Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer

by yummyfajitas • 13 years ago

257 219 13 years ago

vanityfair.com

ImJasonH• 13 years ago

My favorite part of all of this is the scare-quotes around "subversion repository"

hawkw2• 13 years ago

Oh no! The hackers are coming with their terrible powers of "subversion"!

ErikAugust• 13 years ago

You think if they chose to use Git for version control the agent would have not thought anything of it? Subversion just sounds too menacing?

cupcake-unicorn3• 13 years ago

Well, I'm sure they'd find some other, equally ridiculous way to interpret "Git" - obviously the programmer was making a statement about the stupid "gits" in charge of the company...

6d0debc071• 13 years ago

Of course they overstepped. They basically mugged a person of their life savings, deprived them of their liberty, and ruined his marriage over nothing of consequence.

davidw• 13 years ago

I have some recollection that it was a bunch of Erlang code, from some other article about it.

Edit: Hah, wow... ok, so it's a small world. If I'm not mistaken, this is the same Sergey Aleynikov:

https://github.com/saleyn/erlexec/commits/master

I've been interacting with him quite a bit lately regarding his erlexec code. He strikes me as a nice guy.

Edit2: Looks like he's asking for donations to help fund his defense: http://www.aleynikov.org/

cmiles74• 13 years ago

Programming is starting to seem like a relatively dangerous kind of work.

hawkw2• 13 years ago

ITT: journalists don't "get" programming.

bmj• 13 years ago

It sounds like a couple of tech-savvy journalists should start the equivalent of http://getreligion.org.

biafra• 13 years ago

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?

ig14• 13 years ago

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.

kasey_junk3• 13 years ago

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.

doug1001• 13 years ago

That's inaccurate. I just read the Lewis article and there are plenty of facts recited there contradict your summary; none of those facts support it.

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.

dllthomas2• 13 years ago

It seems unrealistic to call bash_history an audit trail, when it can be trivially circumvented:

     set +o history
    steal secrets
    launch missiles
     set -o history

mikepurvis• 13 years ago

It's a Michael Lewis piece—it's worth reading the whole thing. (And when you're done, then The Big Short, Moneyball, and Liar's Poker.)

amalag• 13 years ago

If it was a normal company you could boycott them, but how do you boycott Goldman Sachs for all they have done?

mikegioia• 13 years ago

You could try to convince other programmers not to work there? I really think that's the only way.

xradionut• 13 years ago

Why boycott GS? It's their state, country and mostly their world to loot. They have been above the law for over 80 years. They own the current administration, courts and congress. I wouldn't doubt it if someone claimed they had access to much of the NSA collection due to the amount of influence they have...

impendia3• 13 years ago

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."

clicks• 13 years ago

You should have taken him to a side and told him to go watch 12 Angry Men when he gets home.

GeneralMayhem6• 13 years ago

Or smacked him and told him to grow the fuck up.

Symmetry• 13 years ago

12 Angry Men might, perhaps, not be the best example.

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/11/odds-again-ba...

EDIT: Actually, this is the one I should have linked to: http://www.avclub.com/articles/did-12-angry-men-get-it-wrong...

brazzy• 13 years ago

Appropriate response: "If we convict the wrong guy, the real murderer goes free, you realize".

impendia3• 13 years ago

Actually, it turns out that that wasn't true, at least not under the relevant law.

The defendant was a gang member and a participant in an armed robbery, and when things got ugly (the victims fought back) one of the gang members shot one of the victims.

It was not proved to us that the defendant was the shooter, but -- as I was shocked to learn -- California law put him on the hook for the murder.

Possibly whoever actually shot the victim is still at large. The shooting took place at night, outdoors, the eyewitnesses were all drunk, and their testimony made it clear that, under the circumstances, they could barely tell one black man from another.

dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

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.

impendia3• 13 years ago

I should add: The majority of what I experienced was similar to what you did.

tehwalrus2• 13 years ago

I was on a jury (robbery) in the UK. It's a crime to say, afterwards, what happened in a jury room in the UK.

tomjen32• 13 years ago

So could you punch one of the other Juriors and get away with it, since they can't press charges?

Fomite• 13 years ago

Weirdly, a jury I was on absolutely went for me arguing something was "Necessary, but not sufficient" during our deliberation. That one surprised me.

cgshaw2• 13 years ago

As an attorney and someone moderately interested in politics, it's becoming more and more clear that technical literacy is going to play a huge role in law and policy.

