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Comment by cylde_frog | Hacker News Reader

I wonder about this too. What sort of people do international criminal organisations hire to manage their info-sec? A criminal that became a computer expert or a computer expert that became a criminal?

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Well the criminal organizations can offer a whole range of addictive non-monetary incentives that a computer expert may desire, so I'd guess that's the main path in.

There's more unemployed tech people out there than many here realize though. People that don't present well in interviews, people that didn't stay employ-ably current in tech, hardware guys replaced by the cloud, people in less hot locations for tech, etc. Criminal organizations are much less picky and judgmental than your average tech startup and in some cases may be the only one's willing to give them a chance.

> People that don't present well in interviews

Those are the worst. There was this one candidate who gave all the interviewers mousepads with his picture and aol email address on it. Who even wants that kind of stuff? The best ones give some candy, like there was someone who gave us gum with a custom printed wrapper “Hope I ‘stick’ in your mind!”

Never mind people who struggle to get a job in IT because of a previous criminal record. Those people may also have been in prison and made connections while inside.

In some countries, getting into tech is impossible if you're not lucky to have the right credentials. In France for example, any even remotely technical job will require years of higher education and experience (yes there's an obvious catch-22 here). You can have perfectly serviceable skills that would put you at a junior/mid developer or sysadmin level and be completely unemployable - at this point crime doesn't sound that bad if you have no other alternative despite otherwise having no propensity/attraction to participate in criminal activities.

For what it's worth, I would still be completely unemployable in France despite having 7 years of successful commercial experience under my belt in some well-known companies. Thankfully I played my cards right and managed to move to a saner country where tech is still more or less a meritocracy.

Tbh, illegality aside, creating a very highly secure system like this from scratch as an one or two person project sounds very exciting and fun.

I suspect that people don't fall into such neat categories. You could pose a similar question re: lawyers whose bread and butter is protecting and representing people associated with organised crime (the kind of individuals represented by Maury from The Wire or Neil Mink from The Sopranos). Are they lawyers who developed a slippery version of ethics & morality, or people with loose ethical standards who entered law?

I'd bet good money that the truth is usually quite banal: these individuals make a series of small and highly contingent decisions over time that gradually push them in the direction of criminality or culpability, reinforced over time by social & financial reward for doing so.

What? Representing criminals is not unethical or 'immoral'. Period. Protecting criminals legally is not unethical unless you are knowingly doing something illegal yourself.

I imagine that most layers are just doing their job and getting paid for it. Bringing morality into that equation makes no sense in a legal system that has little to nothing to do with morality.

Representing criminals is fine, but aiding them in committing future crimes isn’t. If you do that, you’re just part of a criminal conspiracy, and being a lawyer doesn’t give you an exception from moral culpability.

Doing their taxes okay, but representing them in court with the goal to free them is the purpose of the justice system...

I think the GP meant 'aiding them in commiting future crimes' in the literal sense (e.g. helping launder money, abusing attorney privilege etc.) rather than implying that by defending them in court the lawyer would then be culpable.

I haven't seen all of The Wire, but as to the character cited as an example, Wikipedia says, "[Maury] is corrupt and unscrupulous, willing to aid his clients in furtherance of their criminal activity." So he crosses your line, and I think that's what the GP post meant.

You don’t get to declare what is unethical by adding the sentence “Period.” after your claim. Ethics is a matter of opinion; I believe that knowingly aiding violent criminals is wrong; if you feel otherwise, that’s just like, your, opinion, man.

They aren't criminal until the court system declares them criminal. The lawyer is defending them before they are declared criminals. That is what "presumption of innocence" means. Everyone has the right to be represented in court, even people that later on will be convicted. Otherwise we can just go back to use pitchforks and similar (and actually it's happening on social media, and it's not looking good)

Everyone is entitled (in the US) to due process and a lawyer to defend them. There is nothing unethical or immoral about it. It's a fundamental right.

Again, ethics are a matter of opinion, laws are a matter of fact. Yes, in the US you have the legal right to an attorney. Whether that attorney is behaving ethically depends on the attorney’s behavior and the person making the judgment on the ethics. You and I don’t have to have the same opinion on what’s ethical. We can each advocate for our own ideas of ethics to be codified into policy.

What happens when you are accused of a heinous crime, the evidence points at you, and yet you are innocent?

I bet you change your mind about the ethics of having a lawyer represent you.

Lawyers, even in the United States, are bound by rules of conduct, and will stop being lawyers very quickly if the overstep the rules of ethical conduct.

The standards of ethics they are checked against are not yours or mine, they are the rules they agreed to. To pretend like ethics aren't a thing for lawyers is surprisingly uninformed for HN.

I’d highly recommend that you study formal ethics. Ethics is not built on a platform of opinions.

Unless you are the sort of person that claims that reality is just an opinion, too, in which case you should also study formal philosophy.

Which is good and fair. I think the example was Tony Soprano though and the (imaginary) lawyer in question knew full well the kind of shennanigans he was up to, these lawyers know they're defending murderers and people that ruin lives.

But that’s the point of lawyers. When they defend a guilty party, most of the time they know that the party is indeed guilty. They need to, to prepare a good defence.

It is a thin line, most of these groups are in contact with lawyer teams before they start the operations and the lawyers are in the know. These groups do risk assessment before going ahead.

Rhetorically, yes he/she/they do get to do that.

Ethics is a matter of philosophy, which has a bit more going for it than just being composed of raw, uneducated opinion.

Lawyers have a code of ethics. Written down and codified. Not a matter of opinion.

You are thinking of morals. That is a matter of opinion

Your life as a human being can't have little to do with morality unless you are a sociopath. On the one hand we need someone to provide all accused with adequate representation to ensure we don't wrongly convict innocent men however at the mob boss level we are virtually always talking about trying to protect horrible people everyone knows are guilty from punishment.

A system that didn't need to hold a trial or give the mob boss a lawyer would be irredeemably immoral but one in which they go free is a shittier world. I don't envy anyone trying to remain moral while walking that line. I don't see how anyone who specialized in such clients could live with themselves.

Or, as the line from Breaking Bad went - you don't need a criminal lawyer. You need a criminal lawyer.

Codefellas https://www.wired.com/2003/12/mafia/

Kids born after that article are nearly finished with high school. I’m pretty sure the dynamic has changed a little since then. Interesting to at least see how it used to be though.

Nice! Is there some follow up story after years?

You hire people you can burn is what you do.

Shipping coordinators got busted? How sad.

Over my life Ive met people who while they seem competent and can tie their shoe laces appear to make bad decisions because they have trouble with judging likely outcomes. Those are the people getting hired to do this sort of work.

From 2003, an inside look at the mafia IT: https://www.wired.com/2003/12/mafia/

"Organised crime" is a bit of a oxymoron.

These people are organised in that they make deals with each other in friend networks. But the people involved are not the sharpest knives in the draw. They get their positions via violence and intimidation more than cunning and planning.

There are cleaver crooks, but we do not often hear from them. A lot of them work at Wall Street, which contains the biggest and most profitable criminal gangs

The cleverest crooks are in Capitol Hill and Downing Street and Brussels, not Wall Street.

I think we probably disagree on "cleaver"!

I would imagine its more of a computer expert who then becomes a criminal because of the money.

Watch "Start-up" in Netflix (American version, not the Korean one).

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