Would be nice if for example they mentioned the overall impact of the illegal transactions on the entire systems, or maybe changes or actions that those banks made (other then paying fines).

Basically, I feel like this misses either (or both) the overall, total impact of 'dirty money', the global scale of it, it's effect, etc. (because only the bigger cases that were caught were mentioned, it's interesting to see how big the phenomenal). And also I would like to understand what is being done to stop or prevent other and future instances.

Now try being suspected of tax cheating as a smaller company and see how governments punish that (not "convicted" mind you, "suspected", meaning you likely did nothing wrong, and even if you did there's a decent chance it's an accident/lack of knowledge/... rather than outright fraud). Let's see government limit themselves to not endangering even one year's profitability then.

If a small bank does $100M of tainted transactions and a large bank does the same, they should be fined the same, IMO.

Your point about the small company is not an analog in my opinion. If you have $500K in profits and a tax cheating penalty of $1MM, it does not follow that the precedent is that tax penalties are 2x annual profits, but rather that tax penalties are proportionate to the tax cheating. If another company has a tax fraud of 50x the scope and 1000x the profits, their tax fraud fine should be 50x yours, not 1000x yours.

If the penalty is meant to be a deterrent, then it should hurt. Otherwise it will not be a deterrent. You have to consider the bank's annual profit if you want it to hurt.

Imagine if See's Candy has a product recall due to malfeasance or NetJets has a crash based on pilot error.

Should any penalties be based on the facts and circumstances of the situation or on the entire profits of Berkshire Hathaway?

also, as we see in criminal law, setting huge penalties doesn't work very well if you can only get a few convictions. it just turns into a game of hot potato where everyone still does the illegal thing to stay competitive and some unlucky firm occasionally gets stuck holding the bag.

a free society should strive for reasonable penalties that are consistently enforced.

The large bank can continue to do damage if they are caught, while the small one cannot. Thus they definitely do more harm, and at the very least will be perceived to have effective immunity from the law.

If you only fine thieves proportional to the value of the stolen goods, then all you're doing is saying it's ok to steal so long as you are sufficiently wealthy. (And if you became wealthy through theft... then you've made a legitimate living through damage to society.)

You don't need the equivalent of capital punishment for stealing and, by extension, don't need to take away all of a caught thief's money, just a sufficient multiple of their stealing to make it unattractive to enter into a career of it.

So the point is not simply that you need to defer thieves from entering a career of it, but that you need also to deter thieves from considering it as a one-time option for when their quarterly earnings are due, and that you need to do so sufficiently well that even a highly skilled thief with a multi-million dollar company salary won't consider it. So either it can't just be fines (asset seizure/prison, maybe for repeat offenders) or those fines must be legitimately severe as measured by the one committing the act.

you might reasonably assume that if you catch a company engaging in one instance of illegal activity, you have only seen the tip of the iceberg and there is much more that you couldn't prove. I would prefer the government not to be setup on this premise, but as I said, this is a philosophical position.

This of course is still proportional to the fraud (and the societal damage), not to the overall revenues or profits of the taxpayer in question.

> If the revenue office estimates that approximately 10% of tax fraud is caught, then the penalty for tax fraud should be at least 10x the amount of the fraud.

this, imo, is the exact situation that creates the game of hot potato. people stop making decisions based solely on EV when the variance gets too high. setting a huge penalty to create -EV may discourage the largest, most forward-looking institutions from engaging in the bad behavior (or at least directing it in a top-down fashion), but most companies and individuals with a shorter time horizon are just going to ignore it. and since everyone does it but almost no one gets caught, it creates an easy way to single out politically useful targets and throw the book at them.

rather than just increasing the penalty to gain ratio, I think it is more productive to ask why it is so hard to enforce these laws in the first place. tax law, for instance, can be so complicated that it is unclear to everyone involved (enforcement, accountants, defense counsel) whether a particular strategy is legal. when wrongdoing is difficult to understand, let alone prove, the government should simplify the laws, not make them more draconian. it wouldn't hurt to spend a little more on enforcement either.

Sarbanes Oxley demonstrated with clarity how to fix this: pierce the corporate veil and send executives who commit crimes (or allow crimes to be committed under them) to jail.

It's a matter of political will and power, nothing more.

Nothing.

Because once they have such a high penetration rate, people would be very hesitant and afraid to leave the service if the T&C are too overreaching.

Your friend might not be poorer for it, but the chances of you (assuming that you do have an account) of rejecting a new addition to the existing Facebook T&C (and as a result quitting from Facebook) is very slim, especially since there isn't a resembling service that you might transfer to (at least not a strong service).

