21 ms·

Sergey Aleynikov Sues FBI Agents Who Arrested Him

391 points by bko 12y ago

amalag 12y ago
Interest that after reading the wikipedia article the NY state prosectors messed up by trying to arrest him a second time. In that second arrest the judge ruled that the arrest by the FBI was illegal. Thereby giving him this opportunity for the civil case. However the law is changed for future source code thefts. Here is an industry perspective http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/215714/employee+rights+labour+relations/Understanding+The+New+Theft+Of+Trade+Secrets+Clarification+Act+Of+2012 http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/215714/employee+rights+... The only technicality that freed Aleynikov was that the source code was not sold as a product itself.
- antiics 12y ago
  Wow, that Mondaq article is really the opposite of objective. Author Dylan W. Wiseman is really letting us know which side he's on with gems like "To correct the obvious injustice of the Aleynikov ruling..."
  - nyolfen 12y ago
    it's called an editorial. sometimes people who write things have opinions
    - eli 12y ago
      I think everyone who writes in detail about a topic has opinions about it, they just don't always have the decency to share them in editorials.
  - rudolf0 12y ago
    Ignoring the obvious FBI blunders and them being far too buddy-buddy with corporations, doesn't he have a point? Aleynikov intended to monetize code which was technically Goldman's property, even if he wrote most of it. It would be a different story if he simply wanted to keep the code for archival and review purposes; he actually tried to help a startup by using it. It sounds like he did violate the spirit of the law, if not the letter.
    - Someone1234 12y ago
      After reading more into this, I agree. However I would also like to add that 8 years (+3 under supervision) is bonkers and completely disproportionate with the crime. Just to put that into perspective, someone could commit rape twice and be out of jail first (3 years piece approximately, or 6-7 years total). It seems like as soon as a computer is involved in a crime, the sentence gets quadrupled. Instead of breaking into someone's computer, you should just run them down with your car, you'll likely get off easier in the latter case...
      - rudolf0 12y ago
        Funnily enough, after reading more into this myself I'm actually going to partially retract some of my statements above. I don't know if it was definitively proven that he copied the code with the intent of helping the new startup. The evidence the FBI found was that he had the code on a laptop when meeting some of their founders, but I don't believe they had proof of what his intent was or proof that he shared it with them or that they were even aware of it. He claims he did not intend to do any such thing: >When he left, Sergey Aleynikov took a segment of code with him that was based on open source, but had some alterations that technically made it proprietary Goldman Sachs software. >According to Sergey Aleynikov, the software was of no consequence to his job at Teza Technologies, but once they realized he had taken a segment of code from their servers Goldman Sachs contacted the FBI and within 48 hours Aleynikov was in custody. So I would say the sentence should be based on the proven intent. If he really did intend to use most or all of the codebase while at the startup to gain them an edge, then I think a jail sentence is fair (though I agree 8 years is way too long). Otherwise, probably not, at least depending on how accurate his story is of what % of the codebase was open source originally.
    - quadlock 12y ago
      I remember reading that the code was mostly open source tools that he had done some modifications to such as fixing bugs and just wanted them for reference. He hadn't accessed the files since leaving Goldman.
josu 12y ago
While the article gives some background, here is a bit more from the wikipedia article about Sergey Aleynikov [1]: >Sergey Aleynikov is a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer. In December 2010 he was wrongfully convicted of two counts of theft of trade secrets and sentenced to 97 months in prison. In February 2012 his conviction was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that entered a judgement of acquittal, reversing the decision of the District court. The main reason why he is suing the FBI is beacause: >On June 20, 2014, upon reviewing the evidence, Justice Ronald Zweibel published a 71-page opinion in which the court ruled that F.B.I. “did not have probable cause to arrest defendant, let alone search him or his home.” The arrest was “illegal,” and Mr. Aleynikov’s “Fourth Amendment rights were violated as a result of a mistake of law.”[2] Besides finding that he was arrested illegally without probable cause, the court blocked the majority of evidence passed by the F.B.I. to prosecutors at the NY State DA's office, as that property was supposed to be returned to Mr. Aleynikov upon his acquittal. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov [2] http://dealbook.nytimes.com//2014/06/20/judge-throws-out-evidence-in-sergey-aleynikovs-code-theft-case/ http://dealbook.nytimes.com//2014/06/20/judge-throws-out-evi...
- lkurtz 12y ago
  You mean Goldman calling up a friend at the FBI doesn't count as probable cause??
  - hnnewguy 12y ago
    Goldman Sachs was entirely within their rights to contact the FBI if they believed proprietary information was stolen from them by an ex-employee. It's the government (read: FBI) that screwed up here, as is most often the case.
    - emodendroket 12y ago
      Well, yes, the problem isn't necessarily that they contact the authorities but that they apparently have their ears.
spiritplumber 12y ago
Whoever loses, we win?
- negrit 12y ago
