The same thing is causing problems in the financial markets right now, with massive zombie company portfolios of various private equity firms still paying out fees to the managers to siphon off the debt and assets of investors.
AI simply makes it easier for corporations to commit crimes with impunity, now they can distance themselves from responsibility even further. No one has even bothered to levy fines for AI agents hacking or corporations violating copyright to train their models.
the corporation legal framework is the very means of ruling. its entire point is to crack a covert fault line into the idea that everyone is equal in front of the law.
I see a future where AI permits a massive leveling or resources that were required and allowed corporation to insulate and distance themselves in the past. We are in a situation where individual people can do immense amount of work with a few agents. You may say "well, so can all the individuals in corporations", but I could see how corporations were operating not only close to a limit, but the very immense resource constraints of getting access to, parsing, and margin sense of data/information was extremely difficult in the not at all recent past. Just 4 years ago it was still immensely difficult finding the right data/information, let alone parsing it, properly displaying and relating it, analyzing it, and daring conclusions and knowledge from it.
There are some people who are already using AI to investigate people, organizations, networks, and things that relied on that secrecy by obscurity and hiding behind the massive resource constraints.
Just an example, remember the Panama papers and how it took many journalists many months to individually parse and relate all the information; and I am sure they totally missed things their human minds simply could not fully relate or patterns they could not identify. AI can do all that in seconds as you know and with the right conditions, you can even have it highlight things that you didn't know. Frankly, I was not a fan of the gatekeeping of the various releases of that kind of data, including things like the Snowden releases, because I guarantee it was also a partial limitation operation by intel agencies, but if that information and data were released publicly, unreacted, AI could definitely have helped people highlight and identify things that are probably still hidden and were simply overlooked by the hand full of journalists and the data analysis people they hired to make sense of things.
The ground reality clearly demonstrates the asymmetry between a 'naked' operator and the one cocooned inside a corporation. The criminal law is identical for both in spirit, in practice; corporations often protect their executives by simply buying out the courtroom: bench, bar and gavel.
You need a government willing to apply the law. Republicans are lawless criminals. They only put political rivals in prison whenever guilty or not.
The current reality is that laws do not apply to CEOs of big tech companies. It must be solved. They should be send to prison, and no pardons. When criminals are protected by the government all society suffers.
Our American obsession with jail is nuts. The violation at hand was “misleading state citizens about how it safeguards and collects user data.”
Lots of folks at Meta should be criminally investigated. But not for this, not unless someone willfully signed off on a lie.
> This will keep happening until those at the top are held personally responsible
Perfect is the enemy of the good.
From the judgement: “The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act […].”
Emphasis mine.
It isn’t criminal law, but maybe at that level it should be.
If anyone perjured themselves, granted. If not, criminalizing this lets anyone in power go after anything with any economic heft.
You’re describing a wet dream for Silicon Valley’s elites. Reducing the courts’ ability to check prosecutorial discretion is an ongoing project there.
Yes.
> it should be treated as a crime
Crime means jail. Not just for the folks you want in jails. For anyone who the people with power drive should be in one.
And then wipe everything, sell servers on ebay, pay employees couple months of wages as apology, pay off lenders, strike the company off the business register and bye.
Blind, stupid hate is absolutely how societies collapse. You’re not speaking without precedent. But it’s part of why some places in the world are structurally poor—they can’t help but give into this instinct for blind vengeance.
He can and he did, it just does not work.
But he can make the governor do it, which did work at least once.
AI readily provided me a list of 8 other well documented cases of "pay for pardons" and offered detailed research on all of them.
Good is arresting a CEO and holding them in prison for a few decades. These fines do nothing. These fines are the enemy of good.
…what is the factual basis for comparing this to Madoff?
How is the circle of passing draconian laws instead of proportional response then driving draconian regimes to abuse that permit not a lesson we can learn?
the jury's ruling?
- extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury - the duration and repetition of the conduct - the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred - the involvement of senior Facebook leadership - the size of New Mexico audiences reached - clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements
That's an extremely high bar to hit and Facebook cleared it. Madoff's scheme, even adjusted for inflation, tops out around 200b dollars or so. Facebook clears the overall financial bar by a whole magnitude, and its effects were felt globally.
