Slashdot Mirror
Insider-Trading Suspects Smash Hard Drive Evidence
An anonymous reader writes "We all know Slashdotters love debating the best way to wipe a hard drive clean. Looks like tech-savvy Wall Street Hedge Fund managers also know the best way to do it. From the WSJ article: 'Mr. Longueuil's version of that night's events was recorded later, during a December meeting with former colleague Mr. Freeman, who by then was cooperating with the government and recording conversations, according to the U.S. complaint. "F—in' pulled the external drives apart," Mr. Longueuil told Mr. Freeman during their meeting, according to the criminal complaint. "Put 'em into four separate little baggies, and then at 2 a.m. 2 a.m. on a Friday night, I put this stuff inside my black North Face jacket, and leave the apartment and I go on like a twenty block walk around the city and try to find a, a garbage truck and threw the s—t in the back of like random garbage trucks, different garbage trucks four different garbage trucks."'"
Red sleeves.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Yep. To quote the article: "When people frantically begin shredding sensitive documents and deleting computer files and smashing flash drives and chasing garbage trucks at 2 a.m. ... it is not because they have been operating legitimately," said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.
Ahhh the old "if you are innocent, then you shouldn't have a right to privacy" argument.
Obviously I disagree.
I'd destroy my hard drive too if I got word the government was coming. They don't need to know that I donated to wikileaks and other projects.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
The distinction (problem) isn't street thug vs. white collar. It's with the victims. With a street thug, there's one victim, one person bearing all of the injury. It's really easy to look at that one person, feel the emotional weight of the injury, and decide the perpetrator needs to be punished.. With white collar crime, the injury is distributed over dozens, hundreds, sometimes millions of victims. So even though the sum total of the injury may be much greater than the sum total of the injury caused by the street thug, there is little to no emotional impact. People still see it as "well, that spam only cost me 5 seconds of my life, so no big deal." So the punishments tend to be much less severe.
Guess what? 5 seconds per spam * 10 spams which get past the filters * 100 million recipients works out to 158 man-years of time lost. The sum total of the injury caused by this spammer is actually greater than killing a person. It's just that the injury is distributed instead of concentrated on one place. The average lost productivity to society is the same.