  We already lost. Stupid shit like this done by the FBI is causing tax payer money. If Sergey Aleynikov wins then guess where the money will come from... I always thought people should be financially accountable for their actions. The only thing that really work, is touching the wallet.
  - task_queue 12y ago
    It's unfortunate that the trend for law enforcement agencies is to shield individual agents and officers from any personal culpability. They'll get a month of paid leave, the agency pays out and they get to return to the same position with the same pay. The only lesson learned is that their coworkers, bosses and justice system will bend over backwards to make sure that they can get away with abuse and injustice without repercussions.
  - hurin 12y ago
    This. We tend to cheer for social justice against government abuse of power, but we're always the ones footing the bill. Settlement and damage costs should come out of the agent's salaries across the entire organization. Maybe police officers will stop shooting black teenagers if everyone on the force is docked $5000 for each application of lethal force.
    - fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
      No, then decent cops would leave, and we'd be left with jerks who have low job-mobility (no other skills), but are adept liars who can cover their asses when they get near trouble.
      - hurin 12y ago
        Most police officers already are jerks with low job-mobility - but I do think a framework where the department suffers for an individuals actions (and not the taxpayer footing the bill) would have a positive feedback effect. If another officer's indiscretion or negligence were to reflect on your pay check, you would be less likely to help cover it up or ignore it.
happimess 12y ago
It is worth remembering that part of the case against Mr. Aleynikov involves his use of "subversion" software, which sounds, well, subversive. From the Vanity Fair article[1]: "The Web site Serge had used (which has the word 'subversion' in its name) as well as the location of its server (Germany) McSwain clearly found highly suspicious." [1]http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...
- protomyth 12y ago
  Yep, that's about par for the course reporting. If it sounds ominous, it must be. I remember a small town newspaper that was all mad 10+ years ago about the master / slave IDE toggle and how it was racist. It was not an Onion article, sadly.
  - amitparikh 12y ago
    This quote was not about the reporter or the news outlet. Michael McSwain was the FBI agent in charge of the case, and the reporting seems to suggest that having 'subversion' in Sergey's Web history was a component of building probable cause.
    - protomyth 12y ago
      Remind me to write a a source code control system called "Patriot". I really don't want to know what they think of "git". On a serious note, I guess the modern lesson is names are used by idiots to attack us so pick your project names carefully.
      - gknoy 12y ago
        "Patriot is binary-compatible with Git ..." sudo cp /usr/bin/git /usr/bin/patriot ... of course that is likely not enough, as all the porcelain still says "git". ;)
  - charonn0 12y ago
davidw 12y ago
I hope he can, sooner or later, put these legal battles behind him and return to programming. He's a pretty good Erlang coder: https://github.com/saleyn https://github.com/saleyn This, in particular, is extremely useful for anyone using Erlang to interact with external processes: https://github.com/saleyn/erlexec https://github.com/saleyn/erlexec
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
blackbagboys 12y ago
I read Michael Lewis's article in Vanity Fair about this case back in 2013, and I remember being struck by this excerpt in particular: [Goldman] called the F.B.I. in haste, just two days before, and then put their agent through what amounted to a crash course on high-frequency trading and computer programming. McSwain later conceded that he didn’t seek out independent expert advice to study the code Serge Aleynikov had taken. (“I relied on statements from Goldman employees.”) He himself had no idea of the value of the stolen code (“Representatives of Goldman told me it was worth a lot of money”) or if any of it was actually all that special (he based his belief that the code contained trade secrets on “representations made by members of Goldman Sachs”)...The F.B.I.’s investigation before the arrest consisted of trusting Goldman’s explanation of some extremely complicated stuff, and 48 hours after Goldman called the F.B.I., Serge was arrested. That, as the complaint highlights, the FBI instinctively acted as Goldman's punitive arm rather than conducting an independent investigation into the facts of the case is disturbing, regardless of the merit of the allegations. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - SixSigma 12y ago
    That's not irony, it's coincidence. Possibly even Baader-Meinhof phenomenon / AKA Frequency Illusion [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_cognitive_biases&redirect=no#Frequency_illusion http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_cognitive_...
    - te_platt 12y ago
      Even more pedantic - It could be ironic if he came here in a deliberate attempt to avoid more information about this case. Or maybe he was trying to show a friend how people on HN are averse to pedantic grammar related comments. Or maybe he deliberately inserted a vocabulary error so he could expose the more nit picky among us so he could hunt them down and destroy there credibility.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
nikanj 12y ago
Blergh, almost half of my screen real estate is taken up by the top bar. I bet somebody got a bonus for that, as Raymond would say.
abalone 12y ago