You seem very fixated on downplaying just how historical a case this (and/or proceeding cases against FB) will be. This will easily go down in the same lane as cigarettes on how people remember this era.
>How is the circle of passing draconian laws
Do I really need to bring out the Martin Luther King Jr. quote here just because we're so fixated on legalities? Let's remember nothing cigarette companies did were illegal as well.
What are you getting at? That we should jail people for not breaking laws?
The fact that you're comparing this to fucking Hitler is insane. Even you know it, which is why you were too embarrassed to say it.
I'm not embarrassed to say it at all. But I don't like when conversations derail into morality scaling. How about we just make sure we create good incentives to do good and vice versa?
I was simply saying that FB's scale of damage and money impacted is much higher than Madoff's
Time in the pokey is unpleasant for everyone.
Corporations don't make decisions, individuals do.
You could argue if we hit the business hard enough, the individual making those decisions maybe suffers from.. maybe... less bonus? but, well....
That's crazy talk. Did you miss the part where corporations are actually people?
Decision makers are often quite sensitive to the cost to the business, people who are tagged as causing $25 billion in unnecessary charges would need to start talking very quickly about what justifies the expense. Even in the case of Facebook that much money is more than enough to start swinging decisions.
If we were really obsessed with jail for executives, a lot more of them would be locked up right now. There might be an obsession, but it's only about jailing peons.
This is the opposite of what happens in any incarceration-happy culture. See: the French Revolution. The rich got away, got richer, in fact. The machines of terror inevitable turned on the poor. Liberties are most valuable to those of us who are not billionaires.
If I do something to fuck over this many people and harm society this much I’m going to jail. No billionaire is having the same consequences.
Until that changes you are going to have people be willing to back table flipping movements like the French Revolution in a gamble to maybe give consequences to those in charge. Hell that’s more than half the reason we got Trump.
Also I’m going to call out your analysis of the French Revolution as failing entirely as poor. Some of the rich got richer but people wanted the kings head and they definitely got it.
Sure. Light a bonfire. Scream and windmills. And then come to your senses and realises lowering the bar for criminality will absolutely not limits its blast radius to the people you want it to.
> you are going to have people be willing to back table flipping movements like the French Revolution
The rich got richer in the French Revolution! America’s rich want that.
If you’re already in the blast radius of the current system, why would you care if it expands if you think it might include the people fucking you over in the first place?
I’m not disagreeing that there are problems that could result from this idea. I’m disagreeing with you on the idea that people are crazy for wanting this while there’s this class of people who do whatever they want whenever they want to the rest of us.
Like I pointed out with the French king loosing his head during the French Revolution. The fact that one of those people had consequences is worth it to a lot of people even if it means the rest of the noble class is even more empowered.
They are already beyond consequence generally, more power for them doesn’t change the relationship between the common man and the nobles.
You saw the same emotional situation play out with Luigi Mangiones actions despite having scant effect on the system.
Right. This is stupidity. Except in a world with private jets and international wires we’d be in a Bourbon restoration much quicker.
There’s a boot on my neck either way. The boot squeezing harder doesn’t change the fact that it’s on my neck.
If I see the chance to cut off the leg of one of the people holding that boot down and the only consequence is that I am in the same situation I was in previously, why would I not take it?
I guess I have to preface this with the fact that I know you personally are well off and actually have a material difference in quality of life in this situation.
I am asking you why I should care about your material difference in life when mine won’t change either way?
In fact, I'd go so far as saying it's much closer to "keep the bar for criminality where it is, but apply it to everyone equally" but personally I'd add a little addendum about scaling up the punishment for crimes by those with greater influence and responsibilities to the people, but that's just me
Neither do I. But let’s look at the facts and circumstances of this case. Lowering the threshold for criminal guilt to meet it would, I think, expose a lot of ordinary activity to criminal prosecution.
They do this despite jailing fewer people in total (not just per-capita) than America.
One could say that this is because Xi is untouchable but I think it's more about the social norms. Americans can't even consider a world where we prosecute the powerful.
Yup. Putting Meta executives in jail for violating New Mexico privacy rules isn’t following China’s example. Putting them in jail for lying to Congress and targeting teenagers is.
