Send people to prison and/or fine the hell out of these corporations.
Putting CEOs in prison is the only way to fix gross corporate misconduct. This is why we'll never do it.
Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
221–230 of 341 posts
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To Schmidt, and 130,000+ other people on Google's corporate welfare You are probably using the wrong expression. Corporate Welfare means Welfare for Corporations. So it's when a government bestows money grants, tax breaks, or other special favourable treatment for corporations. It is nothing to do with employees, not paying excessive salaries, or keeping unproductive ones around. It does not imply that main benefic…
Google’s the primary beneficiary of the DMCA, and also the US’s criminally lax privacy laws. Sounds like corporate welfare to me.
The way I understood that sentence, was that Google is providing Corporate Welfare to 130,000+ of it's employees.
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, the CIA destroyed the torture video tapes to prevent embarrassment and further prosecutions of it's employees. So it kinda goes both ways.
You are demonstrating scary level of Moral Confusion. CIA operates in the National interest, at least hypothetically. Google can operate against national interest to make money, or 'whoever pays most' interest. The people of USA have granted CIA privileges of secrecy and legal protections explicitly to do ShadyShit. No-one ever gave Google permission to do ShadyShit. CIA employees go through background checks, US Gov…
Morality and legality are the same, when you consider yourself to be on the same side as the law.
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#224I think we’re going to see another cycle in tech, much like the one where they realized that people kept saying illegal things in a documented fashion and this kept getting them into trouble leading to short retention policies. Except this time it will probably involve mandatory court-ordered retention which will further push people towards dropping “let’s discuss this offline” comments and trying to hide their conve…
It's a bit weird that this is even a thing given Google's ecosystem supports retention and litigation holds - technology acquired through buying Postini iirc.
It sounds like a selling point:
1) Use Postini
2) Violate an explicit court order by automatically deleting all your incriminating documents.
3) Blame thousands of unaware individual contributors for not each manually blocking 4) Cite this case as precedent, and demand whatever slap on the wrist Google is about to receive.
1.5) Buy insurance to pay whatever that fine works out to.
5) Continue breaking the law.
6) GOTO 2 when the next subpoena arrives.
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Individual custodians just means employees, right? What incentive was there for employees to do this? I know that if I was told to do that, I would ignore it because I have better things to do than fiddle with settings. The only way I would do it is if they said I’d be fired if I didn’t do it or they increased my salary and decreased my other responsibilities.
Yes, so when you get sent a “legal hold” notice, and you click on some kind of acceptance, you are basically acknowledging that you’ll get fired if you don’t preserve the data. That’s how this works. The incentive to compliance is that you don’t get fired by your general counsel.
If someone is fired, then Upper management just used rank and file employees as a shield to escape legal liability.
But if no-one is fired, then what? Responsibility just disappears?
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't matter. "Every day employees" are not the ones who needed to do this.
They can be if the policy was that individual employees needed to self enforce retention on XYZ topics and employees were provided training to that effect. The Feds can not say a company must retain all records going forward, only that it make reasonable effort to retain relevant records and training employees to place items going forward in some sort of vault historically qualifies, especially when this training/ret…
> They can be if the policy was that individual employees needed to self enforce retention on XYZ topics and employees were provided training to that effect.
Whatever the policy is, the company is obligated to preserve evidence. Internal policy does not change that.
> The Feds can not say a company must retain all records going forward
Not only can they, that's literally what the law (federal law for sure, and separately the law of every state, to the best of my knowledge), does require regarding evidence related to ongoing and reasonably anticipated litigation. There is an unconditional requirement to preserve evidence that is known, or reasonably should be known, to be relevant.
> There is no mens rea element to having system constraints due to an existing IT infrastructure budget
The legal requirement to retain evidence once litigation begins or is reasonably forseeable is not conditioned on “so long as that is easily doable within your pre-existing IT infrastructure budget”. If you don’t have a sufficient budget to meet your obligations when you become aware of them, you are obligate to take any steps reasonably necessary to meet those obligations, and if you fail to meet the obligations, there are legal remedies within the relevant litigation for simple failure without regard to mental state (though willful failures have more significant potential remedies within the case, up to and including instantly losing the case without trial.)
Mens rea also matters a lot for whether additional civil and criminal penalties beyond sanctions in the immediate case are available (such as criminal charges of destroying records or documents to obstruct a federal investigation under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1519), though.
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#227I think we’re going to see another cycle in tech, much like the one where they realized that people kept saying illegal things in a documented fashion and this kept getting them into trouble leading to short retention policies. Except this time it will probably involve mandatory court-ordered retention which will further push people towards dropping “let’s discuss this offline” comments and trying to hide their conve…
Not just tech; we're seeing this pressure in finance too. Matt Levine joked about this recently: > It really is wild that the SEC’s official position is now that it is illegal to “use unofficial communications to do things like cut deals, win clients or make trades.” “Conduct their communications about business matters within only official channels”! Imagine if that was really the rule! You can’t have lunch with a cl…
Yes traceability is a thing.
I’m more surprised it’s put in a “this is wild” light. This is in the same direction as declaring gifts you receive from your clients, or reporting the expenses of these lunches you’re having in a business setting, along who were there and how much you paid for them.
My take on this is, if it’s a business act (a task you did on company time, with company money) it shouldn’t be in a grey “we were just chatting” area and you should be able to report to your company what you did and justify the money spent.
I wouldn’t expect full recordings, but at least enough to explain why there was a meeting in the first place and what was discussed. Now I totally understand the SEC wanting more, but they’re probably doing so to move the window and not actually expecting it goes through.
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#228What's depressingly hilarious is that employees generally hated this behavior, because useful information would often disappear before you were done with it. For example, someone answers your question on Friday after you've left and when you check messages on Monday it's gone. Or you'd want to refer to something from a conversation a few days ago and it'd been deleted as well.
I was working there when this happened, and I definitely remember thinking, "Well, no point in writing a detailed email full of information that will be useful in the future, because in 30 days it'll be gone anyway." Even more frustrating was finding myself in a situation where I remembered an old email that would be enormously helpful, either because of the information in it, or because I could reuse the bulk of som…
Email are retained for more than a year. Only instant chats are retained for 24h or 30d.
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have a horse in this race (anymore), but in the abstract I would love if government aligned incentives so that it was more painful for companies to toss records that should have been retained than to retain records that are damaging to them in hindsight, which they were legally allowed at some point to toss. For precisely the reason you indicated.
Then companies will just get rid of chat tools because informal discussions can be turned to fit any narrative. 'wow, Bob picked the worst possible way to solve xyz' negligence, knowingly having incompetent developers. You yourself said Bob's solutions were the worst possible. 'looking back, we should have implemented XYZ differently but we are stuck with that implementation now' can be about something harmless but b…
> can be about something harmless but blown so out of proportion in court.
That's the entire point of a court, to find correct context and proportion.
Judges are not idiots and they don't like being mislead. If you blow things out of proportion, and your opponents can put up a counterargument, it will cost you.
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
When are regulators and enforcers going to wise up to this "clever" game of disguising malicious behavior as negligence? I've seen so many people strategically play dumb that at this point I don't believe whether or not a violation was accidental should have any weight on the punishment. Nature doesn't care whether our immune systems accidentally slack off, or whether we accidentally didn't protect our cities from a…
I think people being negligent legitimately happens quite a bit. I agree though that when it comes to corporate behaviour, negligence should just be treated as willful intent.
Absolutely. Ignorance of the law is not a defense, nor is “whoops!”