What made them strange, other than the fact you didn't know who they were?
The guy who handled the regulators wore button-down shirts when they were around, and any traders/engineers who had to talk to them often were told to wear a button-down, but that was it.
People from "real Wall Street" who joined usually had a phase of dressing up before they adopted full casual dress. One person lasted months before showing up in a t-shirt. I kind of assumed that they were all buying new wardrobes during that period, but there may have been a culture shock of sorts.
For some reason this question is geeking me out, what sort of answer were you expecting?
Levine’s article makes a great point:
“It really is wild that the SEC’s official position is now that it is illegal to “use unofficial communications to do things like cut deals, win clients or make trades.” “Conduct their communications about business matters within only official channels”! Imagine if that was really the rule! You can’t have lunch with a client and talk about business, or have beers with your colleagues and gripe about work, because that does not create a searchable archive for the SEC to review.”
The spirit of the latter crosses a line of showing deliberate contempt for the legal process. Doing it in writing seems just as ill advised as discussing sensitive information in writing.
Honestly, it's getting a bit insane I think.
If we cannot communicate digitally in private and we cannot communicate physically in close vicinity to a car or a building, the only place left is in a remote forest.
As we have seen with Tesla engineers having access to videos inside cars (how can this even be legal) and we saw the 21 year old who leaked the secret Pentagon data, it's not that there has to be a decision by lawyers or government agencies that the data has to be provided. Any devops or admin can access this kind of data and spread as they like.
And how come Tesla and the Pentagon has no precautions in place to stop this kind if abuse?
It's really quite crazy on many levels.
To me it looks like a clearly-defined line between text and real-time voice/video. What the user experiences, not the technical background.
Ie it would have been perfectly fine for google to ban text chats, and just use calls/meetings; even with the same software. As inefficient and unpleasant as it would be.
Many of them contain various personal data of clients and/or employees, legal makes us specify for how long each service needs to hold on to it, and purge as soon as possible to minimize chance of leaks.
> Processing shall be lawful […] if […] processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject;
I'm required to keep evidence about your KYC information and your financial transactions for compliance purposes for (e.g.) 7 years after you stop doing business with me. If I'm using them for that purpose I'd be in the clear GDPR-wise.
However, the day I break off doing business with you I need to stop using them for marketing or sales leads - that would be a GDPR breach.
Where I suspect it will get very messy for companies is the sexy new "hoover all the data into ML models" is going to come a GDPR cropper because I doubt most of the people doing it can show that they purged it when their relationship with the data owner ended, if they even had one in the first place. They're sure as fuck violating copyrights all over the place.
It's on a high speed train heading in that direction now.
There's many areas in which tech competes directly with, or has attempted to build shadow parallel systems to other more regulated industries - payments, exchanges, various medical plays, media, etc.
now, when i hear someone say disrupt, i immediately assume they are cutting corners on whatever regulation that is needed to gain a leg up over the incumbent companies following the regulations.
Tech wanted people to think this was different from Wall St somehow, but I think the average American no longer sees the difference.
Getting a paypal/google/whatever account flagged is basically the death of that account.
Nonsense. Banks have someone you can get on the phone, usually 24/7. Good luck getting anyone at Google on the phone.
This is.. not new at all. We were talking about Uber doing that about a decade ago lol.
If we are just talking about the USA, then I think both Apple and Google had to partner with entities in the financial industries to do payments, they didn't just bypass regulation in those industries. Then there is Stripe and Square (erm, whatever Square is called now), I'm not sure what regulations they fall under.
I worked at one shop that if you said "call my cell" in a slack to someone, you'd get a call from compliance within days ask to explain why you did this, what the conversation was about, why it wasn't on a work phone.. and to never, ever, ever do it again... because you know we are watching, so we will find you.
Which gives you an idea of the level of monitoring they are doing to tie that together probably automatically given how quickly I was called. And this was almost 10 years ago.
I'm also old enough to recall the little background hum & beep the bank landlines used to make when you were on a recorded line.
If you are allowed to be off the record only in person, this seems like the perfect commercial real estate subsidy program from the federal government.
The penalties are so stiff for a lot of infractions, there is far less attempts to workaround the letter of the rules than you would immediately expect.
There's also classes of in-person meetings with externals that you need pre-approval permission to attend and to write up what was discussed after the fact.
Like people at asset management firms attending a dinner with a broker.
Another example, at a hedge fund I worked, emails, meetings or phone calls to public companies required pre-approval from compliance, and for them to be on the email or call. The emails would also require a preface reminding the moron on the other side that you are a hedge fund and they should not provide you with any material non-public info.
