'll admit it was mostly a provocative and clever remark more than an informative one. If you want more meat than that: the US government, and in fact the majority of modern Western-style governments, do not directly control enterprises ("that's fascism/marxism/communism") but there remains a need for governments to interact and leverage infrastructure, information and capabilities of private enterprises - a need that can not be fulfilled by the blunt instrument of eminent domain. Western style governments instead rely on coercion and leverage and also provide market advantages (and sometimes "Soft Power"; look that up) to achieve policy goals. The idea is then that governments nudge private enterprises to efficiently allocate their resoures for the greater good that individual customers and market pressures can't account for (because the calculus of a consumer doesn't include national strategy and because access to restricted information can't make it into the marketplace). A fantastic example of that is the global cyberintelligence war, which the US and Five Eyes would very much like to win, and you should a tleask hope that we don't lose. [The vast majority of the Snowden leaks are about international espionage and sabotage (not about 'terrorism', the 2000's boogyman; find more in previous comments by yours truly).] There are other examples such as private enterprises with shared strategic interests having been invited to participate in international treaties like the Trans Pacific Partnership. This has its own sort of internal self-consistent logic that is somewhat grounded in, although also represents a significant departure from, the ideas of Western 'Enlightenment' thinkers. A criticism of this sort of leverage is that it has to grow more and more intense as the need, frequency, and scope of demands intensify due to resource exhaustion, accumulating expenses/promises, and competition with large centrally organized states and other Western-style states that are willing to interfere more to compete more (the 'prisoner dilemma' or 'tragedy of the commons' scenario). Every person you ask will give you a different answer on how much of this behavior, if any at all, has been happening. The current conception of the state is that it must correct the market where it fails to allocate things efficiently (natural monopolies, etc) and that it may also collectivize cost where chance or circumstance have the power ruin individuals (providing emergency services during storms, snowplows during winter, equal access to education even for the poverty stricken) for the same reason people collectivize risk via insurance. But that otherwise it should remain minimal in size. I acknowledge there are debates about the concept of the state that would fill libraries. These are broad strokes. States have learned that wielding private enterprises for both Soft Power (having the world rely on US company services or Chinese goods, owning water supply [Nestle]) and coercive power (withholding access to treatments and cures of diseases, manipulating social media to stir unrest, exporting favorable financial regulations via the WTO and World Bank [why BRICS made their own]) and by giving domestic corporations favors so that they can compete internationally (traditionally tariffs, huge tax subsidies (sugar), and recently information from the cyberintelligence war) as well as financial manipulations (manipulating currency exchange rates so that they are favored for export) enable them to achieve policy goals. Countries must participate if their competitors are, sort of like a cold war but without the existential threat of annihilation. So states play a large part in the fluxuations of markets. Some of this is highly public ("Today at 9:00, China bans bitcoins"), but others are surreptitious. In so many words: because it is 'invisible' and because it is a 'hand'.