Look at what happened to Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio after challenging illegal NSA warrantless wiretapping requests. (Hint: he just got out of federal prison about two months ago.)
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230398390...
Mr. Nacchio said he still believes his insider-trading prosecution was government retaliation for rebuffing requests in 2001 from the National Security Agency to access his customers' phone records. His plans to use that belief as a defense at trial never materialized; some of the evidence he wanted to use was deemed classified and barred from being introduced.
To Mr. Nacchio, the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents saying the agency monitors the email and phone records of Americans, have justified his own stance. He contended the NSA's request was illegal. "I feel vindicated," he said. "I never broke the law, and I never will."
I'm generally curious about this. I have no idea how to judge Nacchio's career. Can you point some facts proving this point of view?
Or maybe: How was his position any different than yours, if you had a request from the NSA that you wouldn't want to fulfil, knowing that rejecting it could destroy your company, what would you do?
The issue is, imo, very murky but as I understand it:
NSA approached Nacchio and Qwest to do what they were doing with AT&T and Verizon. Qwest had previously helped the NSA intercept all comms in Salt Lake City during the Olympics but told the NSA they weren't interested in cooperating. Nacchio sells some stock. Qwest is suddenly dropped as the favored vendor for a huge government contract leading to a drop in Qwest's share price and earnings.
The US federal goverment's position was that Nacchio knew the contract was going to get dropped and cashed out early - insider trading. Nacchio contended that he was just selling stock and that the government had pulled the contract to entrap and prosecute him in the current case.
Read the indictment. Nacchio was convicted along with several other executives of running a pump and dump scam.
Despite being specifically prohibited from trading based on insider information, Nacchio first became aware that their earnings guidance was "a huge stretch", that to meet them would involve growing revenue from a line of business that had been failing to grow revenue and that had actually been underperforming that year, that they had (apparently) lost important contracts, and that it had become essentially impossible for them to hit their numbers. Then, after learning all that, but before any of it was disclosed to investors, Nacchio dumped over $100MM worth of his stock.
Nacchio controlled the earnings targets for Qwest. He set them dishonestly high and allowed them to be released to the public over the objections of many of his own executives. The stock performed as a result. Then, when it became obvious that the public would soon learn that those projections were impossible to meet, he sold his stock for $100MM.
Nacchio went down within a year of Enron and just a few years after Worldcom. It was the end of an era in which the big accounting firms had conspired with large corporations to swindle the public out of billions of dollars. Nacchio was a crook, not a Fourth Amendment hero.
Are the executives at JPMC crooks? I don't know. If they are, which is not outside the realm of possibility, they should go down too. But what JPMC people do has nothing at all to do with the fact that Qwest's executives defrauded the public to the tune of over $100MM.
So now his character is even bigger enigma. If the guy was a crook and fine with ripping stockholders out of 100MM tune, then how come he didnt want to play along with NSA? If he was greedy then he should have gone along with NSA offer. What could be his motive to say no to NSA? Wouldn't he know, at the time, saying no to the Gov may result in his contracts being shut off??
Fabricated up claims are by their nature nearly indistinguishable from real ones, and outright fabrication isn't the only unethical recourse: there is always panopticon powered selective prosecution— how many felonies have you committed this month?
Regardless, we can observe now that the result will be time in prison and tptacek on HN diligently countering any claim of governmental misconduct. The insight here isn't related to Nacchio's character, it's that claiming that the government is retaliating for failing to comply with their unlawful demands doesn't provide protection.
Look at what happened to Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio after challenging illegal NSA warrantless wiretapping requests. (Hint: he just got out of federal prison about two months ago.)
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230398390... Mr. Nacchio said he still believes his insider-trading prosecution was government retaliation for rebuffing requests in 2001 from the National Security Agency to access his customers' phone records. His plans to use that belief as a defense at trial never materialized; some of the evidence he wanted to use was deemed classified and barred from being introduced. To Mr. Nacchio, the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents saying the agency monitors the email and phone records of Americans, have justified his own stance. He contended the NSA's request was illegal. "I feel vindicated," he said. "I never broke the law, and I never will."