Former programmer Goldman Sachs convicted of stealing code

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On Friday, a New York jury found a 45-year-old programmer Sergei Aleinikov guilty of stealing code owned by Goldman Sach. On the second charge - illegal copying - the jury could not decide, and according to it Aleinikov was acquitted. As the court found, the programmer “stole” an unnamed amount of software code designed for high-frequency trading in order to transfer it to another trading company Teza Technologies, which is a competitor to Goldman Sach and who offered Aleynikov a job.

The story is curious because Aleinikov already had similar problems with the law. Back in 2009, he got into the FBI on a similar charge, but two years later he received a real prison sentence on another charge: a US federal court in Manhattan found him guilty of transporting stolen property and economic espionage. Aleinikov received a substantial period of eight years, of which he managed to serve only 11 months. Aleinikov’s lawyers were able to get the appeal reviewed, and the judge eventually found him innocent, because the FBI agents “did not have enough reason to arrest the defendant.”

As a result, it is not known how, but Aleinikov again found himself in the hands of the FBI on the same charge that he was charged back in 2009. Kevin Marino’s lawyer, Aleinikov, told reporters earlier that his client could pay a four-year prison term and absolutely pay a $ 1.5 million fine. Now he says that the verdict of the court contradicts the principle that no one can be held responsible for the same crime.

Developers of high-frequency trading systems sign special non-disclosure documents with the consent that their Internet access will be limited and their telephone conversations will be monitored by security services. In addition, the work with the program code itself is limited for them: the programmer can work only with the piece of code with which he works directly. Since the topic provides for the implementation of complex algorithms, court hearings on such issues are often held behind closed doors without journalists, so that inadvertently some features of the system will not be made public.
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In the US, the courts are very sensitive to the collection of evidence, especially for crimes in the field of IT technologies. Some time ago, a federal judge refused to admit several charges in a case for which evidence was gathered at the time when agents of the white-collar department, disguised as cablemen, entered the hotel's hotel room, having previously disconnected the Internet there.