Joseph Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest (now owned by CenturyLink), refused to surveil his customers at the NSA's request. Shortly thereafter, the NSA dropped a major contract with Qwest that they had been relying on to meet earnings targets. A few years later, he was chargrd with insider trading on the grounds that he made statements about earnings that were unachievable while selling his own shares. He attempted to claim in court that the charges were retaliation, but his evidence was removed for national security reasons.

His case was covered in the news, and he still went to federal prison for four years. And every other US telecom CEO knows it.

That is the popular HN narrative about Nacchio.

Another narrative, to my mind equally plausible, is that Nacchio was essentially a crook who got caught up in a wave of corporate crime enforcement in the wake of the Enron scandal for making somewhere between 32MM (Nacchio's experts' take) and 100MM (the USG's take) selling stock he knew, sometimes within days, would be worth a fraction of what he was selling it for.

But die by the sword, perhaps live by the sword: the NSA scandal provides Nacchio's best tool for rehabilitating his image.

I think a read of the case on PACER sort of bears out that narrative. You can just skip to the competing sentencing memoranda (note what Nacchio stipulates to) to get the particulars of what he's charged with, and get a sense for how sweeping the behavior was and how likely it was to have been tied specifically to NSA.

I don't like NSA any more than you do, but I think I like corporate crooks even less.

It sounds like you haven't seen the documentaries Silenced (2014), about persecuted US government whistleblowers (i.e. people who were actually in government agencies), or War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State (2013).

I'm just saying its a bit different in US than China in that there's systems to push back and freedom for documentary makers to expose this.

Sure. But I was horrified how little difference it makes to the people in those documentaries. Their lives are ruined for being patriotic, intelligent, and truthful, for not being corrupt. And there's nothing they can do about it.

Have you ever heard of Snowden ?

Doesn't the Snowden phenomenon kind of make his point? His leaks spawned a shitstorm of US/Western media coverage and even court cases against the government. What happens inside China if a Chinese national flees the country and blows the whistle? Basically no challenge to the government, media blackout, maybe his friends get sent to re-education camps, etc.

I'm pretty sure Snowden would get sent to "re-education" camp if US could get hands on him ;)

>even court cases against the government

I mean, that was basically the extent of it though. There has been little-to-no actual systemic change.

You (poorly) jest...but there'd be a lot less intimacy spied on.

What is this statement implying?

The statement implies not to trust any computer, even those you can throw out a window (sorry, Woz).