We desperately need more politicians, bureaucrats and law enforcement who at least have some basic technical knowledge.

Empathy is the only way to prevent stuff like this.

ionforce• 13 years ago

Usually people who attain technical knowledge are the same type to avoid politics.

Politics is a "soft" game of imperfections, where as technical knowledge is the opposite. Cold, hard, objective.

What incentive is there for technically-equipped folk to deal with the imperfections and heartache of interacting with non-technical folk than to take a white collar job amongst other technically-minded folk?

cgshaw2• 13 years ago

I completely agree.

Maybe it should be more incumbent on politicians and law enforcement to learn more about technology and incorporate more private citizens as opposed to just big corporations in the dialogue.

It's frustrating, I think everyone realizes that technology is going to become a greater and greater part of every day life in government and yet there hasn't been much of a push for elected officials to give a shit to do anything but fundraise with it.

eshvk• 13 years ago

technical knowledge is the opposite. Cold, hard, objective.

Life isn't that black or white. Companies run on soft games, the world, your product succeeds not because of "cold, hard, objective" amazing technical design but due to soft irrational people. I'd argue that there are enough people in tech well versed in the soft game for money to be made.

Daniel_Newby• 13 years ago

This was not a case of ignorance or lack of empathy. The system worked as intended: the tallest poppy was cut down, his downfall was a PR victory for someone's reappointment campaign, and by extension someone else's reelection.

Technical knowledge would merely give them Google level efficiency at shafting their victims.

melling2• 13 years ago

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.

michaelochurch• 13 years ago

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 had no intention to do anything wrong, but almost certainly did break the law in a pattern that's a notorious bugbear in finance.

uxp• 13 years ago

Did he break the law, specifically the espionage act?

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.

melling2• 13 years ago

How do you know that he did not intend to do anything wrong? I certainly don't his intentions.

lgeek• 13 years ago

Initially I thought something along these lines as well. But according to the article, it was common practice:

They’d followed his case in the newspapers and noted the shiver it had sent down the spines of Wall Street’s software developers. Until Serge was sent to jail for doing it, Wall Street programmers routinely took code they had worked on when they left for new jobs. “A guy got put in jail for taking something no one understood,” as one of them put it. “Every tech programmer out there got the message: Take code and you could go to jail. It was huge.”

RockyMcNuts2• 13 years ago

No way. You sign away any rights to anything you come up with. You get the lecture on it. This guy Serge got shut down when he wanted to open source something. (although GS has open sourced some simple and non-strategic stuff, as a presumable PR move)

By both the letter of what you agree to and industry standard it's not really ethical to dump your employer's code into Dropbox or whatever. They go a long way to block it, blocking sharing sites, USB ports, etc. I'm not saying it doesn't happen all the time, just like brokers taking their client lists. People justify it by saying 'really, I'm supposed to look these people up in the phone book?' or 'really, I'm supposed to re-implement this simple function?'

How unethical sort of depends on how much of an edge you take, it's one thing if it's stuff you did yourself that would be inconvenient to recreate, the equivalent of your spiral notebook, something else if it's what other people did that would have been impossible to recreate.

But I think Serge demonstrates ignorance and naivete by thinking that was normal practice, and both Serge and Lewis demonstrate an ethical blind spot.

Did he deserve to be made an example of? I have no idea if he did or why that happened. Maybe there was stuff in there that was viewed as very proprietary. Maybe it was clever, or they just had an inflated sense of its value. Maybe what seemed trivial to Serge seemed extremely valuable and proprietary to GS. Or maybe he just pissed off the wrong guy. Or maybe they were getting poached a lot and decided to take a stand. I don't think we'll ever know. Certainly not based on this article.

chollida1• 13 years ago

il Serge was sent to jail for doing it, Wall Street programmers routinely took code they had worked on when they left for new jobs.

This is a huge grey area, well maybe not so grey right now. Often you can't seperate quants from their excel sheet( or R models) and they will keep these models as they move to new firms.

As far as programmers keeping the code they wrote, This is the first time I've ever heard of a programmer, and I'm one, leaving a shop and bringing their code with them.

Let's just say, there is no ambiguity what-so-ever about how employers feel about this in the finance industry.

pdovy• 13 years ago

I would think this would be common sense at any job - unless otherwise specified in your contract the work that you do for your employer belongs to your employer, full stop. According to the article he freely admits that what he took included proprietary code - that is theft.

