Apparently not:

Federal prosecutors charged Matanov for destroying records under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law enacted by Congress in the wake of the Enron scandal.

Prosecutors are able to apply the law broadly because they do not have to show that the person deleting evidence knew there was an investigation underway. In other words, a person could theoretically be charged under Sarbanes-Oxley for deleting her dealer's number from her phone even if she were unaware that the feds were getting a search warrant to find her marijuana.

It looks like one more tumble down the slippery slope, to me!

It says in TFA the order of what happened.

The guy recognised the brothers when their faces appeared on TV. He went to the police and told them about it. But he wasn't entirely accurate in what he said, and when he got back, he cleared his browsing history.

A year later he was charged with ...... deleting evidence. But not of any other actual crime.

So this seems to fall pretty clearly in the "uh oh" category. Apparently now if you even attempt to help police yourself, you are no longer allowed to delete your browser history or presumably any other file from that point forward? He could have had dozens of reasons to delete his browser history.

Yeah, that goes without saying. But is it so essential to them to count likes, that they're willing to initiate legal action over it? Surely that should be the last resort.

I guess I'm not making it clear.

The rules say you do paperwork for deposits of over $10k. So why should they do it for $9k deposits?

Additionally, when the US government thinks you may be structuring, it doesn't simply say "please fill out this form". It tends to just seize the money.

Even Google has to obey the law in India

Yes. That's why the solution to their problem is called "running your own website". Suing Facebook to deliberately drop them between a rock and a hard place is an asshat move that will accomplish nothing except making lawyers a bit richer.

Ye gods. Are these people really incapable of hiring a web designer?

If Hastert had done the reporting, he wouldn't be in deep crap at this point, his secrets intact for better and worse. The reporting has a purpose: keep large transfers from skirting reporting in taxes.... like taking your annual profits to a tax haven, and so forth.

That's not quite how structuring works.

The rules say you must file paperwork if you do a cash transaction of over $10k (or it might be less these days, the regulations change constantly).

As nobody likes paperwork, it was thus quickly observed that people who had, say, $30k they wanted to withdraw would simply withdraw less than $10k for four days, and thus avoid triggering the reporting requirements.

Their "solution" to this was to invent the crime of structuring, which is doing financial transactions to try and avoid the reporting requirements.

The problem here should be obvious. The law set a limit beyond which you are supposed to do something. Then another law said avoiding the limit is a crime. So what's the real limit? Answer: whatever the government feels like. What happens if you have a business that happens to generate about $9000 in cash per day, and you deposit it every day? Well, sucks to be you. You might be accused of structuring, and how would you defend yourself? You cannot prove your own innocence!

Was this guy Hastert guilty of structuring? Hard to say - wanting to reduce red tape in your life is not supposed to be a crime, but in this case it is, so perhaps he is a criminal. Or perhaps not. It's entirely subjective.

The real fix would have been to eliminate the limit and require reporting of all cash transactions, but as that's absurdly impractical they came up with this cludge only a politician could be proud of. For people like us here on Slashdot, many of whom work with software and thus must think very clearly all day, these sorts of laws seem crazy. Figure out what the heck you actually want, government! It's not the fault of random bystanders if you can't figure out what you want and then criminals take advantage of that!

I agree with you. From my post ....

It has iAds. That has not been a successful product for them

... and ...

it's only possible for Apple to subsidise its cloud offerings via fat hardware margins because Apple ignores the low end of the market

How is this a hard problem? The Spideroak cloud storage service does this; uploaded files are encrypted before they leave your machine. Even the file names are secret; the servers have zero knowledge of the file's name or type or contents.

Services like SpiderOak sacrifice features people want, in order to get that. For instance, no search. No web preview or editing. Clunky sharing. No password recovery if you forget.

Still, I was mostly thinking about other services. If you look at some of the features Google Photos has like being able to do text search for untagged photos using image recognition, there's no technical way to do that in a blind manner right now.

The advantage Apple has is that they don't rely on advertising for any significant part of their revenue.

That's the theory Apple is peddling. It doesn't match up very well with reality though.

Firstly, don't get me wrong, I love Tim Cook's stance. I love that Apple is pushing encryption. I don't want to see them stop. But Silicon Valley needs to move as one here, and this sort of competitive sniping isn't really helping.

The only product Apple has that's actually end to end encrypted is iMessages. But WhatsApp is also encrypted in the same way, and that's owned by Facebook, which makes its money by advertising. So much for that theory.

All the other cloud products Apple has work in exactly the same way as their competitors do: you upload unencrypted documents to Apple, who then store and process them for you. And this is a technological constraint, not a business model constraint. Keeping servers fully blind as to the data they're working with is an open field of academic research. It's not something that Google or Facebook or Twitter or DropBox or whoever are holding back from because they hate privacy. It's just a really hard problem.

And finally Apple does of course have an advertising product. It has iAds. That has not been a successful product for them, but it's not for lack of trying.

So when you actually examine the details of Apple's products, you see that they're not really any different to what their competitors are doing. Cook's statements sound good to the non-expert listener, but it's just marketing.

