41–50 of 228 posts
Where in the article is the actual story? Can someone please point me to the page and paragraph that contains what actually happened? What did he do?
On the night of the arrest—without an arrest warrant—Serge waived his right to call a lawyer. He phoned his wife and told her what had happened and that a bunch of F.B.I. agents were on the way to their home to seize their computers, and to please let them in—though they had no search warrant, either. Then he sat down and politely tried to clear up the F.B.I. agent's confusion. "He was completely not interested in th…
Are you sure about that? Do non-Americans have the same rights as Americans? Can they refuse to talk to the police, refuse to let the police into their home without a warrant, have an attorney present, ...?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is he copied a bunch of confidential code off company servers and then deleted the audit trail from the servers. He claimed that the confidential code copied was accidental and that he only meant to copy some open source code.
It's a little harsh to say he deleted the audit trail. He deleted his bash history. Something I do on a near daily basis.
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/021110aleyn...
Basically he'd written a backup program which was specifically designed to compress both his home directory and propriety code from elsewhere on the system into a file (which it would do depended on parameters passed).
On his last day of employment he ran it several times with different parameters which including copying propriety code. He then encrypted the file and then uploaded it to a SVN hosting service before deleting the encryption program and his bash history. Because it was encrypted it bypassed GS's automated scanners.
He then downloaded the source files to both his laptop and external flash drive and took them to work at his new employer.
Given the (undisputed) facts, he clearly broke several laws, the question is whether he was doing it innocently and just being stupid or if he did it with serious criminal intent.
Where in the article is the actual story? Can someone please point me to the page and paragraph that contains what actually happened? What did he do?
My understanding is he copied a bunch of confidential code off company servers and then deleted the audit trail from the servers. He claimed that the confidential code copied was accidental and that he only meant to copy some open source code.
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/)
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.
I was on a jury for a murder trial, and so I have some insight into how juries work. At one point, when I was splitting some hairs and discussing the meaning of some small details from the evidence, one of the other jurors got impatient and reached for the coroner's photo of the victim. "Someone died here, you realize."
I was on a jury for an arson trial, and the deliberations were pleasant and rational and focussed on the evidence and what it meant without anything like that. Some of its probably the difference between murder and arson without personal injury in the mix, some of it is probably the luck of the draw in the jury pool. How a jury worked and how juries work aren't really the same thing.
From the article: "He didn’t fully understand how Goldman could think it was O.K. to benefit so greatly from the work of others and then behave so selfishly toward them." I don't think he understands Wall Street.
While I'm a capitalist, I wouldn't conduct business with Goldman. They have a history of screwing the market (semi-ok), screwing their customers (not ok), and screwing their employees (not ok). And then blaming everyone else. I expect a certain degree of ethical behavior.
In case people aren't clear on this. He worked in an industry that takes this sort of thing very seriously. He shouldn't have even been trying to download open source from work. You don't email stuff home to work on it, for example.
Yes, he did something stupid. It's not clear that he did anything wrong, but he should have known (and maybe did) that this was a really bad move on his part. It's not worth it to take work code out of its place, especially not in finance where this will be prosecuted. Unfortunately, engineers fail to account for the fact that image and credibility matter far more than substance. This is a case of a man who really ha…
I could see theft of property, possibly, but the furthest I could see it going is breaking an employment agreement, which is a contract between two private parties and doesn't bring criminal charges for violations.
So, while I think the often repeated advice about never talking to the police sometimes goes too far (it's probably good to have a friendly relation with the neighborhood cop, and by all means please help in apprehending murderers and burglars if you safely can), it's pretty much dead-on as soon as you step into enforcement la-la land:
- Don't consent to any searches.
- Don't say anything without a lawyer.
- Put great effort into finding a competent lawyer.
- Don't say anything your lawyer hasn't approved.
Beyond refusing help to efforts to prosecute you, such steps will clearly mark you as a non-victim. (Same advice as applies when you have to pass through a mugging-prone area.) This will cause a lot less effort towards pushing through with your case. After all, there are other suckers born every minute.
[1] http://reason.com/archives/2009/10/19/were-all-felons-now
In case people aren't clear on this. He worked in an industry that takes this sort of thing very seriously. He shouldn't have even been trying to download open source from work. You don't email stuff home to work on it, for example.
Yes, he did something stupid. It's not clear that he did anything wrong, but he should have known (and maybe did) that this was a really bad move on his part. It's not worth it to take work code out of its place, especially not in finance where this will be prosecuted. Unfortunately, engineers fail to account for the fact that image and credibility matter far more than substance. This is a case of a man who really ha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is he copied a bunch of confidential code off company servers and then deleted the audit trail from the servers. He claimed that the confidential code copied was accidental and that he only meant to copy some open source code.
It's a little harsh to say he deleted the audit trail. He deleted his bash history. Something I do on a near daily basis.