I'm new to this but after reading up on the background I think this case is being somewhat mischaracterized in the comments here. I know we are all anti-authoritarian hackers at heart but HN also stands for accuracy and fairness. I would say the general tone here is "jack-booted FBI thugs falsely arrest hacker because their pal at Goldman Sachs pulled some strings". The implication being that this has all unravelled and he is now suing the government for corrupt trampling his constitutional rights. After reading up, I would say a fairer characterization is "guy who got caught stealing proprietary code got off on a technicality because the law doesn't actually cover HFT code due to shortsighted phrasing". Before you hit that downvote button, here's my support: the judge who overturned it called this out and Congress passed a law in 2012 to close the loophole through which he got his conviction overturned. From the Congressional Record[1]: Quoting the appeals court, "just before his going-away party, Aleynikov encrypted and uploaded to a server in Germany more than 500,000 lines of source code for Goldman's HFT system ..... On June 2, 2009, Aleynikov flew ..... to Chicago to attend meetings at Teza. He brought with him a flash drive and a laptop containing portions of the Goldman source code. When Aleynikov flew back the following day, he was arrested by the FBI .....''" In his concurring opinion, Judge Calabresi [Cal-abress-E] directly called upon Congress to clarify the scope of the EEA [Electronic Espionage Act] as he wrote: [I]t is hard for me to conclude that Congress, in [the EEA], actually meant to exempt the kind of behavior in which Aleynikov engaged ..... [n]evertheless, while concurring [in the opinion], I wish to express the hope that Congress will return to the issue and state, in appropriate language, what I believe it meant to make criminal in the EEA. Specifically the EEA used to say "included in a product that is produced for or placed in" interstate commerce, which the court thought didn't technically cover HFT code, and now reads "a product or service used in or intended for use in". That's it. That's the loophole. If there ever was a case of violating the spirit, but not the letter of the law, this is it. [1] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r112:H18DE2-0051 http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r112:H18DE2-0051:
- Lewton 12y ago
  I really recommend you read the vanity fair article posted earlier. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman... It is quite clear that he did not violate the spirit of the law. There was no clear intent to steal any "trade secrets" from Goldman Sachs, and the analogy brought up in the last part of the article that compares it to taking home a notebook you've used for scribbling down thoughts after you've quit your job, is apt
datashovel 12y ago
I think Goldman Sachs was more worried that he was taking his brain with him to a competitor. The banking cartel certainly has to be high on Silicon Valley's list of "industries that need to be disrupted". The sad thing is he's probably being prosecuted for things he created within the walls of Goldman Sachs and could probably easily re-create from scratch without them.
harry8 12y ago
Can I just make sure that someone mentions the most powerful motive that a shop like GS would likely have? HFT barrier to entry is expertise. Any firm has as their biggest competitive risk their employees setting up with that expertise in competition. It happens all the time. To counter that the optimal strategy of an HFT shop where an expert resigns is to sue them as far and deep into the ground as they can why? As a lesson to all remaining staff This gets an HFT shop additional barrier to entry from competition from existing experts, their own. Did GS deliberately follow this optimal tactic? I don't know, I have no evidence. Maybe the fact it is optimal for other reasons is unrelated and possibly even unknown to them. Form your own opinion on the balance of probabilities there.
- abalone 12y ago
  Couple points: 1. They didn't sue him. They complained to the FBI and the government criminally prosecuted him for violation of the Economic Espionage Act. 2. The basis of the prosecution was that he exfiltrated 500,000+ lines of source code. Doubtful this particular "tactic" could be more generally applied unless staff are engaging in similar activities now clearly prohibited under the EEA.
seesomesense 12y ago
Would you employ Sergey ?
chrisbennet 12y ago
Except of Flash Boys book from from the Vanity Fair article: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman... "He agreed to hang around for six weeks and teach other Goldman people everything he knew, so they could continue to find and fix the broken bands in their gigantic rubber ball. Four times in the course of those last weeks he mailed himself source code he was working on. (He’d later be accused of sending himself 32 megabytes of code, but what he sent was essentially the same 8 megabytes of code four times over.) The files contained a lot of open-source code he had worked with, and modified, over the past two years, mingled together with code that wasn’t open source but proprietary to Goldman Sachs. As he would later try and fail to explain to an F.B.I. agent, he hoped to disentangle the one from the other, in case he needed to remind himself how he had done what he had done with the open-source code, in the event he might need to do it again. He sent these files the same way he had sent himself files nearly every week, since his first month on the job at Goldman. “No one had ever said a word to me about it,” he says. He pulled up his browser and typed into it the words: Free Subversion Repository. Up popped a list of places that stored code, for free, and in a convenient fashion. He clicked the first link on the list. The entire process took about eight seconds. And then he did what he had always done since he first started programming computers: he deleted his bash history. To access the computer he was required to type his password. If he didn’t delete his bash history, his password would be there to see, for anyone who had access to the system."

