@cstross You obviously need to do some criminal investigation, you know the thing police tends to do when people commit illegal crimes. Like: Arrest the people who seem most likely to be involved at once and take their statements without letting them coordinate. Look through their computers to find emails, Slack messages, source code with weird if statements. As for people leaving the job, as long as they are not dead you can still punish them.
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@cstross "Day fines" make the penalties for white collar crime a personal liability for those involved and scale it to their wealth. Make the risk calculus personal and see how the CEOs tunes change.
@cstross Don't take this a me opining not to punish corporations significantly harder. But. Punish the persons. If a corporation does something illegal, then someone has given the order, someone has followed it, punish those persons accordingly. As a not insignificant bonus people might start squealing to get reduced sentences.
@NohatCoder I agree! But which person is responsible? There's often a multiyear lag effect between decision, impact, and prosecution, during which executives resign or retire and are replaced. With big cases against big firms taking decades to hear, do you jail for current CEO for something their predecessor-but-one started and they were only present for the end of?
@cstross You obviously need to do some criminal investigation, you know the thing police tends to do when people commit illegal crimes. Like: Arrest the people who seem most likely to be involved at once and take their statements without letting them coordinate. Look through their computers to find emails, Slack messages, source code with weird if statements. As for people leaving the job, as long as they are not dead you can still punish them.
All the way through.
Up to and including all of the people receiving stock bonuses, and, stockholders receiving dividends. being charged with receiving the proceeds of crime, and being bankrupted.
If the evidence was deleted, then it gets treated in ciurt as harshly as it currently does.
The corporate veil should not exist if crime has been commited.
And, Yes, I am looking at you, Fujitsu.
@BillySmith @NohatCoder At least in the UK, a load of the shareholders getting those dividends … are pension funds. So you and me. I tend to think liability should generally where control ends—but make allowances to pursue people deliberately structuring their assets to obscure control (eg. some types of trust).
@cstross @BillySmith Yes, we need to punish people and companies, but that doesn't mean throwing away the concepts of due process and proportional punishments.
@cstross
In principle, I think the fines are Ok. Merely they need to go up, no limits as you repeat the offense.
Possibly make the repeat criminal after a while.
Escalation with off ramps is good: in the end we want compliance, not full jails.
What @johnrogers.bsky.social called his 2nd law of crime: "Punishable by a fine" means "legal for a price".
@cstross
Yes. And when Russia and China do it you call them authoritarian. 🤔
You can fine them per offence as long as the size of the fine multiplied by the probability of enforcement is significantly higher than the profit that's possible to achieve from the activity.
Companies tend to be good at optimising for profit. If breaking the law will bring in $X/year and comes with fines that average $Y/year (including inconsistent enforcement), then they will break the law if X>Y. If Y is 2X, they probably won't break that law at all, and definitely won't do it very often.
This is why I was initially optimistic about the GDPR. Fines expressed as a percentage of global turnover can easily exceed global profits and can be scaled to ensure that the violation is deeply unprofitable.
Unfortunately, the probability of enforcement has been so low that it isn't working.
@david_chisnall @cstross Comes a point where it just becomes cheaper to buy out the regulators and/or legislators.
One of the things that always surprises me about #USPol is just how cheap they can be bought. Qataris with their 9 figure bribes look pretty stupid compared to FIFA, for example.
@rupert @david_chisnall Consider how cheap it was to buy the entire UK as a tax haven, by bankrolling the propaganda for "Leave" in the Brexit referendum and buying a few rounds of drinks for the hacks in the Fleet Street boozers
@cstross @rupert @david_chisnall it's not like the EU even allows those fines to go above a rounding error. And even then it doesn't enforce them.
Go ahead. Tell me a single meaningful fine the EUC has enforced.
Google? $3.45B, suspended, and that's less than 3 days of revenue.
Amazon? $746M for GDPR violations; that's not even 8 hours of revenue.
ALT TEXT:
Two characters A and B
B: What you are suggesting is illegal
A: What happens if we do it anyway?
B: We get fined.
A: So it's legal, but for a fee.
@Photo55 @Ralph @cstross I have explained to many policy people that when they're trying to regulate that the approach business will take is not best available technology but rather CATNIP = Cheapest Available Technique Not Involving Prosecution which includes just paying the civil fines if that's cheaper than actually following the regulations.
@themself @Photo55 @Ralph @cstross I often think about how the city of New York has an entire separate traffic violation system for delivery drivers because they get fined so often and were clogging up traffic courts - it’s literally more cost effective for the city to give reduced fines in exchange for the delivery services not challenging them.
Fines are *literally* just the cost of doing business sometimes!
@TindrasGrove @themself @Photo55 @Ralph @cstross Not really.
That's a sensible short term workaround. If it continues indefinitely, then it becomes a state sanctioned cost of doing business.
However, if you take the money from the fines in the separate system and use it to tighten rules to the point they can't be challenged, and subsequently increases fines then it actually starts to become a deterrent.
@syllopsium @themself @Photo55 @Ralph @cstross it is very much not short-term. It very much is the cost of doing business.
This program has existed since (I think) 2010 https://nyc-business.nyc.gov/nycbusiness/description/nyc-delivery-solutions-the-stipulated-parking-fine-program
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@cstross hence RICO. Which is also a fruitful source of civil rights violations.
@cstross And the prospect of that happening? Practically non-existent.
@pzmyers Depends where, and under what circumstances—but right now, in the USA, UK, or anywhere that's part of the US-dominated trade system, nope. (Although the UK is actually considering—shock!—banning X/Twitter completely. Not just the CSAM stuff from Grok; Elon didn't do himself any favours by attacking the prime minister personally.)