HN is mostly the 1%, they just don't think they are the 1%. At least in the US. Outside the US it's often even more crazy, but it's more bi-modal.
In the US, grossing 500k all-in (IE stock + bonus + salary, not take home pay) would put you in the top 1%.
225k all-in would put you in the top 5%.
Watching HN complain about "the upper class" or "the rich" is an exercise in cognitive dissonance.
So maybe?
The sarcasm definitely doesn't change the point, of course - most of HN is the rich, and the upper class, but somehow believes they are not.
When a company, for example its managers through willful negligence or an outright lie, enables the organization to do something that is considered illegal, they absolutely should be held personally responsible. The existence of a company as an entity shields the entrepreneurship itself, not individuals who are actively harming others.
Managers who willingly poisoned people with cigarettes or lead, and now with brain rot, while simultaneously claiming that it is not harmful to the public, even when they know that is simply a lie, should absolutely be held responsible.
> Our American obsession with jail is nuts
I am European and I want those American executives in jail as well /s
But in all seriousness, shareholders in 2026 should start pushing for an investment markets reform to introduce criminal responsibility for such actions, because that's a pretty good deterrent to have the executives not act against their fiduciary duty and the shareholders' bottom line.
We rarely imprison the people who actually deserve it. Even when we do, it's barely a punishment if the person is wealthy.
Our jails are full, but a lot of that is we harshly punish mundane crimes against people with no real ability to defend themselves. And that's mostly because the grift of for-profit prisons.
> the grift of for-profit prisons
Only a single-digit percentage of prisoners are in for-profit prisons, and roughly half of the states do not use them at all. I dislike them for the obvious perverse incentive, but it's a great exaggeration to say that the system puts largely innocent people in prison to line the pockets of for-profit prison execs.
For better or worse, American society is very good at sorting people, so the HN crowd and other intelligentsia usually doesn't encounter the bottom 5% that wreak havoc.
And guess what the top reason is for incarceration are? Hint: it beats out sex offences and weapons/arson. And it started right after a certain announcement in the 70's that was largely admitted to increasing incarceration rates.
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
Besides, you can look at the straightforward statistic of homicides to gauge the overall criminality of a population. The US has a homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer countries. By this measure, the US actually has an under-incarceration problem, not one of over-incarceration. Wikipedia has the US incarceration rate at 542 per 100k, compared to Sweden at 92, Switzerland at 77, or South Korea at 115; compare that to the intentional homicide rates of the US at 5.763 per 100k, Sweden at 0.867, Switzerland at 0.504, and South Korea at 0.489. If incarceration scaled with the homicide rate, those other countries are actually much more prison-heavy than the US!
Except that proving it is rarely necessary because the system relies on plea deals and because the 6th amendment is not automatically enforced. There are places in the US where the criminal justice system would break down if every defendant refused a plea deal and demanded a speedy trial.
Our jails are full because we have unnecessarily long sentences and a prison system that is meant to be punitive instead of rehabilitative (and which winds up encouraging recidivism and compounding the problem further). Things have improved over the past 20 years but we have not done enough to address the problem.
I'm actually not aware of any place in the US that routinely administers what could be considered a speedy trial. It's a shame, really, but perhaps an inevitable side-effect of the ever-increasing burden on the part of the prosecution. Pre-Warren Court, it was normal for criminal cases to take days between arrest and trial.
> Our jails are full because we have unnecessarily long sentences and a prison system that is meant to be punitive instead of rehabilitative
I make the point in a sibling comment that the US actually has lower incarceration rates compared to its peer nations, relative to their homicide rates. Our jails are full because we have a lot more crime. We can agree to disagree on the "root causes" thereof.
(Also possible, but I suspect less likely, is that our homicide rate is higher but not in proportion to the number of murderers; maybe we have a bigger problem with serial killers than other countries, and thus have fewer murderers to incarcerate relative to the homicide rate.)
Given that America has a homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer countries, it stands to reason that its overall criminality is higher, and therefore we can expect to see more people imprisoned per capita than in those other countries.