Now, was Goldman reasonable here? No, we can probably all agree that Goldman and the government overstepped a lot of bounds chasing this guy down. That said, I don't think some form of prosecution was unreasonable.

msandford2• 13 years ago

That might be, but it's a CIVIL issue not a CRIMINAL one.

walshemj4• 13 years ago

Banks take security v seriously even trying to plug a usb drive into you pc to copy files will be logged and will probably get you fired.

jonknee3• 13 years ago

Getting fired for breaking policy is fine. Calling in favors to the Feds and nailing someone for 8 years is not.

BudVVeezer• 13 years ago

That must explain my bank's insistence on not having passwords greater than 9 characters, without spaces or most "special characters." They take security seriously!

riskable2• 13 years ago

First of all: Banks do not take security very seriously. I know this from first-hand experience working at banks. What they do take seriously is people "leaking" or sharing proprietary information.

Secondly: Being fired is not what happened to this guy. He was prosecuted and sent to prison. Not even remotely the same thing.

brianpgordon• 13 years ago

The question isn't whether Sergey did something he shouldn't have. It's whether Goldman and the government overstepped in prosecuting him.

Being sentenced to 8 years in prison based on wildly ill-informed testimony is clearly not a reasonable response.

waffle_ss• 13 years ago

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 the content of what I am saying. He just kept saying to me, 'If you tell me everything, I'll talk to the judge, and he'll go easy on you.' It appeared they had a very strong bias from the very beginning. They had goals they wanted to fulfill. The goal was to obtain an immediate confession."

Don't talk to police! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

sneak2• 13 years ago

That video is right up there with knowing about 83b elections as some of the most valuable information one can possibly possess.

I rewatch it annually and send out mass emails to all my friends and family when I do reminding them to do so as well.

reginaldjcooper2• 13 years ago

Can you add "jury nullification" to the mass emails also? That's what I tell my friends and family about.

gamblor956• 13 years ago

Tell that to all the Zynga employees who made 83(b) elections and are now underwater! 83(b) entails being taxed on the value of stock/options when purchased/received (i.e., as compensation), rather than when vested or when exercised. It's great if the value of the stock increases, but you're substantially worse off economically (taking the time value of money into account) if the value of the stock decreases.

mahyarm• 13 years ago

Unless the total price of the stock grant is financially negligible at the point of hire, the %5 tax difference isn't that great of an advantage compared to the risk since most startups fail.

I think vested stock options not expiring a few months after leaving the company is far more valuable, but no one does that. It would allow you to put no money down and only exercise when the options are actually liquid without being forced to purchase the stock at some point due to circumstances not under your control.

tomp2• 13 years ago

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, ...?

drone• 13 years ago

Yes, all persons on US soil are to be protected by the constitution. (Not withstanding specific incidents of abuse, the fact that one is, or isn't a citizen is not intended to have any effect on the constitutional rights available.)

qdpb• 13 years ago

He most definitely is an American now. Otherwise he would be deported by now.

rhizome3• 13 years ago

Even more on point: ALWAYS record interactions with the FBI:

http://jonathanturley.org/2013/05/11/why-the-fbi-doesnt-reco...

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130516/18383623114/your-w...

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/05/10/beware-fbi-whe...

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/20070402_FBI_Me...

psychometry• 13 years ago

Unless you live in a multiple-party wiretap consent state, in which case you've committed additional crimes.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

The best answer to the question "Can I ask you a few questions?" is "Sure! Just give me your card and I'll have my attorney set something up."

Gives them nowhere to go but home.

dustingetz• 13 years ago

This is far too oversimplified to be the third comment I read in this thread, sorry.

RestlessMind• 13 years ago

I don't know anyone in my circles who "has" a lawyer. So what to do when you encounter a situation with law enforcement officials? If I am at home, sure, I can search for a nearby lawyer's contact information. But what if I am at airport or some place where I cannot search for one? How do I find a lawyer in that case?

VladRussian2• 13 years ago

"If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you before any questioning, if you wish."

it is when you're arrested. Until arrested - my understanding that one don't have to answer questions. Though personally i found it is really impossible to insist on your rights, i basically just chicken under stress : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6142434

noonespecial• 13 years ago

“He was stringing these computer terms together in ways that made no sense. He didn’t seem to know anything about high-frequency trading or source code.”

Programming is esoteric to common folk. Almost like witchcraft. When things go wrong for villagers, they often burn witches.