It wasn’t about regulation, but protectionism. If you want to do business with us, you need to hire people to deal with us - people we approve of, or no access.
This was in an unregulated industry, with strong protectionist instincts (Hollywoods movie industry).
Couldn’t these sorts of “in person only” rules also be a protectionist gatekeeping technique?
This is in addition to all email and slack/IM messages.
Route it all through VoIP and record it there?
Maybe theres some bank-compliance phone vendor that operates its own MVNO and does the recording for you?
here's something like that - https://www.teleware.com/products/mobile-voice-recording/
Banks aren’t creating a super secret MVNO to comply with regulations and the telcos aren’t cutting breaks for a bank or a 3rd party spy network. I’d imagine saving all employees cellphone calls for 7 years is a very expensive project.
[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/02/lyra-new-very-low-bitrate-...
CDO credit ratings were a perverse incentive race to the bottom in terms of quality, because it was issuer-paid.
The ratings agencies essentially bid on future business with the banks by issuing rosier ratings than their competitors.
Also, they paid billions in fine settlements after the fact.
The record keeping likely contributed to them being able to piece together the agencies becoming more and more lenient, and the internal dialogue between analysts & sales.
Yet this remains unchanged.
Anyway, some structure was put in place by the government settlements. For example in Moodys government they agreed to:
* Separation of Moody’s commercial and credit rating functions by excluding analytical personnel from any commercial related discussions and excluding personnel responsible for commercial functions from determining credit ratings or developing rating methodologies;
* Changes to ensure that specified personnel are not compensated on the basis of the company’s financial performance;
and a few other things
The separation of concerns seems similar to the Dotcom implosion era settlements to how equity research could be paid, and that they had to be firewalls off from the parts of the bank bidding on equity/debt/loan offerings with the companies that research reports were being written on.
Probably the biggest outcome was that the market now understood credit rating agencies are barely worth the bytes they are recorded in, and they are taken with large grains of salt now.
So far from perfect, but also far from the narrative of "nothing changed".. like much in life.
Only half-joking. I really wish I knew how this works.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/read-the-bloomberg-chats-tha...
Seems like it might be time.
Desantis just tried to push through a law that said you have to register with the state if you report on politicians. Do you like that proposed law?
Do you want the government to have access to all communications between you and your coworkers? Do you want to be questioned every time that you tell a coworker over Slack “maybe we should talk about this at lunch?”
It amazes me that people want the only organization that has a “monopoly on violence” to have more power.
There's currently an investigation going on about how one particular former President may have broken the reporting law. But for that law, his "catch-and-bury" agreement to keep unpalatable stories about him out of the public eye was perfectly legal.
So yes, I do want the organization with a monopoly on violence to have more power of oversight of people with power through money. Especially as long as who has control of those levers changes with the frequency it does.
Are you one of those people in power? Because the scenario that someone said was that I financial firms that are highly regulated was that if any employee said on chat to a friend at work, “hey give me call on my cellphone and let’s talk about where we are going after work”, you could be talked to by legal.
You are saying that you want an increase by the surveillance state. Have people learned nothing about how the government abuses power from the “War on $x”?
Sure. I was there; I remember. I think it was a waste of time but ultimately harmless; it resulted in a few (private, moneyed) corporations deciding not to sell some music that the government had mandated be labeled (which, to be clear, is a wide power the government has; perhaps overused here, but it's no a violation of anyone's rights that they make companies put the ingredient lists on food). Then the Internet happened and that whole thing became irrelevant.
Florida is a great example to study these money-power-vs-political-power effects, because were the tables reversed people currently supporting Disney would be horrified. Imagine it was Rupert Murdoch and Fox World with an ultra-right-white-national enclave utterly immune to legal oversight, and the duly-elected Democratic government trying impotently to reign them in. Much as I like the result of Disney;s pushback, the means are deeply disquieting and speak to a completely-dysfunctional corporate-power-vs-state-power relationship that is ripe for abuse. And the wheels of corporate power turn glacially relative to government power; DeSantis, barring a state constitutional amendment, is gone in 2024 as a state governor, but Rupert Murdoch was CEO of News Corp / Fox for 36 years.
I'm not 100% for corporate power or 100% for government power. I'm for balancing and pitting the two against each other because they're both effective tools for checking the worst abuses of the other. And make no mistake: when it comes to the FAANGs, what we're seeing is patterns of abuse that need to be reigned in. Requirements for auditing and oversight can be overdone, but in practice, in 2023, the tech sector has been allowed to run with a laissez-faire attitude for decades and has become a vital piece of the modern societal fabric; as a general principle, anything that vital to daily human experience for most citizens needs government oversight to ensure its legal compliance before it becomes Standard Oil or Bell Telephone or Microsoft or Fox Media or, indeed, Disney... Something unanswerable to all but itself.