391 points by bko 12y ago

Interest that after reading the wikipedia article the NY state prosectors messed up by trying to arrest him a second time. In that second arrest the judge ruled that the arrest by the FBI was illegal. Thereby giving him this opportunity for the civil case. However the law is changed for future source code thefts. Here is an industry perspective http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/215714/employee+rights+labour+relations/Understanding+The+New+Theft+Of+Trade+Secrets+Clarification+Act+Of+2012 http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/215714/employee+rights+... The only technicality that freed Aleynikov was that the source code was not sold as a product itself.

antiics 12y ago
Wow, that Mondaq article is really the opposite of objective. Author Dylan W. Wiseman is really letting us know which side he's on with gems like "To correct the obvious injustice of the Aleynikov ruling..."
- nyolfen 12y ago
  it's called an editorial. sometimes people who write things have opinions
  - eli 12y ago
    I think everyone who writes in detail about a topic has opinions about it, they just don't always have the decency to share them in editorials.
- rudolf0 12y ago
  Ignoring the obvious FBI blunders and them being far too buddy-buddy with corporations, doesn't he have a point? Aleynikov intended to monetize code which was technically Goldman's property, even if he wrote most of it. It would be a different story if he simply wanted to keep the code for archival and review purposes; he actually tried to help a startup by using it. It sounds like he did violate the spirit of the law, if not the letter.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    After reading more into this, I agree. However I would also like to add that 8 years (+3 under supervision) is bonkers and completely disproportionate with the crime. Just to put that into perspective, someone could commit rape twice and be out of jail first (3 years piece approximately, or 6-7 years total). It seems like as soon as a computer is involved in a crime, the sentence gets quadrupled. Instead of breaking into someone's computer, you should just run them down with your car, you'll likely get off easier in the latter case...
    - rudolf0 12y ago
      Funnily enough, after reading more into this myself I'm actually going to partially retract some of my statements above. I don't know if it was definitively proven that he copied the code with the intent of helping the new startup. The evidence the FBI found was that he had the code on a laptop when meeting some of their founders, but I don't believe they had proof of what his intent was or proof that he shared it with them or that they were even aware of it. He claims he did not intend to do any such thing: >When he left, Sergey Aleynikov took a segment of code with him that was based on open source, but had some alterations that technically made it proprietary Goldman Sachs software. >According to Sergey Aleynikov, the software was of no consequence to his job at Teza Technologies, but once they realized he had taken a segment of code from their servers Goldman Sachs contacted the FBI and within 48 hours Aleynikov was in custody. So I would say the sentence should be based on the proven intent. If he really did intend to use most or all of the codebase while at the startup to gain them an edge, then I think a jail sentence is fair (though I agree 8 years is way too long). Otherwise, probably not, at least depending on how accurate his story is of what % of the codebase was open source originally.
  - quadlock 12y ago
    I remember reading that the code was mostly open source tools that he had done some modifications to such as fixing bugs and just wanted them for reference. He hadn't accessed the files since leaving Goldman.