What they didn't do (although some wanted them to), is also check the system on already employed people and checked if that changed their likelihood of staying in a bad job/finding a better job or anything like that.

Because that's the real idea behind basic income. not just giving it to the unemployed, but to everyone, with the hope that it would encourage people to find jobs better suited to them, and to allow people to take bigger risks.

(And one thing these trial do seem to show is that giving it out, and then removing it, is at least modestly disruptive.)

Everything is affordable in that situation. In a smaller country, if you do nothing else to manage it, it increases inflation.

In a 'reserver currency' country that inflation is spread out across the globe.

And that isn't even addressing things like how the USA could reinstitute the wealth and income taxes of the 40's, or charge market (rather than fire sale) rates for national resources (drilling on fed land, grazing on fed land), airwaves, or alter how we grant monopolies (patents) and many other untapped flows of public wealth to private entities.

UBI isn't too expensive to do small-scale trial, it's entire theory of operation (and the key criticisms raised, like the inflation-spiral one) is too dependent on universality and coordination with other policy changes to do a meaningful small-scale trial, as you can neither validate the claimed benefits nor refute the claimed drawbacks that way.

You can do a gradual ramp of benefits trial, but not a limited sample of population in an otherwise open environment with pre-existing policies generally applicable.

When I send an image to a friend, it can take hours to send a half-megabyte image despite my internet connection being fine. When this happens, none of the consequent messages send. If I close my phone, messages stop sending. So I must violate my privacy by keeping my phone open for sometimes, hours at a time, just to send a stupid little image.

Despite the fact that sending an image will cause consequent messages to be delayed by hours, messages have started, in the last 6 to 12 months, to be sent out of order. This can be disasterous, as a fair number of my friends have depression and other problems, which means (as an example) my "haha" responses can sometimes be seen to be responding to /other/ messages (And yes, I can use the quote function, but sometimes that interrupts the flow of messaging).

This, plus stupid little problems like, backups not being tested to be forward-compatible (something that is ridiculously easy to test, but that they could not be bothered to do), mean that relying on signal is a fool's game at this point.

I ended up stopping using Signal (except for a few holdouts) because of the message delivery problems; it caused way too many social problems.

I mostly use Telegram now, and it's been great. The worst part about it is everyone saying "but it's russian spyware!!" whenever I suggest it. It isn't, folks, and I'm well apprised of the theoretical vulnerabilities. They're just a compromise I'm more than happy to make, when the alternative is a chat tool that fails at chatting even 5% of the time.

What really sucks is that there's no hope of me convincing them to switch again if a better messenger were to come along.

I'm a heavy signal user for about 5 years, never had any of the issues you're describing. Regularly sending 3-4 minute videos it all goes through fine. Exported/imported my chat history 4 times now when changing phones, never had an issue. Never seen messages to be sent out of order either. I really wonder if we're using the same app!

The fact that you have it good, and have never had problems, does not contradict the fact that I and other people have had problems. Talking about these problems is not 'Signal bashing', just like talking about traffic problems is not 'car-bashing'.

I am thinking if this is happening could google be throttling signal somehow? That is the thing i have always worried about.

What does Google have to do with it?

> Telegram’s source code is not an SDK or a library. [--] But to be fair, the messaging app doesn’t state they have an SDK. All they did is put their source code in the open.

TDLib is that SDK.

The Saudis seem like a much more likely party to do it in my opinion, mostly because we know they are willing to do a lot worse against people they oppose (or who oppose them).

That being said, I also think that playing the "A government hacked my phone" is a much better play on behalf of Bezos then claiming it was done by someone accessing his or Sanchezs phone (for example her brother who is supposedly a Trump supporter, like the link in the end suggests).

What happens is something approximately like this:

Saudi military intelligence puts through a request via appropriate channels to the Five Eyes for a tap on some low-profile woman's phone, claiming it's necessary in pursuit of a counter-terrorism objective. This ends up with GCHQ rather than NSA (NSA spies on Brits, Brits spy on Americans, they work at adjacent desks and share info: this is the traditional work-around for laws banning domestic spying) who happily hand over the contents of a foreign POIs phone to an allied intel agency.

Nobody at any senior level has a clue what's going on under cover of surveillance: stuff like this happens thousands of times a day. Meanwhile, the Saudi officer in charge of the kompromat on Bezos now has the dodgy photos off his girlfriend's phone ...

If GCHQ doesn't work, route through some other allied SIGINT agency with cooperation via NSA, preferably in a country where the Khashoggi thing is just another "foreigners doing horrible things to each other" back page story and nobody has a clue about Jeff Bezos' divorce.

