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Man Charged With Stealing Code From Federal Reserve Bank
wiredmikey writes "A Chinese computer programmer was arrested by U.S. authorities in New York on Wednesday, on charges that he stole proprietary source code while working on a project at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The man arrested, Bo Zhang of New York, worked as a contract employee developing a specific portion of the GWA's (Government-Wide Accounting and Reporting Program) source code at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York where the code is maintained. The complaint alleges that in the summer of 2011, Zhang stole the GWA code, something he admitted to in July 2011. Zhang said that he used the GWA Code in connection with a private business he ran training individuals in computer programming."
Don't steal from the government - it hates the competition
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Every government IT job like this I've ever seen has US citizenship required, not even green card required. How did this guy get in?
I work in a place that makes you sign an NDA. Betcha he had to sign one too. Whether blueprints or code, industrial espionage is a real crime, both morally and legally.
1. this has nothing to do with China 2. USA is just as bad as China when it comes to covert internet access, just that China doesn't run around complaining like a little girl when it happens.
FTA: "he used the GWA Code in connection with a private business he ran training individuals in computer programming" Training individuals who are interested in the Fed's software? Now who (cough) would be interested in that?
Zhang said that he used the GWA Code in connection with a private business he ran training individuals in computer programming.
Correctly edited version: Zhang said that he used the GWA Code in connection with a private business he ran training Chinese Hackers in Reserve Bank Code.
Silence is a state of mime.
Is it a wonder that there is a growing contempt for China and its actions?
I believe we've gone way past the "three times is enemy action" for incidents like these.
Sensationalism by the author, playing to the xenophobic among the indigenous readership. It should have been 'Programmer Steals Code ..' Not 'Chinese Programmer Steals Code ...'
Now, if he were an agent of the PRC, a point of nationality would be highly relevant, but in this case it does not serve fair news reporting.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
“Government-Wide Accounting and Reporting Program” (GWA), a software system owned by the Department of the Treasury that is used mainly to manage central accounting and reporting functions and processes associated with budget execution, accountability, and asset management.
Just sounds like some average bloated corporate code that was stolen. Nothing noteworthy.
2. USA is just as bad as China when it comes to covert internet access, just that China doesn't run around complaining like a little girl when it happens.
I can't decide if this is misogynist, bully-ist, antidemocratic, or just silly.
Your other point is good, though. It's a guy teaching. I don't have any problem with him using the code, he just should have asked permission and they should have been willing to give it to him. Problem is they see it as something it's worth making an example over--possibly destroying his life because he didn't see a problem with using a snippet of code that, in all likelihood, it was not a problem to use.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
private class LeechAmericanPeople{}
There is an unemployed American programmer begging for minimum wage temporary night shift job, and eating spaghetti for the 4th night in a row, meanwhile these shits are hiring Chinese contractors
God bless America!
Carlin - The Real Owners Of America
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying  lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else."
"But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
"You know what they want? Obedient workers  people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."
"This country is finished."
Seems every other day we're hearing about some chinese scientist or programmer that steals US proprietary secrets of some kind. Why does this keep happening? I thought the whole point of a background check was to avoid this sort of thing. Review where you f'ed up in the background check. See what you knew at the start that should have been a red flag and then add it to the disqualified list. If you were fooled at that point or didn't get enough information then see to it that you're harder to fool and gather more information. This is just sad.
Do your damn background checks.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I have more contempt for the fuck that hired a Chinese contractor to work on government systems while people are begging for jobs here
WAS THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Have gnu, will travel.
Did he steal the code and dance out of the place?
Is it a wonder that there is a growing contempt for China and its actions?
If all it takes is for one citizen to copy a bit of code for you to hold his country in contempt, then you must really hate America after all those people lost billions of dollars in the Enron scandal. Of course, I chose the Enron example at random, but there are probably thousands of criminal acts occurring across the country every day. If you are going to just single out the ones committed by people of Chinese decent then think that says more about you than China.
What if he was the best for the job?
America is LOADED with Chinese spies. China is in a cold war with the west, and the west is disregarding it. Sad.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Holy f#ck people are racist on here.
The dude was using some code he wrote to train people. Can we assume guilt of something *after guilt has been proven*? Pretty please?
The same Goldman Sachs and BOA that were cracked after he worked there?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
soooooo yeah.
if you would read Henry Paulson's "On the Brink" he specifically talks about how the Russian government tried to do EXACTLY this in 2008 with the help of the Chinese government. But the Chinese government told the Russians to fuck off and die in a fire. Why ?Partly because Henry Paulson had been the CEO of Goldman Sachs and heavily involved in China for the past several years, . . . his book mentions far more discussions with Chinese leaders during the crash of 2008 than he mentions people like Dick Cheney or even George Bush.
none of this has anything to do with 'hackers' or 'source code'.
His mistake was he should have covered himself by stealing a few billion dollars and giving a few million dollars to election campaigns. Or may he should have incorporated as a bank...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Nope, the cheapest.
You've got to be fucking kidding. If I hadn't already commented in this thread, I'd mod down this BS.
Likely he got the job because they couldn't hire any qualified US citizens. (That's a requirement in H1B, etc., right? OK, we know that HB1 is also a bit of BS, but...)
The bottom line is that Chinese kids are willing to work, and they actually learn things. American kids are even lazier than the 70s, when they spent half of their time in College drunk or hight. Today, for the first time in its history, the US is going to have a generation that is less educated than the previous two generations.