As I said in my previous comment, the homicide rate is not the same as the rate at which murderers are convicted and imprisoned. Besides having a higher homicide rate compared with other countries, the US also has a low rate of arrests/convictions for homicide compared to other countries:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/01/12/as-murders-spi...
Really though, the fact that a majority of US inmates are non-violent offenders should be enough to tell you that the homicide rate says little about the incarceration rate. The homicide rate also says very little about the overall crime rate, unless you believe in antiquated concepts about "criminality" that treat "crime" as a monolithic category. In reality, a murderer is no more likely to commit fraud or possess drugs than anyone else, and someone kiting checks is no more likely to be a murderer.
Only true for federal inmates, which is <10% of all prisoners in the US. When you take into account the rest of the prison population, the majority are in fact imprisoned for violent crimes[0] (homicide, assault, rape, robbery, etc.).
> In reality, a murderer is no more likely to commit fraud or possess drugs than anyone else, and someone kiting checks is no more likely to be a murderer
I'm flabbergasted that anyone could believe this on its face. Do you not think that the behavioral factors that drive someone to murder correlates with a whole host of other antisocial behaviors?
In actual reality, studies in criminology repeatedly show both that people who commit one kind of crime tend to commit other kinds of crime; and that there's a strong power law distribution in crime, where an extreme minority commit the great majority of crime. Most people do not commit any. It's farcical to suggest that the average Joe off the street is as likely to be a fraudster as a convicted murderer, or really as any other kind of criminal.
[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-numbers-dont-lie-its-...
But this case was about selling out democracy. I suppose it falls into the category of great crimes like killing people with cigarettes and deceiving the public and regulators while doing it. If you steal from the rich and powerful you go to prison, but killing tens to hundreds of thousands of children in Africa is too abstract to punish that way.
The American attitude about and system of incarceration is pretty crazy, but so is our idea of scale in crime. At the retail end of our criminal so-called justice system, you have cops that in many places fragrantly engage in overtime and detail fraud, sometimes amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, putting minor criminals in prison and penury. It's all pretty crazy.
This crosses jurisdictions. We have no international legal system that doesn’t rely on voluntary cooperation.
If you’re claiming that every car- and bicycle-theft victim is a billionaire, idk what to tell you.
Also you don't need international justice to find criminality in how DOGE was done.
Sure but also there has to be some sort of deterrent and an executive who's worth is $100M+ who can't touch their $100M because their in jail is far more of a deterrent than META missing its earnings for a quarter because they owe the government a one-time slap on the wrist.
I'm all ears on what a different penalty could be that ultimately stops this behavior.
PS - META's stock is currently up 2% in after hours trading, so
This is tautology, but sure. If you or I did 10x this, e.g. stole a car via financial slipper, we would not be prosecuted.
Broadening criminal liability for executives might sound like a good idea but there are a lot of second order effects
Cambridge Analytica was a decade ago and there hasn’t been a similar Meta scandal since, so it seems like the deterrent has worked.
Even when you cannot get highly employable US engineers to agree to do unethical work, you can always import some indentured servants who are too vulnerable to feel like they can say no.
I know someone that took a job at meta short term to get cash for a family member with cancer.
Go after the people giving the orders, not the workers trying to survive a deeply fucked up system.
That said, expecting individual engineers to understand the greater context of building an online addiction machine is probably too much. The product managers and data scientists surface concerns and executives decide. And executives should be held criminally responsible in the event of gross negligence.
1. Few workers report a 996 work schedule at Meta or other Mag7 companies. This work schedule is reported by smaller AI startups and Chinese and Indian tech firms.
2. H1B and many other sponsored visas are transferrable. I have had several colleagues get laid off or interview for other jobs and get hired elsewhere. The L visa is non-transferable, though it represents a minority of visa sponsorships in the US.
3. You directly ignored my data about workers at Meta out-earning other workers in the Bay Area. My foreign colleagues earned the same as I did at virtually every stage of my career.
In general macroeconomics, yes, the introduction of foreign workers results in wages getting pulled down. This "lump of labor" only has temporary impacts. The overall outcome is an increase in the market for engineers, as immigrants go on to found companies. NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company, is one of these.
Expect the GOP to move in this direction as the democratic party starts going after big tech as well.
