Hacker News Reader

Comment by Selfcommit | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Is that really such a bad thing?

"I'm glad you wrote to your Representative, Ms. Concerned Voter, but I regret to inform you that because the amount of taxpayer fraud you witnessed was less than $5,000,000 that the Department of Justice would be powerless to bring charges even if I referred the case to them. $5,000,000 is a stupendously minor offense in the grand scheme of the budget, and minor offenses no longer warrant charges after the Major Crimes Prioritization Act of 2018."

Of course. That means the U.S. would have no way to protect its citizens against harms from abroad unless they amounted to national harms.

Understanding that HN isn't a hive-mind, I still find it deeply ironic that a website full of people saying that the U.S. is overreaching by prosecuting MegaUpload was in a different context calling for the aggressive prosecution of HSBC (a non-U.S. company who broke U.S. laws not on U.S. soil).

>I still find it deeply ironic that a website full of people saying that the U.S. is overreaching by prosecuting MegaUpload was in a different context calling for the aggressive prosecution of HSBC (a non-U.S. company who broke U.S. laws not on U.S. soil).

What on Earth are you talking about? Some other HSBC?

http://hsbclocations.com/united_states/

>HSBC Bank USA, National Association, an American subsidiary of UK-based HSBC Holdings plc, is a bank with its operational head office in New York City and its nominal head office in McLean, Virginia (as designated on its charter). HSBC Bank USA, N.A. is a national bank chartered under the National Bank Act, which means that it is regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a part of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

HSBC Bank USA was not the entity that laundered the money. The target of the DOJ probe and the organization that paid the fine was HSBC Holdings, the U.K. entity.

If you want to argue that HSBC the larger entity had a presence in the U.S., even though the problems did not arise out of that U.S. presence, how do you deal with the fact that Megaupload had U.S. servers?

Oh come off it. For one, that's a patronizing insultingly idiotic argument, it's a farcical shell game of transactions through various subsidiaries the whole point of which was to avoid scrutiny of the US authorities. For two, HSBC Holdings the parent company does have offices in the US, as well as other subsidiaries (HSBC North America Holdings Inc.) which were involved. For three, you expect me to believe that you'd buy it if MU had used a US subsidiary and pretended that the business units were separate?

>If you want to argue that HSBC the larger entity had a presence in the U.S.

No, I don't need to (they do), the purpose of HSBC's US subsidiaries is so that the parent may operate in the US.

>how do you deal with the fact that Megaupload had U.S. servers?

I guess if MU wants to have servers in the US and serve US-based customers, then the federales ought to be able to go and confiscate the servers (so long as they follow due process) if they have cause to do so. But this seizing foreign-based property is right out. I wonder why the DOJ hasn't raided HSBC and siezed a lot of their office equipment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com