Goldman has consistently attempted to paint Aleynikov as a stealer of valuable secrets — but if anything in Goldman’s high-frequency trading code was valuable, it was Goldman’s trading strategies, and Aleynikov had zero interest in those. What’s more, he wasn’t interested in the code itself, a big buggy mess which he was happy to leave behind: his new job was to build an entirely new system from scratch, in a completely different computer language to that used at Goldman. All that Aleynikov did, in substance, was to email to himself a bunch of files which included open-source code he had managed to find, over the years, online. He thought it might come in handy, one day, but it never really did: most of the files, when they were seized, were unopened.
I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that America’s system of jurisprudence simply isn’t up to the task of holding banks and bankers accountable for their actions. The only people who ever get prosecuted are small fry and insider traders, rather than the people who really caused the biggest damage. And the lesson of Sergei Aleynikov is that if and when the laws get beefed up, the banks will simply end up taking advantage of those laws for their own vindictive purposes, rather than becoming victims of them. Given the ease with which Goldman got the FBI to do its bidding, one has to assume that, most of the time, the government will be working on the same side as the big banks, rather than working against them. Do we really want to give those banks ever more powerful weapons?