An American programmer paid minimum wage? Like hell. Perhaps a wannabee american programmer who can't get shit done. But the reason America is where it is, is because Americans are fucking lazy ignorant xenophobes.
>FBI Assistant Director in Charge Janice K. Fedarcyk [said] “His intentions with regard to that software are immaterial.
>Stealing it and copying it threatened the security of vitally important source code.”
And what's so important about the security of accounting code? Would it be so bad if this were open source-- heck, the whole process, so that citizens could actually see the financial operations and transactions of Federal Agencies, before tens of millions get embezzelled or spent in boondoggles...
*light comes on.*
Ok, got it.
What's up with that? Slashdotters are losing their edge.
Table-ized A.I.
then USA has a very serious problem on their hands.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Of course you're correct. The Fed isn't in the business of software development and all their code could be open (as opposed to their data). It would be fun project to force this to happen in all goverment departments because of all the screaming and invalid arguments that would ensue but forcing a clean separation between code and data would be extremely beneficial.
but is nothing close to the millions you can steal on Wall Street.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
When I worked for J. P. Morgan before the Chase merger and for a year afterwards, security was so tight I can't think of any way I COULD have stolen code if I wanted to. I don't think my PC even had a floppy drive or a USB port, and everything was on servers, not local machines. Even the MS Access '98 code I wrote resided on servers, though I did have edit copies on my local hard drive.
I went through the usual security checks -- fingerprint submissions to police, FBI, and CIA, etc. Those checks are pretty thorough, so even on that basis I'm surprised a thief was able to sneak through the security protocols.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Well, to be fair, the fact that he is not a US-citizen seems relevant. I am not the first to express surprise that a foreign worker was hired and had access to something so sensitive. I seem to remember that even federal internships often require citizenship. A lot easier to check US-citizen background when hiring, I imagine.
After reading comments about how there are no Americans talented or qualified enough to fill this position, I have to point something out:
There are plenty of American software engineers that could do this job. There aren't plenty of American software engineers that could do this job for the crap pay they were most likely offering. It's not a matter of unwillingness, it's a matter of being able to support a family in the current environment. Corporations whine and whine about no talent being available, but what they really mean is 'there's no talent available that will work for the insulting wages we're offering, so let us hire H1Bs for pennies on the dollar who can't complain or they get deported.' Not only do they save money, they get an employee that they can more easily work into the ground than an American citizen.
The H1B system is a cruel joke perpetrated on the American worker. And before some capitalist-is-awesome-fuck-you moron says that it would kill jobs, no, it would just shrink corporate profits to the point where they make 7 kajillion dollars instead of 9.
Also, IMHO, any entity that hires contractors to do mission critical work instead of hiring full-time employees deserves everything they get.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I'm not talking about guild or innocence here but; They outsourced this important coding job to a Chinese man. Is he the only one who could do it, or was he the cheapest?
If Americans are given good jobs, opportunity and hope for the future -- there's a good chance to expect loyalty and honor from happy citizens.
If you want to replace that model with; "We will bargain you down to the lowest common-denominator on the planet" then you really, really have to beef up security because you can trust them only slightly more than they can trust you. Holy crap!
>> When November of 2008 financial collapse rolled around (inevitably), some Bonds rating companies were giving their consulting clients AAA ratings on whatever they pushed out because consulting made more money than bond rating. The Big Banks got around protections for consumers by using smaller banks to collect the sub-par loans with no questions asked (they were not forced in the SLIGHTEST by anti-red lining laws, contrary to Rush Limbaugh and his minions).
Ultimately, all these "Job Creators" can't really trust each other -- because there are no suckers left. It's only sharks in them thar waters and there is nothing left for bottom feeders but the blood.
>> The Federal Reserve (which has no oversight and isn't government), outsourced a job to a non-American, and likely he already sent a good portion of the code and the Fed's security procedures to China. Dig in fella's, this is how you enjoy just desserts -- and you thought you only had to worry about Occupy Wall Street? Heh.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
So, the DOJ used to have code and no longer does? How much effort is it going to take to recreate this stolen code?
Seriously, folks. We need to start using more descriptive vocabulary to differentiate between 'taking something away from somebody' and 'duplicating something'. These have very different outcomes and should have different name space. 'Copy' is the term that I prefer.
He was only suspected for theft after he tried to change name.
Ka Ching!
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Like the government is really doing government wide accounting and reporting...... Since when?
And I guy gets busted for using the code the tax payers paid for to teach? now its starting to sound more real.
Clearly its would have been only a matter of time before some student figured out the flaws in the system which those in government would manipulate to hide where tax payer money is really going.
Ultimately the question is..... Why is it proprietary? Considering its paid for by the tax payers who really do have a right and duty to know what their government is doing with the the peoples tax dollar..
For those who want to question the Peoples Rights and Duty...... When was the last time you read the Declaration of Independence? Maybe its time for you to read it again.
Apparently, he wasn't.
We're having trouble hiring here. The job is fun, the salary is in 6 figures, but we need a lot of people and there's lots of competition. Often, bad candidates get jobs before we even get a chance to talk to them. Out of state candidates usually don't want to move even with generous compensation.
We only have a single H1B, and the guy is really, really good (and paid accordingly. No money saving there).
Just saying that depending where you're located, if the demand is high, it can be REALLY hard to find good candidates. Most devs who think they're good are terrible.
It is great news that people opt to steal code rather than money, even from banks. I look forward to replacing conservation laws with suitable information-based statements, for a coherent vision of the universe.