This era of existence is marked by humanity trying to forge a path between a 1984 future and a Brave New World future. There are no simple answers for power allocation.
So you think it is okay that the government trampled on the free speech rights of rappers who were talking about police corruption and there experience years before the internet became ubiquitous where anyone could get it out?
> Imagine it was Rupert Murdoch and Fox World with an armor, always taste no and the duly-elected Democratic government trying impotently to reign them in
And the government only tried to “rein them in” by punishing them after they spoke out.
> when it comes to the FAANGs, what we're seeing is patterns of abuse that need to be reigned in.
Well the difference is that no corporation has ever stopped me because I “looked suspicious” because I was walking through my own neighborhood that I looked like I didn’t belong. Nor does it have qualified immunity to get away with doing almost anything. I have agency to not be under the auspices of any corporation - especially a search engine. I don’t have that power under the government. There is no balance on government power except not to give it anymore than absolutely necessary.
I’ve never had to worry about my son being harassed by any corporation just for driving down the street.
And do you think the government is just going to be happy with surveiling employees?
Did they though? I mean, to be clear, I'm sure they tried. But both back then and now, the songs were easy to get and is still easy to get. If anything, the whole affair Streisand Effected the hell out of them.
I think the story's a good example of a failed attempt at abuse of power because the system of checks and balances worked (it would have failed harder but for a single, powerful, monolithic corporation agreeing with the goal and de-stocking the product from its shelves).
> Well the difference is that no corporation has ever stopped me because I “looked suspicious” because I was walking through my own neighborhood that I looked like I didn’t belong
No; they merely cut access to your account because you look suspicious, such as having pictures in your private Drive account that their algorithm decided were child pornography, locking up or deleting all data you had hosted by them, with no recourse and no hope of retrieval. Google's within their rights to cut an account, but there's no arguing there's a difference in kind of the experience someone online has if they have a Google account vs. being banned from having one. It's not nearly as bad as government abuse of power; it's really quite bad, and only government has the authority to make it better because the corporations are otherwise unaccountable.
> Nor does it have qualified immunity
Who backstops the terms of service violation system? When Google demonetizes trans-friendly or trans-inclusive content because their inscrutable TOS and algorithm decide such content is "sexually explicit" (read: offends the sensibilities of schoolboards and advertisers), who has the power to say that's not what that term means? Nobody. I guess with YouTube, we can always take our business to its competitor, doesnt-exist.com.
> I have agency to not be under the auspices of any corporation
Yes; you have the digital equivalent of the freedom to live in a van down by the river, banished from the nice neighborhoods. Vive Liberte.
(To be clear, I don't have concrete answers here. There are no easy answers; it's a complicated problem. But that means the answer also isn't as easy as "Government already has too much power." Perhaps it currently has too much of the wrong kind of power, and not enough of the right kind).
In the 1980s how did you produce or distribute music without the internet and computers that could produce music? The police arrested NWA at a concert for rapping “Fuck the police”.
> No; they merely cut access to your account because you look suspicious, such as having pictures in your private Drive account that their algorithm decided were child pornography, locking up or deleting all data you had hosted by them, with no recourse and no hope of retrieval.
I can and do have multiple backups of my media (Google Drive, iCloud, Amazon Drive, and they are stored using a separate account in AWS S3 Glacier. Are you really comparing losing some pictures and data with losing your freedom or being harassed by a cop?
> Yes; you have the digital equivalent of the freedom to live in a van down by the river, banished from the nice neighborhoods. Vive Liberte.
Yes guess how hard it is to live a good life after getting arrested because you got on the wrong side of an overzealous Justice system? Or got shot by a trigger happy cop?
I agree with you that the monopoly on violence requires more scrutiny than the soft-power of money. My argument is that certainly doesn't imply no government oversight, nor does it imply we don't have enough government oversight right now. Especially of corporations - your argument appears to be government power is dangerous to use because it can be abused vs. individuals and vs. music acts; can you think of an example where too much government oversight of corporate process has led to improper deprivation of liberties (jail time and the like)?
We can acknowledge government power is abused against individuals while still asserting it is the most effective tool against corporate overreach and should be wielded as such.
No comparing government power and the harm they can inflict (taking away your freedom) to corporate power (they can take away pictures of little Johny) are night and day. I can live my whole life without dealing with Google.
