Interestingly a lot of the rainbow colored carrots the are promoted als "original carrots" are also new "breeds", often newer then the orange ones. More colorfull and more sweet then the original.
Because we have many rich people and corporations willing to spend a lot of money to make sure they don't lose their cases. According to Wikipedia, Aleynikov was making over $1m per year at a Goldman competitor after he left.
And it looks like he got his money's worth. There was no dispute that he took the code. His "open source" defense apparently fell through, and a jury convicted him. He only won on appeal because he convinced the Second Circuit that software wasn't a trade secret within the Electronic Espionage Act, something which Congress went and explicitly my added in response to the court case.
So then your parent's question degenerates to, why does spending more money correlate with winning more cases? Which is a much more interesting question.
1. Money is a means of resource allocation. More money, more resources.
2. War of attrition. Raising costs on the other guy makes settling or coming to some sort of settlement more likely.
3. Scorched earth. GS may be trying to send a message not so much to Alyenkov as to any other programmers who'd be willing to entertain a similar stunt. See recent coverage of Amazon's frequent, but nearly entirely unsuccessful, pursuit of noncompetes against former employees.
the fact that we had prevailed against Amazon also gave these engineers the confidence that we could and would do so again -- and ultimately, it didn't prevent anyone from matriculating. It did, however, have one lasting effect: the engineer that was pursued went from thinking fondly of his years at AWS to hating AWS and Amazon with a white-hot passion that still burns today. In the end, enforcing a non-compete is like erecting a Berlin Wall: if you feel you need it, you have much deeper problems...
The same way they have the authority to tap everyone's phones: they are one and the same with the unchecked military power of the United States with carte blanche to di whatever they want from spy on ex-lovers, to imprison people in solitary for years before trial, to lie openly to congress without repercussions.
Talking about the content of what they might know is a distraction of the real problem. If there is too much power and information with one organization (the goverment in this case) bad things happen to individuals that go against these organizations.
This a problem that's not exclusive to police states, it also affect western democracies and corporations. For the US right now the individuals at stake are the ones that go against and or scare the status quo: whisteblowers, hackers, political activists, etc.
How does this effect foreign users of these services? I mean I'm pretty sure that they haven't restricted their data collection to US citizens. Is there international law about this?
Uh, the NSA's primary mission is to conduct data surveillance on foreign entities. The reason why PRISM exists is that much of this data flows through American companies' servers.
