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Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

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Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#191
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presenting an indictment as fact is dangerous and highly questionable, whether or not the person got convicted. That doesn't mean the indictment is accurate, it is written at a point where it hasn't been scrutinized by the courts. They are pretty much always written as the very extreme position of what could have happened. They always present the offender as having clear intentions of breaking the law, when reality i…

The overstated it by using the wrong metric: proceeds, not profits. The facts of the case, which demonstrate Nacchio selling out of his position in his own company based on private information unavailable to his common shareholders, remain (so far as I can see) unimpeached. Why are you defending this person?

Why? To support the point that citing an indictment is a highly questionable approach to attacking someones credibility, especially after witnessing it effectively derail the conversation in this thread.

The insider trading case does not disprove that QWest faced serious economic repercussions for non-compliance.

The question of whether his insider trading charge, which was filed by the SEC four years after his initial actions at QWest, was a response to his non-compliance is a lot less likely. But publicly discrediting your opponents sounds like the type of thing particular agencies do best.

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't wait to disarm you, brother. And the country will be better for it. Hand over those guns!

Sure. Let's make sure only the government has guns. That always works out well, nothing bad ever happened with that. Our democratic government has never used force illegally, violated our rights, and has never exceeded its Constitutional authority. That's why there are so many popular posts on HN lauding the US government for its benevolence. Let me ask you, specifically, why would you want to disarm me? Take away gu…

Lots of brave down voters with no logical discourse to offer today.

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#193
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't that an interpretation refuted by the source material I just provided?

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.

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overstated it by using the wrong metric: proceeds, not profits. The facts of the case, which demonstrate Nacchio selling out of his position in his own company based on private information unavailable to his common shareholders, remain (so far as I can see) unimpeached. Why are you defending this person?

Not GP, but: ⚫ Defendants are entitled to defense. You might even say it's in the name. ⚫ People are entitled to exploration and speculation of both history and legal issues. Legally guaranteed that right in some places. ⚫ Why are you so intent on prosecuting him? For that matter, I note a pretty pronounced pro-Spook bias in many of your posts. ⚫ The circumstances which lead to Qwest's precarious financial state were…

Do you understand what a stipulation is? Nacchio acknowledged the trades I posted from the indictment. Your argument seems to depend on recognizing a dispute where none exists.

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You of all people should know better than to give any credence to indictments . You know what purpose they serve, right?

The indictment contains stipulated facts, which I took pains to pull out. You've ignored that, and instead chosen to beat up a straw man: the idea that I give credence to everything in the indictment, and that my argument depends on the reader believing the prosecutors.

[deleted]

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#196

It would have been very interesting if Yahoo had simply said "do it." A few months later the government would want to demand Yahoo pay them millions of dollars........ but be entirely incapable of explaining WHY they were owed this money at all. That would have been a very interesting event.

At that point they're in contempt of court. There's really no saying how long it would have stayed $250k/day. A week? A month?

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#197

A smarter company would have treated the $250K as a marketing expense. It's peanuts compared to what Yahoo earns, and imagine the reaction when people figured out that Yahoo had gone to the mat for its users.

> A smarter company would have treated the $250K as a marketing expense.

That's called 'contempt of court' and would cause the fines to go up the second the judge realized how they took it.

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#198
post #10

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 routing hubs Joseph Nacchio, the CEO at the time, dug his heels in demanding legal avenues to avoid turning his back on QWest's customers. The US threatened to pull out large contracts that made up a large part of QWest's business. Furthermore, having been serv…

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?

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about that because it seemed like a cost they could just afford to ignore ($91m/yr), this was probably not the limit of the penalties they could have faced.

They'd lock up the execs for "embezzlement". I could tell you a story about this squeaky clean guy I know who's in prison for fraud, because he refused to comply with a secret court order... but I can't, because I don't want to join him. I could tell you another story about a barrister I know who had his career destroyed and his wife "suicided" for refusing to do certain things around a trial in the UK - but again, I…

You seem to have an inside perspective. Care to share more?

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#200

A militarized police state, the state subjugating private businesses according to its needs, state intrusions into the most private spheres of its citizens, executions of US citizens without trial, kidnappings - it all looks like we are moving straight into fascism. And I'm seeing the same pattern in the EU where I live since it basically copies whatever the US does. "Fascist governments encouraged the pursuit of pri…

Yeah, we've been there for about a decade now, and the mask is slipping off.

The biggest question is what to do, and how to do it. Clearly, we have to fix things, but how do we fix a fascism problem that is deeply ingrained in the roots of power and spans multiple countries economic, social, military, and political structures?

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