They didn't burn witches in the old days because of some moral failing that we've outgrown. They burned them because they were unable to understand that "witches" didn't actually cause plagues.

minimax• 13 years ago

That cringing sensation you got when you saw the scare quotes around "subversion repository" is the same feeling people in trading get when journalists write about HFT and algorithmic trading. You can see an obvious example in the article where Michael Lewis applies scare quotes to "dark pools."

sgt1012• 13 years ago

dark pools scare me a hell of a lot more than witches - possibly because the continued functioning of the financial system is more important to me than warts.

hexasquid• 13 years ago

"He was stringing these computer terms together in ways that made no sense."

That's how I see job specs from recruiters.

kenjagi• 13 years ago

That article is riddled with inaccuracies.

chrisgd3• 13 years ago

Try listing them

gd12• 13 years ago

His 'second jury' were comical.

"Most were surprised by how little he had taken in relation to the whole: eight megabytes in a platform that consisted of an estimated one gigabyte of code. "

Really? One gigabyte of code? Or one gigabyte of third party binaries, precompiled libraries, documentation etc.? All you need are the source files, and those language keywords compress nicely. Exactly how much plain text do you think they have?

' "But that’s the secret sauce, if there is one,” said the juror. “If you’re going to take something, take the strats.” '

Rubbish. The strats are the easy (or at least easier) bit in the high frequency space. That's like taking a dump of the html from facebook/twitter and thinking you've stolen their site. It's the scalable, distributed infrastructure that drives large websites, and it's the fastest possible infrastructure that drives HFT. One thing Lewis got right is the Coke/Pepsi analogy, and it really is that simple. A straight up race.

" “It’s way easier to start from scratch.” "

It is, and it isn't. In even the worst codebase there will be nuggets of usefulness that will accelerate the process. Isolated parts of the system that you've perfected. Exchange message decoders for example (ITCH, FIX/FAST, etc.). This is especially true when you, the genius who will be starting from scratch, has worked on it for a few years. I assume he was doing something useful in his time at Goldman.

I'm not buying the innocent act.

nonchalance• 13 years ago

The best lesson here:

The fourth, and final, rule was by far the most important: Don’t say a word to government officials. “The reason you don’t,” he says, “is that, if you do, they can place an agent on a witness stand and he can say anything.”

Aren't you allowed to have a lawyer present in conversations with agents?

chrisgd3• 13 years ago

A right he did not exercise

sneak2• 13 years ago

I haven't clicked through, but only the government (via prosecutors) can charge anyone with criminal offenses.

Additionally, while private people can suggest charges or report crimes, ultimately they have zero say one way or the other if charges actually get filed.

See also: Apple/DoJ/Gawker, ATT/Apple/DoJ/weev, JSTOR/MIT/aaronsw

s_q_b• 13 years ago

only the government (via prosecutors) can charge anyone with criminal offenses.

That's almost universally true, but some states still do in fact have the right of private prosecution. E.g. New Jersey allows you to swear out a criminal complaint directly to a magistrate, and there isn't a damn thing the police or a prosecutor can do about it.

Private prosecutions used to be the norm. It's actually a very powerful force against police corruption, and I wish it hadn't gone away in so many states.

Also, in cases like this, the prosecutors will generally defer to the desires of the victim, especially when the victim is one of the world's most powerful corporations.

JonnieCache• 13 years ago

Side question: how do these people with "only the vaguest interest in his fellow human beings" end up with a wife and three kids? It seems to be a common theme amongst articles like this. They always paint the hero-programmer as some kind of rainman figure and then it turns out he has a loving family. Just the usual fictional press nonsense I guess.

EDIT: should always read on before commenting:

"He married a girl and manages to have three kids with her before he figures out he doesn’t really know her."

feintruled• 13 years ago

As far as the article has it, it wasn't a match of love. It was just two Russians getting together through the ex-pat community, she got security and money to spend, and he just did it because it was the thing to do.

thufry• 13 years ago

I am someone who has only the vaguest interest in my fellow human beings, and has a great, loving relationship with my girlfriend. Different people want different things. I enjoy my girlfriend's company and enjoy spending time with her and a few other friends but in general I detest the presence of other people in my physical vicinity.

ahallock• 13 years ago

How does this case not violate the eighth amendment? Or if not that, basic fucking justice and morality. He's lost everything, spent a year in prison, was acquitted of federal charges, and now is being charged by NY State? The justice system is seriously broken.

wmil• 13 years ago

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.

chiph• 13 years ago

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.

yummyfajitas2• 13 years ago

On the contrary, Goldman generally stands by their employees provided they believe the employee stood by them. See for example, Fabrice Tourre, who's personal legal expenses were entirely covered by Goldman.