> can you think of an example where too much government oversight of corporate process has led to improper deprivation of liberties (jail time and the like)?
In a very realistic scenario that someone said happens in highly regulated industries is that if you ever tell a friend on a company communication channel to call you even if it’s something personal you will be called by lawyers.
States are trying to pass laws where social media companies have to verify your identity and your age before you can post.
Government is trying to have back doors to all of your chat.
Government is arresting people based on their chat messages where they are talking about using pills that facilitate abortion between grown people?
Do I need to go on?
Is it worth having the government intrude in your life to protect your pictures of little Johny?
So what? So you have to explain that you didn't violate the auditing laws? That's hardly a huge burden. Don't use corporate assets for personal communication, problem solved.
> Government is trying to have back doors to all of your chat
And they shouldn't. But the point is: for most users who haven't bothered to set up something like IRC, corporations already do. And you continue to harp on the ways that government can impact personal civil liberties when I am still talking about the ways government can restrict corporations from using unchecked power to make people's lives hell. For the purposes of this discussion, chat logs and abortion are irrelevant. Unless you think the personal right to have an abortion is somehow analogous to the corporate right to, what, Dodge tax law? Use dark money to fund a candidate like DeSantis getting into office?
If you're concerned about government overreach and a resulting threat to personal civil liberties, the best defense we have against it is strengthening and enforcing existing corporate auditing law. Because everything you're concerned about regarding civil liberties gets exponentially worse when corporations can buy politicians.
Government and corporate power aligning behind a common goal is on the road to fascism. I'm advocating for setting those power bases against each other.
So are you okay with the government subpoenaing your private phone communications because they think when you asked your coworker to call you on your personal phone to talk about where you wanted to go out drinking?
Fascism is when the government controls every area of your life and of corporations. Do you think giving the government more control of the private sector will lessen the chance of fascism?
You keep bringing it back to personal civil liberty because you don't have an answer to the question "So why is more government oversight of corporations bad?"
I actually have no problem with such a subpoena being attempted (it is part of the regular process of investigating a crime), but I have a problem with a court rubber-stamping it. I have no problem with the corporation I'm working for being obligated to track and furnish similar records for any corporate assets I use, and to be obligated to ask questions if they catch wind that I might be trying to skirt auditing law by pushing conversations that should be legally audited private. Catch the difference?
> Fascism is when the government controls every area of your life and of corporations. Do you think giving the government more control of the private sector will lessen the chance of fascism?
I actually do because the definition you gave is not actually what fascism is.
Fascism is a political movement emphasizing extreme nationalism, a supremacy mythos of that nation, and the militarism necessary to support such an inherently unstable structure. Among its tools can be usurpation of corporations. But tight control of corporations is also a hallmark of socialism and communism, among other structures. You may as well say its wrong to breathe air because fascists do that too.
A healthy democracy reigns in the excesses of an unfettered corporate sector. Those excesses, left unchecked, can (not will, but can) result in, among other things, fascist-leaning private company owners throwing in the power of their corporations behind like-minded politicians and building the machine that facilitates a Mussolini or Hitler rising to power. Mussolini, in particular, was funded by Italian industrialists.
I just gave you a real example of where corporate oversight leads to giving the government access to your personal communications.
> I actually have no problem with such a subpoena being attempted (it is part of the regular process of investigating a crime), but I have a problem with a court rubber-stamping it.
Have you not been paying attention to what the government has been doing in the name of the War on Drugs, the War on Crime and the War on Terrorism?
> Fascism is a political movement emphasizing extreme nationalism
Have you not been paying attention to what’s been happening since 2016?
> A healthy democracy reigns in the excesses of an unfettered corporate sector
Exactly what power are you afraid that Google can have over you compared to the government?
There were an awful lot of people concerned about the time they colluded to depress wages (https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...).
And the people they fired to break unions (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55173063).
And they're currently under investigation for monopolizing digital ad tech (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...).
Let's assume, ad argumento, that they have monopolized digital ad tech, meaning other digital advertisers are excluded and almost all the ads you see are single-source.
Gosh, it sure would suck if fascists gained control of that single source, wouldn't it? And as we've seen, we can't trust that won't happen just because they nailed up "Don't be evil" above the door (and then it fell off later).
We should probably enforce the laws that are in place to keep a market diverse and healthy.
... I think I see your position though. You're concerned, given current political climate, that increased government oversight could give fascists more power. I echo that concern... Except that I believe we got here because fascists recognized that nobody was watching the tech henhouse and weaponized that. We had an awful lot of tech firms thinking they were bigger than political concerns and should be a world apart from government oversight right up until they realized they aided and abetted those who organized Jan 6th, then... Oops.
