FBI Arrests Volkswagen Executive On Charges Related To Dieselgate (cnet.com)

According to CNET, the FBI has arrested Volkswagen executive Oliver Schmidt over the weekend on charges of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. relating to the ongoing Dieselgate emissions scandal. From the report: Schmidt headed VW's regulatory compliance office in the U.S. from 2014 to March 2015. The FBI's official Criminal Complaint states that during that time VW employees -- Schmidt included -- knowingly installed secret "defeat device" software in 475,000 diesel cars in the U.S., hiding during emissions testing the fact that those cars emitted up to 40 times the legally allowable pollution levels when on the road. The complaint asserts that by knowingly installing this secret cheat software, Schmidt and VW conspired to defraud the U.S. by impairing and impeding the Environmental Protection Agency and violating the Clean Air Act, leading to the arrest on Saturday. Schmidt is due to appear before a Federal Court in Miami on Monday.

Comments

Can we stop adding GATE to every scandal?

[Spy Handler]

What you gonna do if Bill Gates is ever involved in a scandal? Call it Gatesgate?

Re:Can we stop adding GATE to every scandal?

[MightyMartian]

The simple answer is simply that enough English-speaking individuals over the last 43-44 years have decided that "-gate" as a suffix at the end of a word can be used to give a scandal as a memorable name. You do understand, I hope, that human language is not a static construct, that words and even morphemes and other elements of speech evolve over time, old words taking on new meanings, new words being formed either by adoption from other languages or by joining together two existing words, and so forth. So, "-gate" as a suffix has now come to a scandal, and has for over four decades gained sufficient penetration in most English-speaking jurisdictions that I'd say it's now a permanent part of the language.

Re:Why is this story worthy?

[drew_kime]

Why is this worthy of Slashdot? This is just an executive being busted by the FBI.

Because the exec was responsible for validating code that was found to not be doing what he said it did.

Do you have anybody in your company doing QA? Or auditing code? Think they might be interested in this?

Re:Toothless

[avandesande]

... or a banker. The whole financial system collapse in 2007 and banks knowingly laundering money for mexican drug cartels (look it up, I am not kidding) and not one arrest.

Re:Why is this story worthy?

[MightyMartian]

I agree. Since this boils down to someone writing software whose explicit purpose is to cheat on government-mandated tests, I'd say it's a very interesting technical story that involves a scenario that may play out in many areas of development. Being a programmer doesn't mean moral, ethical and legal considerations cease to exist.

Re:VW cost investors $80 billion, more than Enron

[avandesande]

2007 financial crisis cost 22 trillion dollars, nobody was jailed.