josu 12y ago

While the article gives some background, here is a bit more from the wikipedia article about Sergey Aleynikov [1]: >Sergey Aleynikov is a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer. In December 2010 he was wrongfully convicted of two counts of theft of trade secrets and sentenced to 97 months in prison. In February 2012 his conviction was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that entered a judgement of acquittal, reversing the decision of the District court. The main reason why he is suing the FBI is beacause: >On June 20, 2014, upon reviewing the evidence, Justice Ronald Zweibel published a 71-page opinion in which the court ruled that F.B.I. “did not have probable cause to arrest defendant, let alone search him or his home.” The arrest was “illegal,” and Mr. Aleynikov’s “Fourth Amendment rights were violated as a result of a mistake of law.”[2] Besides finding that he was arrested illegally without probable cause, the court blocked the majority of evidence passed by the F.B.I. to prosecutors at the NY State DA's office, as that property was supposed to be returned to Mr. Aleynikov upon his acquittal. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov [2] http://dealbook.nytimes.com//2014/06/20/judge-throws-out-evidence-in-sergey-aleynikovs-code-theft-case/ http://dealbook.nytimes.com//2014/06/20/judge-throws-out-evi...

lkurtz 12y ago
You mean Goldman calling up a friend at the FBI doesn't count as probable cause??
- hnnewguy 12y ago
  Goldman Sachs was entirely within their rights to contact the FBI if they believed proprietary information was stolen from them by an ex-employee. It's the government (read: FBI) that screwed up here, as is most often the case.
  - emodendroket 12y ago
    Well, yes, the problem isn't necessarily that they contact the authorities but that they apparently have their ears.

spiritplumber 12y ago

Whoever loses, we win?

negrit 12y ago
We already lost. Stupid shit like this done by the FBI is causing tax payer money. If Sergey Aleynikov wins then guess where the money will come from... I always thought people should be financially accountable for their actions. The only thing that really work, is touching the wallet.
- task_queue 12y ago
  It's unfortunate that the trend for law enforcement agencies is to shield individual agents and officers from any personal culpability. They'll get a month of paid leave, the agency pays out and they get to return to the same position with the same pay. The only lesson learned is that their coworkers, bosses and justice system will bend over backwards to make sure that they can get away with abuse and injustice without repercussions.
- hurin 12y ago
  This. We tend to cheer for social justice against government abuse of power, but we're always the ones footing the bill. Settlement and damage costs should come out of the agent's salaries across the entire organization. Maybe police officers will stop shooting black teenagers if everyone on the force is docked $5000 for each application of lethal force.
  - fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
    No, then decent cops would leave, and we'd be left with jerks who have low job-mobility (no other skills), but are adept liars who can cover their asses when they get near trouble.
    - hurin 12y ago
      Most police officers already are jerks with low job-mobility - but I do think a framework where the department suffers for an individuals actions (and not the taxpayer footing the bill) would have a positive feedback effect. If another officer's indiscretion or negligence were to reflect on your pay check, you would be less likely to help cover it up or ignore it.

