The two computer programmers who allegedly rigged Madoff's systems to fool investors and regulators have been charged by the US Attorney. According to the complaints, they finally got cold feet in 2006 after more than a decade of complicity, told Madoff they wouldn't lie for him any more, and pulled hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the funds. But it's hard to applaud them for their fine moral sensibility, since they accepted hush money to keep quiet, making their change of heart look more like fear than the belated pangs of conscience.
If they're found guilty, as far as I'm concerned, they should get what Madoff got. He couldn't have perpetrated this massive fraud without this sort of assistance, and if the complaint is correct, they quite clearly knew that swhat they were doing was helping to destroy the life savings of all their investors. White collar crime needs to feel a little more dangerous.
Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
The two computer programs who allegedly rigged Madoff's systems
So you had me thinking that this marked a real evolution in the law. Then I clicked through and saw that, no, it was programmers.
Might want to change "programs" to "programmers". When I read that they got cold feet I wondered how the fact that Maddoff accomplices were actually functional artificial intelligence wasn't a bigger story.
The two computer programs who allegedly rigged Madoff's systems to fool investors and regulators have been charged by the US Attorney.
I heard one of the programs was a single father of an infant. Such a sad state of affairs. If he end up in prison, what will ever become of young Skynet?
How on earth do they deserve what Madoff got? They wrote code for money. They didn't misrepresent the code to investors. They didn't take investors money. They didn't burn through or hide billions of dollars.
They wrote software which was used to commit a crime, knowing it would be used that way. Thus they certainly helped take investor's money, helped hide losses, enabled insider trading, etc.
If Major Hassan walked up to a gun dealer and bought a gun after saying "I'm gonna kill me some INFIDELS with this!" the dealer would probably go to jail for, at least, conspiracy before the fact. Same principle here.
I have written software that could have been used to commit crimes with credit cards. Whether what it did was legal or illegal wasn't my area and I didn't worry about it. I assume some lawyer did, but I coded what they asked me to code and got a check. Admittedly, I didn't later get hush money but I don't think you can call them accomplices who deserve the same as Madoff.
As for your hypothetical dealer, not a chance. Assuming he performed the background check and got a green light to sell, all he does is say he thought it was a joke and was afraid of PC backlash if he denied a sale to a muslim.
They apparently built software to fabricate dummy account records. It's hard to argue that they didn't know what was going on.
Certainly you would agree that they should be punished.
Getting the same as Madoff is a bit harsh, since it's very likely they didn't know the extent of the fraud in which they were assisting. I that it should be less than Madoff's punishment, but then I also think Madoff's sentence is light.
Except I did the same thing. We did it in the testing servers but they looked just like the production ones.
Ehrm, so? The two men in question are charged with actively knowing what their software was being used for and yet maintaining it anyway, over a period of years, then purging their own assets and choosing blackmail over whistleblowing when it was time to get out. Now there will be a court trial to figure out if all that can be proven.
It's possible they were ignorant until near the end and then made a bad choice when they found out the truth, but their exit strategy sure looks like the behavior of two persons who knew they were in far too deep.
What about the programmers who wrote the Goldman Sachs code that apparently frontruns the market? The software that got stolen by a former employee and had the FBI involvment because 'in the wrong hands' it was a terrible threat to everyone. Should they be in jail as well?
Looks like the FBI must read Mark Cuban's blog:
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/30/breaking-down-bernie-madoff-p2-2/
Programs finally morphed into programmers
What's amazing is how little money they received for this given how much it was worth to Madoff. I blame the Federal government. If we only had a free and open market for fraud-enhancing software, then price discovery would be more efficient and programmers could begin to caputre a fairer share of the value they craete for fraudsters.
"Whether what it did was legal or illegal wasn't my area" - no, but it may be the jury's.
Maybe we should follow China's example? Capital punishment for corruption scandals.
I agree everyone involved should be punished, although the programmers involved are small fish. There is just inevitably more evidence that these people were involved than the equally complicit higher ups.