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Comment by mc808 | Hacker News Reader

I've never heard of the "Special Prosecutions and National Security Unit", but it doesn't sound like something that should care about some online game's analytics data. Combined with the guy being arrested as he was about to leave for China, I can't help wondering if there is much, much more to this story. E.g. they felt a need to hold him for something, and this was the best they could come up with.

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According to http://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/divisions

> The Special Prosecutions and National Security Unit is responsible for supporting counterterrorism and counterespionage investigations and prosecutions in the district. In addition, the Special Prosecutions and National Security Unit prosecutes public corruption, environmental, civil rights, child exploitation, illegal export, and immigration cases.

So this could fall under their jurisdiction with 'illegal export'?

I always enjoy entertaining conspiracy theories, but in reality if you have a problem employee and evidence of them downloading your company's important info, and have legitimate concerns that they are going to take it elsewhere, would you not call the authorities/FBI?

Regardless, if you want to know the whole story, you can read the affidavit from the link which contains literally all of the details of exactly how this played out.

tl;dr - there's really not much more to the story, the summary is exactly what happened.

I'm not sure who I would call first, but if it led me to the FBI then I would probably expect the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property Unit (from leereeves link) to do the investigation/prosecution. It also seems odd that the FBI would respond so thoroughly on such a short notice, as if they had already been communicating with the company, although that could just be because he was about to leave the country.

If you read the affidavit, he already left the country, but had come back, they were just lucky to get him the second time through.

Also, the affidavit makes it sound like the FBI didn't even get involved until after the company confronted him about the data they knew he kept, and him trying to use the data as leverage to get a better severance package. At that point it's really more extortion than 'hacking'.

Yes he had already left once, but that was about 4 days before anyone noticed the database activity.

It doesn't matter, he got called out on having sensitive data, admitted it, and then tried to blackmail the company with it.

The computer forensics part is pretty much a moot point after that.

Apparently it does matter which unit prosecutes the case, at least to whoever set up the units. Who knows, it could be as simple as the National Security unit treating it as possible espionage but then going with the trade secret charge. They don't specify.

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