happimess 12y ago

It is worth remembering that part of the case against Mr. Aleynikov involves his use of "subversion" software, which sounds, well, subversive. From the Vanity Fair article[1]: "The Web site Serge had used (which has the word 'subversion' in its name) as well as the location of its server (Germany) McSwain clearly found highly suspicious." [1]http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...

protomyth 12y ago
Yep, that's about par for the course reporting. If it sounds ominous, it must be. I remember a small town newspaper that was all mad 10+ years ago about the master / slave IDE toggle and how it was racist. It was not an Onion article, sadly.
- amitparikh 12y ago
  This quote was not about the reporter or the news outlet. Michael McSwain was the FBI agent in charge of the case, and the reporting seems to suggest that having 'subversion' in Sergey's Web history was a component of building probable cause.
  - protomyth 12y ago
    Remind me to write a a source code control system called "Patriot". I really don't want to know what they think of "git". On a serious note, I guess the modern lesson is names are used by idiots to attack us so pick your project names carefully.
    - gknoy 12y ago
      "Patriot is binary-compatible with Git ..." sudo cp /usr/bin/git /usr/bin/patriot ... of course that is likely not enough, as all the porcelain still says "git". ;)
- charonn0 12y ago

davidw 12y ago

I hope he can, sooner or later, put these legal battles behind him and return to programming. He's a pretty good Erlang coder: https://github.com/saleyn https://github.com/saleyn This, in particular, is extremely useful for anyone using Erlang to interact with external processes: https://github.com/saleyn/erlexec https://github.com/saleyn/erlexec

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

blackbagboys 12y ago

I read Michael Lewis's article in Vanity Fair about this case back in 2013, and I remember being struck by this excerpt in particular: [Goldman] called the F.B.I. in haste, just two days before, and then put their agent through what amounted to a crash course on high-frequency trading and computer programming. McSwain later conceded that he didn’t seek out independent expert advice to study the code Serge Aleynikov had taken. (“I relied on statements from Goldman employees.”) He himself had no idea of the value of the stolen code (“Representatives of Goldman told me it was worth a lot of money”) or if any of it was actually all that special (he based his belief that the code contained trade secrets on “representations made by members of Goldman Sachs”)...The F.B.I.’s investigation before the arrest consisted of trusting Goldman’s explanation of some extremely complicated stuff, and 48 hours after Goldman called the F.B.I., Serge was arrested. That, as the complaint highlights, the FBI instinctively acted as Goldman's punitive arm rather than conducting an independent investigation into the facts of the case is disturbing, regardless of the merit of the allegations. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- SixSigma 12y ago
  That's not irony, it's coincidence. Possibly even Baader-Meinhof phenomenon / AKA Frequency Illusion [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_cognitive_biases&redirect=no#Frequency_illusion http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_cognitive_...
  - te_platt 12y ago
    Even more pedantic - It could be ironic if he came here in a deliberate attempt to avoid more information about this case. Or maybe he was trying to show a friend how people on HN are averse to pedantic grammar related comments. Or maybe he deliberately inserted a vocabulary error so he could expose the more nit picky among us so he could hunt them down and destroy there credibility.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

nikanj 12y ago

Blergh, almost half of my screen real estate is taken up by the top bar. I bet somebody got a bonus for that, as Raymond would say.

