This should forever taint Marissa Meyer's reputation. Failure to save Yahoo is understandable. Disregard for user privacy and safety at this scale is unforgivable.
Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio who <edit> claims to have </edit> resisted NSA spying is out of prison (2013)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30...
You do people like Stamos a huge disservice by drawing this comparison. People like Nacchio are exploiting the good work real privacy advocates do, for their own personal enrichment.
Or it's possible for people to be dual-natured: capable both of flagrant chicanery and abuse, as well as acts of conviction and principled defiance.
The reality, though, is that his tenure at Qwest appears broadly similar to the kinds of bullshit that was rife in corporate America at the time: accounting scandals, entirely unrelated to Qwest's government contracts, that boosted apparent growth and drove share prices higher than the fundamentals of the business could possibly justify.
Google, for instance, [qwest kmc telecom].
* That he was simply very optimistic about the business he was running that that he believed there would be an uptick in the stock long term after the company weathered the downturn he knew to be coming.
* That he was "set up" by NSA: yes, he sold at a high price anticipating a sector-wide downturn, but he did so because he'd been assured that Qwest would be part of a multi-billion NSA modernization program called "Groundbreaker", led by CSC, which contract would surely rescue Qwest's stock and even out his sale.
* That his board had demanded that he sell his stock, and that such sales were routine at Qwest.
* That he was distraught over the suicide of his son and sold the stock as part of an effort to immediately disentangle himself from the CEO position which he hoped to leave.
Against that, you have the black-and-white record of his trades and the testimony of numerous high-level Qwest executives all saying they'd been urgently warning him to revise Qwest's targets downwards. He not only maintained the unrealistic targets, and participated in channel-stuffing-style schemes to fake up earnings numbers, but profited personally by trading against those bogus numbers.
[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-ns... [2] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/08/more_on_the_n...
Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio who resisted NSA spying is out of prison
Nacchio's imprisonment has nothing to do with NSA spying; it has to do with his efforts to bilk Qwest shareholders out of their money. Those efforts are well-documented.
Further.. where is the motive?? So they guy scams everyone and their dog out of 50MM and doesn't care about shareholders and is evil to the core.. but yet disagrees to play along with some government agency that would put a spy trap in his servers?
If anything this could probably somehow helped him along the lines of some secret plea bargain.
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good [men and women] do nothing."
Both Meyer and Stamos made their choices, on this issue.
He did better than Meyer but I fail to see how his move bettered the world. It helped him not longer being part of something nefarious. But he left all users he had responsibility for in the unclear.
Of course you or I might like to believe we would have taken a more overtly defiant stand (by going public for example). But then again, we weren't there, in his shoes - now were we?