TLDR: the global war on terror has given us a global hairball of inter-tangled intelligence sharing arrangements, and these can be manipulated for pleasure and profit by any sufficiently corrupt party who is plugged in to it.

It’s hard to conclude that five eyes isn’t a domestic spying proxy program.

One is resource management and risk evaluation (aka, there are bigger problems), another is knowledge of FIS operations and many others...

You've incorrectly attributed the argument from a specific offshoot (that foreign spy tools persist because of limited counterintelligence resources) and applied it to the root supposition (that nation states utilize parallel construction, through a conspiracy with known adversaries as a matter of course and that spy infrastructure is built specifically for that purpose).

Of course it's more likely that someone (anyone, really) just pwned Ms. Sanchez's phone directly.

They are huge customers for British arms sales (look up the Al Yamamah deal — roughly US $100Bn in business). They're known to have bought surveillance and intelligence monitoring software from Israel. They're in everybody's back pockets, and in their wallets.

As a Brit, I find your belief that US citizens are immune from monitoring by the intelligence services of other nations (when that kind of money is passing hands) touching ...

As are a lot of countries. Does not mean we will allow surveillance without any questions.

>As a Brit, I find your belief that US citizens are immune from monitoring by the intelligence services of other nations (when that kind of money is passing hands) touching ...

I never said or implied that.

Read the comment again:

>No Five Eyes member is going to randomly tap some US citizens phone because the Saudis asked without some serious investigation.

(You're looking at the present-day for context, but these agencies run on protocols that have built up over many decades, dating back to the Cold War.)

I would welcome your conjectures on how the spooks controlled Obama. His enduring legacy may be heavy use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, and a radical expansion of "death from the sky", which seem incompatible with his personality, creating a mystery: What leverage did/do the spooks have on him?

My read on BHO is that as a non-white guy super-achieving in a quietly racist political climate (we've subsequently had a refresher course in American racial politics: it never went away) he was at pains to avoid alienating factions that might work against him.

He was also a lawyer: not just any lawyer, but a former editor of the Harvard Law Review (a plum niche reserved for star pupils at the #1 law school in the United States, often an early sign that the individual is on the road to the Supreme Court). Instead of heading for the bench Obama went into politics, but he is above all else a legalist (and a constitutional expert). As such, he worked only within the established legal frameworks, carefully trying to build a platform for incremental adjustments.

The Espionage Age was already a feature of the system before he arrived in the Oval Office: he continued to use it as it was designed. He didn't rock the boat or try to impose a radical agenda on the DoJ. He wouldn't do anything that might give his enemies a lever against him. He was, in fact, a conservative politician: not "conservative" in the sense of Movement Conservativism (which is actually a very radical political platform), but a Burkean conservative.

The spooks didn't need leverage on him: he was theirs from the outset.

>>For me it checks out - leaking informations sounds like something that Trump or his supporters would do. Why would not they, if they have the option to? Per the intelligence agencies - are you sure that they are a single entity, where people are of uniform opinion? And every single person follows law to the letter of it? There is the example that those services employed Snowden - if the services were so organised as to avoid such hacks, we would not have heard of Snowden.

But from my experience in other government entities, I believe that doing something like hacking into someone's phone, would require approval and support from high enough officials in those organizations, and so far it seems that these organization do still seem to remain professional and not involved in political actions by the president.

I agree that there might be (and I'm assuming there are) private Trump supporters in those agencies, that for example, would do 'a Snowden' and release classified and private information that they shouldn't. But that information first needs to gathered, and I don't think Jeff Bezos has done something to warrant previous gathering of information about him. (If information about Trump for example is released this way, it would seem more likely to me, because we know they collected that information while thinking he might be a spy).

But once again, I hope I'm not just being hopefully optimistic in my trust of 'the system'.

Of course if as a hobby I want to use their patent to help me build/improve my electric car, then now they won't sue me. But the question is, what if I'm Tesla's competitor, or if I want to be, will they allow me to use their patent when I'm trying to compete with them, and "steal their business"? Because no one will use their patent if they might sue them after for "using their patent against them", but on the other hand, is using their invention against them "good faith"?

Is there no proper and legal way to share their invention that indicates exactly what can and can't be done(something like an open source license)?

Yes, this is usually done with broad cross licensing agreements and/or patent pools.

I know good people working for Facebook, but it does make me think "After everything you know about Facebook, the fact you would still work there, makes me respect you a lot less"

Just because you don't use Facebook doesn't mean that some other company isn't doing the same thing with your data, you just probably haven't heard of it.