back to article Accused Goldman Sachs code pilferer sues FBI for 'wrongful arrest'

A former programmer for banking firm Goldman Sachs who has been accused of stealing company secrets has filed suit against the FBI agents who arrested him for allegedly violating his constitutional rights. Sergey Aleynikov, 45, has been battling it out in the courts ever since his 2009 arrest on charges that he absconded with …

  1. RaidOne
    Happy

    Maybe the guy...

    ... Had all the company code on his home PC to work on it - all of us are working from home, right? Right?

    Regardless of the fact that he is guilty or not, I can bet Goldman Sachs will pay anyway.

    1. FreemonSandlewould

      Re: Maybe the guy...

      Goldman Sachs has ties to the highest level of government. It is pretty obvious to me they are using their connections to prosecute possible competitors in the software space. That's the real background story here.

  2. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Sounds trumped up to me

    This sounds trumped up to me too -- you know, the modern day "lets find the most impressive-sounding charge, and if that doesn't work firehose on more charges" approach. I don't support ripping off code, even from Goldman Sachs, but I do think when a judge sees treatment like this they should simply drop all charges and chastize the prosecutors for this behavior. Unlawful use of scientific material? Sounds like a crock of shit to me. If they had filed a more normal charge than an "economic espionage act" charge, and followed proper procedure handling the evidence, I bet it would have stuck.

    1. Mark 65

      Re: Sounds trumped up to me

      Does unlawful use of scientific material even exist as an infraction? Sounds like the guy is just making shit up.

      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

        Goldman Sachs is a scientific institute now ?

        Or do they think that their specific formulas for massaging numbers to demonstrate their wishful thinking qualifies as science ?

  3. Graham Marsden
    Headmaster

    I'm sorry, I'll read that again...

    "A former programmer for banking firm Goldman Sachs who has been accused of stealing company secrets has filed suit against the FBI agents who arrested him for allegedly violating his constitutional rights."

    He was arrested because he violated his own constitutional rights...?

    Punctuation, the difference between "Helping your uncle, Jack, off a horse" and Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'm sorry, I'll read that again...

      It's Goldman Sachs, what's the difference?

    2. Roj Blake Silver badge

      Re: I'm sorry, I'll read that again...

      There's a difference between "Helping your Uncle Jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle jack off a horse."

      Proper nouns are your friend.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    please god

    Let this be successful.

    Anything that helps put a stop to the toxic implementation of the US justice system. It is disgusting the way authorities attempt to send every infringement down for life by just piling on any charge at random and seeing what sticks.

    (Yet another example that the US is infact a 3rd world dictatorship, masquerading as a civilised society)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Trivia

    Sergey is a notable contributor to ZeroMQ.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The US - a corrupt police state

    With no justice

    1. Graham Marsden
      Unhappy

      Re: The US - a corrupt police state

      Au contraire, you get the Justice you can afford...

      1. Fluffy Bunny
        Devil

        Re: The US - a corrupt police state

        More correctly, America, the country with the best judges money can buy. Also works if you substitute in police, journalists and politicians...

  7. danny_0x98

    For More On the Story

    Michael Lewis's nonfiction work Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt details his — and other's — story in the effort to move what we'll inaccurately call Wall Street back to serving the customers and not the brokerages.

    A good stop if one wants to get educated before opining.

    Not that, obviously, any one has to.

    1. Philip Lewis

      Re: For More On the Story

      Flah Boys is not Michael's best book, but well worth the read anyway. I hope Segey wins, it was a all totally bogus.

  8. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Stop

    The legal question at his appeal was "did he steal something that was legally goods?"

    The appeal seems to have succeeded because the laws applied for the charge covered the theft of a product, and his lawyers argued in court that the law's definition of a product did not cover code. This does not mean Aleynikov did not actually take code from Goldman Sachs that the company thought was their intellectual property. Indeed, Aleynikov acknowledged downloading some source code from Goldman Sachs systems, he just claims he did so when looking for open source code (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov#Arrest.2C_trial_and_acquittal). So, IMHO, it does look reasonably suspicious that he tried to take code he should not have from Goldman Sachs with the probable intent of using it for his or a competitor's benefit. Which sounds like textbook industrial espionage to me. After his successful appeal, the law in question was tightened up to cover code (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r112:H18DE2-0051:).

    Some of the posters here seem driven by a distaste for Wall Street into thinking it is just some "bank-driven vendetta". In the UK, having worked with financial institutions and signed many a NDA, I can assure you his downloading of proprietary code - even if he was the coder that wrote it for an UK bank - would have got him in hot water legally too over here and in most of Europe (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b7fb43ae-57af-11e3-86d1-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3RpYFvtAe). That the Feds and New York are keen to protect the financial institutions that make a lot of tax dollars is hardly surprising, so Mr Aleynikov is going to have the book plus a ton of bricks thrown at him with gusto.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Steal code?

    How is that possible? Surely there are only a finite number of ways you can arrange programming commands. Some of which will compile and work as applications.

    It is possible for two or more people to independently write the same app. There are only so many ways certain things can be done.

    Just like in literature all the core stories have probably already been written. Everything new is just a variation of what has come before.

    To me software development is just a race to see who can figure out in which order the syntax needs to be to get the desired result then arrange the commands the quickest.

    I fell out of love with software devs the day some of them started using "I dont understand backend stuff" as an excuse for crap code...especially in relation to SQL.

    I dont do software dev but im finding myself wading into that world more often.

    As Bonnie Tyler would probably say "where have all the good devs gone?".

    /troll

    1. LucreLout

      Re: Steal code?

      Surely there are only a finite number of ways you can arrange programming commands.....I dont do software dev

      No shit? Really would not have figured that out.

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