GeneralMayhem6• 13 years ago

This makes me angry. Not just the story itself, but the way VF goes about telling it, which commits the same sins (albeit with better intent) as Goldman Sachs. "So-called 'subversion repository'?" Why don't we just accuse him of summoning demons while we're at it?

danielweber• 13 years ago

Michael Lewis is a great writer about economics. He appears to have gotten out of his depth here.

GeneralMayhem6• 13 years ago

Wow, I don't know why the name didn't register. Yeah, he's spectacular when writing about economics or sports.

freyr• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm giving him too much credit, but I think the author's emphasizing that the term itself sounds like damning evidence to anyone who doesn't know better, since subversion means "a systematic attempt to overthrow or undermine a government or political system by persons working secretly from within." He's pointing out that agent used such terms without understanding them (or exploited the public's ignorance to make their case). That's why he put it in quotes.

Lewis goes on to explain, later in the article, that subversion repositories are commonly used and aren't evil. He could have explicitly spelled out that the term subversion relates to version control, but I think he explained it adequately enough given the intended audience.

shubb• 13 years ago

To be fair to the agent, I think uploading company code to your private third party repository is pretty bad.

Especially if you are thinking (later in the article, quoting the programmer), 'they wouldn't like it', 'it was like speeding, in a stolen car'.

rtkwe• 13 years ago

(For that specific instance at least) Read the start of that paragraph again. That's supposed to be the FBI agent trying to describe what happened and being completely flummoxed by the use of subversion that doesn't line up with the dictionary definition.

'Then he explained what he knew, or thought he knew:...'

stdgy• 13 years ago

I thought that was supposed to be sarcastic, poking fun at the terminology as viewed from the non-tech savvy jury and FBI agents. Though, as always, that's not an easy thing to tell online.

zeteo• 13 years ago

The justice system is, of course, still in the business of catching and punishing murderers, thieves and such. But, with the decline in crime since the early '90s, this side of their activity is becoming increasingly supplemented by a different game altogether: enforcing a growing set of complex laws against practically everything [1]. There is a lot of prosecutorial discretion in choosing which of these laws to enforce and the degree to which to enforce them. With prosecutors often competing against each other in the number and severity of convictions secured, it's hardly surprising that they've arrived at the age-old algorithm used by street muggers: pick the most likely victim, and go all in. A guy like Aleynikov was thus ideally suited as a prosecution target: unlikely to excite much sympathy from a jury with his heavy accent and un-American looks; clueless about lawyers and confessions; cooperative enough to sign statements that were re-formulated by investigators to look bad in court; high-tech enough to mark novel and impressive prosecutorial checkboxes. They consequently made sure to squeeze him for all he had.

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

gknoy2• 13 years ago

Once targeted by something like this, how does one go about finding a competent lawyer? How do I evaluate their competency?

sfall• 13 years ago

look at their boy of work, their specialty, their work history, and then sit down and talk with them they should be able to quickly start asking questions about relevant specifics

j_baker2• 13 years ago

Most importantly, don't say anything that might incriminate you. Even if they have you on video doing it with hundreds of witnesses and DNA evidence.

kbenson• 13 years ago

That's the whole point of not talking unless a lawyer is present (and you give them a chance to vet your speech). You have very little chance of knowing what is incriminating, and this is by design.

Their job is to put away criminals. In the case where there is not really a crime, their training, which is meant to get confessions from actual criminals, ends up pulling seeming confessions to nonexistent crimes from innocent people. After that happens, you are screwed.

Ruska• 13 years ago

Don't say anything. At all. Nothing you say will help your circumstances, but it can hurt you.

dredmorbius• 13 years ago

Note that even denials, e.g., "I have no idea of what you're talking about", can result in charges, if they're provably false (e.g., there's a record you do know what they're talking about -- email, twitter, writings, conversations, etc.). These typically lead to various "obstruction" charges.

Simply refuse to comment.

perlpimp2• 13 years ago

Always ask for immunity or ask them repeatedly to rephrase their questions as a vehicle of supporting a useless conversation. Until they bring papers for you to sign immunity, tell them that you do not understand and tell them to explain it differenty because you do not understand.

