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."
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, ...?
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?
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.
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.
“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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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?'"
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] waffle_ss|12 years ago|reply
"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
[+] [-] rhizome|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
Gives them nowhere to go but home.
[+] [-] sneak|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tomp|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RestlessMind|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|12 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] zeteo|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] gknoy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perlpimp|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] j_baker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hexasquid|12 years ago|reply
That's how I see job specs from recruiters.
[+] [-] nohuck13|12 years ago|reply
-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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaonashi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdog|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phyalow|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] impendia|12 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] dragonwriter|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brazzy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tehwalrus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clicks|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fomite|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonnieCache|12 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] 6d0debc071|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rollo_tommasi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imsofuture|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wmil|12 years ago|reply
"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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdovy|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lgeek|12 years ago|reply
> 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.”
[+] [-] walshemj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianpgordon|12 years ago|reply
Being sentenced to 8 years in prison based on wildly ill-informed testimony is clearly not a reasonable response.
[+] [-] michaelochurch|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ImJasonH|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Geekette|12 years ago|reply
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?'"
[+] [-] cgshaw|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] Daniel_Newby|12 years ago|reply
Technical knowledge would merely give them Google level efficiency at shafting their victims.
[+] [-] GeneralMayhem|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcgwiz|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] GeneralMayhem|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnordfnordfnord|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mratzloff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmiles74|12 years ago|reply