An engineer is liable but so is the firm. A doctor is liable but so is the hospital. I’m going after both.
How would making imported workers liable do anything but disincentivize them from committing these crimes?
Obviously we should hold leadership liable and responsible for harms of their choices and make this stuff illegal. Once illegal, then everyone is held to that standard of course.
Don’t assume I’m lacking empathy. The goal of holding engineers liable is to protect the public against malicious software. Protecting the engineers is unrelated to my comment. You can have both. In fact, real engineers are mandatory whistleblowers, and protected.
If the wires are hanging out of the wall and someone asks me to switch the power on it reminds me how my old boss almost died then chased the guy with a hammer but collapsed from his injuries before he could kill him. So i disassemble the switchboard. If there is someone like that walking around I don't care how long it takes. Sometimes they get angry I just ignore it. They may also report it to my boss.
RL is different like that but also quite similar.
This is sophistry that was used to condemn Nazis but has never applied to any context outside of the Nuremberg trials. Fail to follow orders and you're shot as a traitor. Follow them and you're hanged as a war criminal. "Just follow orders" is the basis of paid employment itself.
It is assumed that those giving bad orders will be held responsible for doing so, but this rarely proves to be the case. See the eBay harassment of the Steiners. Everybody involved that followed orders was punished except the executive that signed off on and provided support for the operation.
But in the Equifax breach, two executives were fired following criminal intrusion by Chinese hackers they had no involvement with. Everyone that neglected to follow orders to patch Struts probably still works there.
The rules are arbitrary.
This doesn’t need an analogy.
Why not just look up examples of engineers disclosing breaches of code/contract? Every state has lists of complaints brought to their engineering board with results and disciplinary actions.
But a part of that process means introducing licensing to the field of software. Yet another hoop that this field has traditionally rejected. I don't think all SWE's "need" a license. But I do think that maybe it's long overdue to finally distinguish between a "programmer" and an "engineer" more formally.
Anyone can create a startup or call themselves software engineers and release insecure, privacy-violating products with no repercussions.
I worry about that because at some point, legislation will catch up, and without subject matter experts any implementation will likely be flawed at first.
There’s absolutely no reason why professionals at this pay grade and handling this much risk can’t be following this level of rigor.
1. That professional engineers being liable somehow makes the firm they work for not liable. Both are liable.
2. The professional engineer isn’t responsible for breaches of code/contract their colleagues are committing. They are. In most jurisdictions a PE must disclose in writing and are liable for violations they witness.
It’s surprising how uninformed folks are about how rigorous engineering in the real world is.
If you think this is overkill or unrealistic you’re jaded. The privacy and security of the general public is on the line. If engineers and firms were liable for every data breach they’d cease to happen.
"But it would be tremendous loss if we cancelled [bigco]!"
Well, maybe, let that be a lesson the all other such companies and their owners I guess?
We need reforms on corporate governance. Right now Meta is basically Mark Zuckerberg and a bunch of bag holders. They can't vote him out because he has both a board seat and majority voting power all on his own. Dumping the stock is far from a safe thing for institutional investors to do if they want to avoid lawsuits or regulatory attention.
It needs to be illegal for you to both be the CEO of a publicly-traded company and the voting majority shareholder. Note I say majority, not major plurality.
The requirement is what a lawyer can convince a dozen jurors the requirement should be. If there's a lawsuit against a fund manager at an institutional investor saying "you didn't fulfill your duty as a fiduciary because x", there's at least some risk that x becomes a real responsibility for fiduciaries through the outcome of that case. If the zeitgeist dictates that as a responsibility, it is a responsibility.
> They can underweight Meta stock if they believe it's overvalued due to potential legal risks or corporate governance problems or whatever.
The fact that they aren't doing so when the company is losing billions of dollars in legal judgments would suggest either
1) They can't do so because they would lose money doing so
or
2) Our system is in need of reform so that when executives direct a company in such a way that it is routinely facing legal exposure, shareholders remove those executives so that corporations act as better citizens and things are handled at the shareholder meeting level instead of the court system level.
Jails are for losers -- not Peter Thiel.
whereas here in the states - once you're a billionaire - jail or being held personally liable is a foreign concept.