You can be held for 24 hours than you have to be released. After you are released make sure to find strongly worded complaint that whoever you dealt with overstepped their boundaries. Scan then submit it. Put up a scan on your website and link all relevant resources that have been used to harass you and jail you for that period of time. Add diquis or some other commenting service and roll with it.

vijucat• 13 years ago

I have worked with Goldman and UBS. UBS, to it's credit, has taken a liberal stance and explicitly addresses contributions to Open Source : if they are done on your own time, that's fine. Goldman, in contrast, had the usual, "anything and everything you do or do not belongs to us" agreement.

jrochkind12• 13 years ago

Man, talk about risks computer programmers don't usually consider in taking a job on wall street.

vermontdevil• 13 years ago

And now he's being charged by the state of New York. This will never end as long as Goldman Sachs continues to pull the strings, I fear.

GeneralMayhem6• 13 years ago

An interesting takeaway from this piece is that GS is blatantly and systematically violating the terms of the MIT license, GPL, and whatever else they happen to get their hands on. I'd love nothing more than for the FSF to take them to court over it.

fnordfnordfnord4• 13 years ago

Me too, in principle, but realistically I think it would be a poor bet to make. Given the legal resources available to the respective parties there is a real danger that GS would win despite the merits, and possibly even set some precedent that Open Source folk would not find favorable.

vidarh• 13 years ago

That's only true if they distribute the code, is it not?

GeneralMayhem6• 13 years ago

IANAL, but I don't think so. Practically, probably; legally, unknown.

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

That makes it sound like ripping the license out and replacing it with a proprietary one, even for purely internal use, is probably a bad idea. I don't know who'd be able to sue them for that, though, if the original copyright "owners" aren't supposed to have seen it in the first place.

Article II of the GPL has a specific exception for transferring GPL-ed software to employees to work on without letting them spread it beyond that, but I don't know how much of this that would cover.

mratzloff• 13 years ago

GPL, perhaps, but I'm not sure how you think they're violating MIT.

GeneralMayhem6• 13 years ago

The only clause in MIT (besides the warranty disclaimer) is that the MIT license and original copyright notice must remain on all copies of the software.

snake_plissken• 13 years ago

Like the opening of the Vanity Fair article, I never and still do not understand exactly what he did that is illegal.

jmduke2• 13 years ago

This is the first front-paged post I know of where nobody's invoked Betteridge's Law of Headlines, which I find particularly ironic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

mcgwiz2• 13 years ago

The article was very sympathetic toward Aleynikov and accounts his acquittal on appeal, so it breaks that "law" (which IMHO is upheld primarily due to confirmation bias).

jmduke2• 13 years ago

which IMHO is upheld primarily due to confirmation bias

I agree; this was my point. Its frustrating to trot out a trite middlebrow dismissal for when we don't like something and to pretend it doesn't exist otherwise.

finnh• 13 years ago

I was actually just about to post a corollary to Betteridge's law of headlines, which is:

Any headline asking if Goldman Sachs committed malfeasance can be answered with "yes."

Geekette• 13 years ago

Wow. Naivete is a bitch... Or one hell of a drug, depending on your viewing angle.

And given his re-arrest on what appear to be spurious charges (1st set were thrown out on appeal), I can't help but agree with this comment on VF: "When Goldman says 'jump', the gov't says: 'How high?'"

justinhj• 13 years ago

The only thing I find odd is the deleting of the bash history. There are no passwords in there, unless you type one by accident.

beerscout• 13 years ago

If he used wget (or similar utility) he could specify password as a command line argument. It's not a very good practice security-wise but people do this sometimes.

mcgwiz2• 13 years ago

Although I acknowledge the sympathetic angle of the article, I cannot fathom why he would take such a risk.

During my 2 years consulting in global investment banks in NYC, it was standard practice for all employees, internal or external, with access to sensitive data or IP to undergo comprehensive IP compliance training and execution of IP agreements. This had to be performed within a month or so of engagement or your badge and account would be deactivated. Every year at a particular client required the training to be repeated.

It was inculcated that violations of such policy had a high likelihood of being caught and would carry very significant penalties. In my experience, they successfully established very taboo cultures around transmitting IP out of their systems.

fnordfnordfnord4• 13 years ago

IIRC one speculation on the matter was that the information that was taken would have proven that GS engages in all sorts of illegal and rule-bending trading strategies (say it ain't so).

edit: added quote from court record below.

"...because of the way this software interfaces with the various markets and exchanges, the bank has raised a possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways."