In fact, many Zoom conversations are expressly forbidden from being recorded at many financial firms. Again, that’s because no one is using zoom to make trades so there isn’t a requirement to record them and financial firms also don’t want to have to pay to keep things stored just so some lawyer can hit them with discovery.
A big current issue is when you use written correspondence that is not part of a system of record. See Finra Regulatory Notice 17-18 for details on that.
The point of the regulation isn’t to cover every conceivable alternative. The point is to specify what avenue you can use to accomplish a task in a regulated manner
Because trading conversations have to be recorded (legally). It's easy for corporate policy to say "we don't record Zooms, (therefore) you cannot trade over Zoom". It's also easy to say "we record all text communications, (therefore) you can trade over text". Meanwhile, the phone rules predated any other modern form of communication so they have the complexity of "sometimes record and trade, sometimes don't" grandfathered in.
During yearly compliance training one thing that was stressed was not to mark anything A/C Priv unless it actually was. They made sure to call out that including someone from legal in an email chain does not make it A/C Priv and not to try anything like that. At the time I thought it was silly that the training went over such obvious things as "don't commit white collar crimes" in essence but apparently that's not how they do things at Google. I just can't wrap my head around why any of the many different people involved could ever look at what they were doing and think "yes, this is fine, I should continue this behavior". WTAF.
[email protected]: "it needs to be history off"
https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22...
[email protected]: "should we have history off for this?"
https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22...
[email protected]: "Hi Tim, if OK, can I ask you to turn history off :)"
https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22...
[email protected]: [interesting exchange with another employee who is trying to follow the rules]
https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22...
Paraphrasing: "What policy? I'm on multiple legal holds as well. I ignore them every day [smileyface] But if you want to follow the rules, I'll respect your decision. I'll just communicate with the others off the record. I only included you for optics reasons."
What kind of legal guidance were these people getting? When I worked at a big corp, we had regular meetings with legal that were reminders of how to treat sensitive subjects and it was taken very seriously.
Exactly.
When 'fix' means ensure conversations that are already under current legal hold are destroyed, it's clear what legal guidance and training are.
I hope the court nails their execs to the wall for pulling shit like this as a matter of corporate policy.
The internal legal guidance they've been getting for this case is likely exactly the same as their internal legal guidance for everything else.
eg "completely full of shit" that they're complying with things
Seems like a bad internal culture, maybe stemming from their weird self belief and exceptionalism because "we're smarter than everyone else"?
Either way, when Google claims things like "We're fully compliant with GDPR, or [other legislation/requirements here]", the documented examples above is why many people don't believe them in the slightest.
The kind that looked at the Microsoft anti-trust lawsuits in the 90s, and instead of saying, I dunno, "let's not try and gain and wield illegal monopoly powers" but "let's delete all the evidence of us gaining and wielding illegal monopoly power".
https://ia601707.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.cand.3...
[email protected]: "Hi, please use this chat for ops/policy/BD/escalations issues that need faster response. Please note: I would like to keep history off. Members are Shie, Camille, Dan, Court, Sherry, Jintae, Ash, Jami, me."
https://ia801707.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.cand.3...
"Nice website you got there. It'd sure be a shame if your competitors all were listed above it in search even when looking for it by exact name."
But I wouldn’t even go that far.
Like... I'm hard pressed to find a scenario where Google has not appeared to be a bunch of outright gangsters.
If we could put executives from Volkswagen in prison for cooking the books on some environmental regulations, shuttering Google and arresting the entire C-suite should be way more obvious.
What I found interesting was the rationalization that "people would just cherry pick data and use it against us." Which belied the idea that if you saved all of it, you would be able to reconstruct it.
Also the storing of live traffic not to "look at" but to have a model of live traffic to test changes against. I once asked "why not create a statistical model of the traffic and use that?" and was responded "#1, people wouldn't believe you if you said this was 'just like actual traffic', and #2 we get live traffic for free with no engineering effort so its a win to use it instead."
They weren't wrong but they didn't really prioritize privacy or safety either.
Most quality docs must be retained by law for the life of the company, even if they discontinue a product. So it isn't really judgement call from the legal department.
At the HFT firm, the attitude was, "we're constantly being sued (by the SEC and others), so we treat all of our records like they're under litigation holds, just in case the SEC claims they wanted them, even the off-topic slack channels."
At Google, the attitude was, "we're constantly getting sued, so we treat all of our records as being as ephemeral as possible so we can avoid having a record of what we're doing."