abalone 12y ago

I'm new to this but after reading up on the background I think this case is being somewhat mischaracterized in the comments here. I know we are all anti-authoritarian hackers at heart but HN also stands for accuracy and fairness. I would say the general tone here is "jack-booted FBI thugs falsely arrest hacker because their pal at Goldman Sachs pulled some strings". The implication being that this has all unravelled and he is now suing the government for corrupt trampling his constitutional rights. After reading up, I would say a fairer characterization is "guy who got caught stealing proprietary code got off on a technicality because the law doesn't actually cover HFT code due to shortsighted phrasing". Before you hit that downvote button, here's my support: the judge who overturned it called this out and Congress passed a law in 2012 to close the loophole through which he got his conviction overturned. From the Congressional Record[1]: Quoting the appeals court, "just before his going-away party, Aleynikov encrypted and uploaded to a server in Germany more than 500,000 lines of source code for Goldman's HFT system ..... On June 2, 2009, Aleynikov flew ..... to Chicago to attend meetings at Teza. He brought with him a flash drive and a laptop containing portions of the Goldman source code. When Aleynikov flew back the following day, he was arrested by the FBI .....''" In his concurring opinion, Judge Calabresi [Cal-abress-E] directly called upon Congress to clarify the scope of the EEA [Electronic Espionage Act] as he wrote: [I]t is hard for me to conclude that Congress, in [the EEA], actually meant to exempt the kind of behavior in which Aleynikov engaged ..... [n]evertheless, while concurring [in the opinion], I wish to express the hope that Congress will return to the issue and state, in appropriate language, what I believe it meant to make criminal in the EEA. Specifically the EEA used to say "included in a product that is produced for or placed in" interstate commerce, which the court thought didn't technically cover HFT code, and now reads "a product or service used in or intended for use in". That's it. That's the loophole. If there ever was a case of violating the spirit, but not the letter of the law, this is it. [1] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r112:H18DE2-0051 http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r112:H18DE2-0051:

Lewton 12y ago
I really recommend you read the vanity fair article posted earlier. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman... It is quite clear that he did not violate the spirit of the law. There was no clear intent to steal any "trade secrets" from Goldman Sachs, and the analogy brought up in the last part of the article that compares it to taking home a notebook you've used for scribbling down thoughts after you've quit your job, is apt

datashovel 12y ago

I think Goldman Sachs was more worried that he was taking his brain with him to a competitor. The banking cartel certainly has to be high on Silicon Valley's list of "industries that need to be disrupted". The sad thing is he's probably being prosecuted for things he created within the walls of Goldman Sachs and could probably easily re-create from scratch without them.

harry8 12y ago

Can I just make sure that someone mentions the most powerful motive that a shop like GS would likely have? HFT barrier to entry is expertise. Any firm has as their biggest competitive risk their employees setting up with that expertise in competition. It happens all the time. To counter that the optimal strategy of an HFT shop where an expert resigns is to sue them as far and deep into the ground as they can why? As a lesson to all remaining staff This gets an HFT shop additional barrier to entry from competition from existing experts, their own. Did GS deliberately follow this optimal tactic? I don't know, I have no evidence. Maybe the fact it is optimal for other reasons is unrelated and possibly even unknown to them. Form your own opinion on the balance of probabilities there.

abalone 12y ago
Couple points: 1. They didn't sue him. They complained to the FBI and the government criminally prosecuted him for violation of the Economic Espionage Act. 2. The basis of the prosecution was that he exfiltrated 500,000+ lines of source code. Doubtful this particular "tactic" could be more generally applied unless staff are engaging in similar activities now clearly prohibited under the EEA.

seesomesense 12y ago

Would you employ Sergey ?

chrisbennet 12y ago

Except of Flash Boys book from from the Vanity Fair article: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman... "He agreed to hang around for six weeks and teach other Goldman people everything he knew, so they could continue to find and fix the broken bands in their gigantic rubber ball. Four times in the course of those last weeks he mailed himself source code he was working on. (He’d later be accused of sending himself 32 megabytes of code, but what he sent was essentially the same 8 megabytes of code four times over.) The files contained a lot of open-source code he had worked with, and modified, over the past two years, mingled together with code that wasn’t open source but proprietary to Goldman Sachs. As he would later try and fail to explain to an F.B.I. agent, he hoped to disentangle the one from the other, in case he needed to remind himself how he had done what he had done with the open-source code, in the event he might need to do it again. He sent these files the same way he had sent himself files nearly every week, since his first month on the job at Goldman. “No one had ever said a word to me about it,” he says. He pulled up his browser and typed into it the words: Free Subversion Repository. Up popped a list of places that stored code, for free, and in a convenient fashion. He clicked the first link on the list. The entire process took about eight seconds. And then he did what he had always done since he first started programming computers: he deleted his bash history. To access the computer he was required to type his password. If he didn’t delete his bash history, his password would be there to see, for anyone who had access to the system."