See page 8 http://www.scribd.com/doc/17191934/USAvSergeyAleynikov-7409-...

Fuxy• 13 years ago

That's the problem with the American judicial system. Whenever they want to convict someone innocent of a bullshit crime they just assemble of idiots who just say guilty to go home to their trailer. Have they heard of the phrase "jury of their pears" that actually means pears not of the same species. I wouldn't consider any of the people on that jury my pears.

ben0x539• 13 years ago

(peers)

BWStearns2• 13 years ago

I for one would be fascinated to see a jury of pears.

iopq• 13 years ago

jury of my pears? Why would the jury consist of fruits?

tomjen32• 13 years ago

jury of one's peers n. a guaranteed right of criminal defendants, in which "peer" means an "equal." This has been interpreted by courts to mean that the available jurors include a broad spectrum of the population, particularly of race, national origin and gender. Jury selection may include no process which excludes those of a particular race or intentionally narrows the spectrum of possible jurors. It does not mean that women are to be tried by women, Asians by Asians, or African Americans by African Americans.

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/jury+of+one's+...

But originally jury of ones peers was a right of (so called noble) Englishmen to be judged by other lords, and not by commoners. Sadly, it does not give intellectual people the right to be judged by others with above room temperature IQ (what is it they say, a jury consists of 12 people not smart enough to get out jury duty?).

dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

Sadly, it does not give intellectual people the right to be judged by others with above room temperature IQ

The closest English precedent for that was not the "jury of one's peers" but the "benefit of clergy".

mathattack• 13 years ago

They did mug him, but it's considered a huge no-no in financial services to take any kind of code home. It's impossible that he didn't know the gravity of what he was doing when he did it. It's always a terminatable offense at the very least, and frequently leads to more.

j_baker2• 13 years ago

When I took Criminology (or perhaps it was Deviance), my professor made me read this book: http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Going-To-Prison/dp/1559501197

It was written decades ago, and is still relevant today. Sadly, I think programmers should begin reading it, as prison seems to be growing into a larger threat for us.

rollo_tommasi2• 13 years ago

This article is also interesting in that the total blind trust McSwain put in Goldman's explanation of the situation really illustrates the typical mob hit-man mentality of most law enforcement agents. The Big Boss gives them a name and they take that guy out, no questions asked.

pigscantfly• 13 years ago

It's all down to laziness, IMO. That FBI agent could have done some research for verification and realized that Goldman was selling him an overblown story. What's the point, though; the courts will do their background research eventually, right? And by then they'll be arresting the next poor schmuck Wall Street doesn't want to lose to a competitor.

pmorici• 13 years ago

Or insider connections; I would bet that the people in charge of security at Goldman are probably former FBI, Secret Service, or similar background.

nohuck132• 13 years ago

I was working at one of the rival HFT's mentioned in the article when all this went down. I had some thoughts.

-It's never ok to take proprietary code with you after quitting. I don't know anybody that would have thought that was OK, especially with the amount of money people were making off this IP in 2008. Of course that's true in any industry, but especially in trading.

-That said, you can't just walk out the door of Goldman on Friday and be trading on Monday, even if you had their entire codebase. The infrastructure needed to be a world-class HFT player at Goldman scale is insanely complicated and prohibitively expensive to all but the most well-funded folks these days. You're going to need colo space and power at tens of trading venues, low-latency WAN infrastructure to ship production quotes and data around the world, expensive exchange gateway connectivity, quant research platforms and a giant compute cluster, significant devops and monitoring infrastructure to run and monitor it all, and smart people evolve the stategies, models, and code as it decays while you're setting all this stuff up.

appdeveloper• 13 years ago

I agree- it's not okay to take proprietary code. But criminal charges and an 8 year sentence? Totally disproportionate.

nohuck132• 13 years ago

Oh, agreed. I was surprised at the attitude that taking code might be a commonplace thing. Didn't mean to defend the punishment.

perlpimp2• 13 years ago

That is some advertisement for Goldman, work for us and you will be fine, quit and we will sic FBI, Police or whoever we can find to persecute you, take your money destroy your family and ...

.. man this sounds like some mafia.

kaonashi• 13 years ago

What does it mean exactly to 'take proprietary code'? You mean he had a copy on his laptop so he could work from home? Isn't that what most of us do?

craigching• 13 years ago

Was it a personal laptop or a GS owned laptop? I don't want to defend GS and I think the criminal charges are overboard (and I don't understand how they think it's ok, hopefully it hurts their ability to recruit), but generally when you work for a company it is NOT ok to put company assets on personal machines.

