http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/a-federal-appeals-court-has-2.ars By Timothy B. Lee ars technica April 11, 2012 A federal appeals court has thrown out the conviction of a former Goldman Sachs programmer who stole source code from the firm's high-frequency trading (HFT) system. The court holds that the defendant's actions did not fit the definitions of the federal crimes for which he had been convicted. "We decline to stretch or update statutory words of plain and ordinary meaning in order to better accommodate the digital age," the court wrote. Sergey Aleynikov was a top programmer for Goldman Sachs until he left in 2009 to work for a start-up firm planning to build a competing high-frequency trading system. Just before he left, he uploaded a copy of Goldman's HFT code to a remote server. He later downloaded the files to his home computer, but his actions were discovered and he was arrested by the FBI a few weeks later. Aleynikov was indicted under two federal statutes, the National Stolen Property Act (NSPA) and the Economic Espionage Act (EEA). He was convicted by a lower court in 2010, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned his indictment, releasing its opinion on Wednesday. The NSPA makes it a crime to “transport, transmit, transfer in interstate or foreign commerce any goods, wares, merchandise, securities, or money." The government argued, and the lower court agreed, that the source code met the definition of "goods, wares," and "merchandise." But the Second Circuit reached the opposite conclusion, ruling that these terms only include tangible objects. [...] _______________________________________________ LayerOne Security Conference May 26-27, Clarion Hotel, Anaheim, CA http://www.layerone.orgReceived on Wed Apr 11 2012 - 23:50:16 PDT
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