Every company has its own policy, but I would bet GS wasn't cool with putting their code on personal machines.

phyalow3• 13 years ago

nohuck13 - Can you email me on the address in my profile? I have a couple of questions regarding the industry. Thanks :P

pdog• 13 years ago

Regarding your second point, the code for the strats would be immensely and immediately more useful than the trading platform. You wouldn't need much infrastructure to build a profitable strategy to trade against it.

cupcake-unicorn3• 13 years ago

I don't have anything useful to say, but: "Serge figured, it was a matter of unfolding the box, turning a three-dimensional object into a one-dimensional surface"

Now how does one do that? :) And he shouldn't have had to used the Pythagorean theorem on just a one dimensional line...

Sigh. Just thought it was funny, since the article was about how programming/technical jargon goes over the heads of jurors, the FBI, etc. but seems like the article writer isn't immune to it either :)

jmaygarden• 13 years ago

There are multiple ways to unfold a box into 2 dimensions. For example, see this printable pattern that you can try at home [1].

Also, how else would you determine the distance between two coordinates in a plane without using the Pythagorean theorem [2]? It's not like he could use a measuring tape in an imaginary, unfolded room.

EDIT: I reread your post and see that you are pointing out a typo. The phrase "one-dimensional surface" was obviously meant to be "two-dimensional surface." A one-dimensional surface is non-sense.

[1] http://familycrafts.about.com/cs/coloringpages/l/blboxtempla...

[2] http://www.purplemath.com/modules/distform.htm

cupcake-unicorn3• 13 years ago

Yes, sorry - I was pointing out the "one dimensional" typo.

imsofuture• 13 years ago

While stupidity isn't a crime, people like Serge manage to find their way around that obstacle.

It's pretty obvious he didn't have any malicious or illegal intent, but he definitely followed the checklist of 'things not to do when leaving a job'. Emailing yourself code? Seriously?

The whole thing is a travesty, but he walked right into it.

yogo2• 13 years ago

That was my impression too. For someone that smart in a technical field, some things just seemed a little to casual or didn't make much sense. Deleting your bash history because there might be passwords in it? I generally give the benefit of the doubt to the guy in his position--maybe he was in a hurry or got comfortable being one of the chosen few super users--but, you have to think wtf.

At a company like that where IP is highly valuable and you are paid handsomely, you know right off the bat that every character of code you right belongs to the company before even seeing employment and/or confidentiality agreements.

Dating another woman or stuffing a large object in your trunk late at night right after your wife dies, does not look good. You may very well be innocent, but it doesn't look good.

smm2000• 13 years ago

I have passwords in my bash history - namely mysql passwords.

pawrvx• 13 years ago

Goldman is above the law.

metaphorm2• 13 years ago

A reminder everyone, the only thing you should ever say to a law enforcement officer is "I'd like to see my attorney."

Tycho• 13 years ago

Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street

Is that true?

(the rest of the paragraph was interesting, and worth repeating for anyone who read the whole article):

Serge thought he knew why: they had been forced to learn programming without the luxury of endless computer time. “In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes,” he says. “When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work. Consequently we learned to write the code in a way that minimized the amount of debugging. And so you had to think about it a lot before you committed it to paper. . . . The ready availability of computer time creates this mode of working where you just have an idea and type it and maybe erase it 10 times. Good Russian programmers, they tend to have had that one experience at some time in the past: the experience of limited access to computer time.”

known• 13 years ago

Paranoid?

mabhatter• 13 years ago

Black and white letter of the law, he should not have sent the modified Open Source programs home. The modifications really would be the employers property and the employer has all the power to release them. That said, he had been sending the files home to work on all along (before changing jobs) and never was EXPRESSLY TOLD to stop. That is why the original case would have been tossed as there was noillegal access" going on.

The second case for sending secrets is closer to legit. But only because if you send secrets out at all, if you didn't have permission, it could be illegal.

The REAL issue is font work for asshats that don't play nice. Alternately, accept that as a programmer mixing hobby Open Source projects with your Employment projects is a recipe for trouble.. Take their money and be a sucky leacher.. Or post your fixes to maintainers from home, reengineered solely at home with no files from work.

As somebody who does admin work, its a great excuse just to not take work home at all unless its on my company laptop.

Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

Related Stories