What's more, there's a rather problematic assumption underlying Cook's position. Apple indeed makes most of its money from the extremely fat margins it makes from iPhone buyers, who consistently pay way over the odds for what they're getting. But it's only possible for Apple to subsidise its cloud offerings via fat hardware margins because Apple ignores the low end of the market. Indeed, given their attempts to destroy Android, it's fair to say Apple not only ignores the low end but would be quite happy if people too poor to buy an iPhone had no smartphone technology at all. Advertising as a business model may not be perfect but it's the reason that people in Africa can buy smartphones for $30 and use services like Google Maps, Search, Photos, etc. People who live outside affluent countries matter too.

Fair points. I didn't know you could see registration numbers from the ground.

I posted specific examples so that people could discuss the issues and point out problems with the conclusion. Several, in fact.

None of your examples support your thesis. I've been reading and posting to Slashdot for 15 years. People posting "an opinion that's not *quite* right just to get people to respond" is pretty much the lifeblood of Slashdot, how else would you test out ideas and discover they were wrong? Heck, in another story I'm getting my ass kicked right now because I didn't know that light American aircraft had registration numbers visible from the ground. Other posters are setting me straight. Yet I do not work for some shadowy organisation.

Your other examples are equally bizarre. People posting that they think the Paul's have a few good ideas and lots of crazy ones? That's not an organised conspiracy, that's just ..... a common viewpoint! One that was even mocked and made fun of in the last story about Rand Paul I remember reading.

You took the most vulnerable example and framed it in a "conspiracy theorist" context, and used it to frame the entire position. That's fine, it's a good use of rhetoric, but it adds nothing new to the conversation other than "in my opinion...".

You're the one using rhetoric! I didn't take "the most vulnerable example", I picked one at random because they're all equally ridiculous. Why exactly would any government or paid trolling operation even care about Uber?

And yes, if it's not clear, my reply said in my opinion you are sounding kind of crazy and appear to be giving in to paranoid delusions. Your position is: they don't disagree with me because they think I'm wrong. They disagree with me because there's a vast shadowy conspiracy to undermine me, Okian Warrior, and my world view, using subtle powers of rhetoric!

Occam's Razor says that, maybe, Uber is controversial and politicians like the Paul's tend to have many different views, with which few if any people agree completely.

Because looking at the chemical plant explosion hoax [wikipedia.org] and Acorn hoax [wikipedia.org] would indicate ro me that sock puppets can have an enormous negative effect on public opinion and government policy

What change to government policy did the chemical plant hoax bring about, exactly? And what effect on public opinion? Your link provides no backing for this assertion. It seems like the hoax was nothing more than a bizarre timewaste, given the triviality of phoning the chemical plant and discovering it was not on fire.

If you really can't see why "be careful of sock puppets" is damaging, just go browse further down this thread. There's an example of a guy who says he is Russian asking for evidence that Russia shot down the jet liner. And literally EVERY reply except mine is on the lines of, "go away paid Putin troll". That kind of thing shuts down debate and closes people's minds.

What's more - there's nothing you can do about it. So what if some people are being paid to post to Slashdot? What's the worst they can do, exactly? Say things you don't like to hear?

The judge talked about that argument quite extensively in her sentencing. She had read academic studies of violence in the drug trade and found Ulbricht's arguments about lessening violence to be wanting - she pointed out that the drug trade causes lots of violence upstream.

Now you can of course argue that this is only because drugs are illegal. And that might well be true. But even if America legalises every drug tomorrow, Indonesia is still gonna have the death penalty for dealing, and the illegal drugs trade will still exist, and Silk Road would still be a part of it.

The planes are registered with fictitious companies to hide their association with the U.S. government.

Hide their association from who, exactly? Air traffic control? It's not like you can see who registered a plane from the ground.

This statement just screams "we are breaking the rules and don't want to get caught"

Yes, see, the moderation and replies to this post are quite disturbing.

This troubles me greatly. Internet debate is being shut down on the internet, but not by paid Russian trolls. I have yet to see proof of such things happening on Slashdot, and the article itself largely draws blanks with regards to English-language interference.

Debate is being shut down by an army of people who automatically assume any position they disagree with w.r.t Russia is held by "non people" and therefore anything they say can be safely ignored. It's basically a modern witchhunt - your opinions look funny to me, so you must be a witch! Burn them! Evidence? We don't need none of that, just look at those opinions!

Given the fairly direct path between "westerners demonizing Russia" and "war" this is one of the most disturbing things I've seen on the internet in years. Now is the time for people to use the internet to talk to each other and understand each others viewpoints. Instead people in the west are simply sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "LA LA LA PUTIN TROLL CAN'T HEAR YOU".

Fuck, you know what? As far as I'm concerned, even if there are people being paid to post Putin's views on Slashdot - bring it on! Our media doesn't even try to tell the Russian side of the story, and as the Slashdot poll disclaimer says, you shouldn't be making decisions based on internet popularity contests anyway. I'll evaluate things I read for myself and so should everyone else.

Er, I think what you are observing is just called debate. People disagree with you about Uber? No conspiracy theory needed for that - perhaps your views about what other people think just aren't as accurate as you had believed. Rand Paul? Likewise.

There have been delusional people with nonsensical arguments on the internet since the internet was invented. As with terrorism, this recent rise of "you disagree with me thus you must be a secret government paid sockpuppet" is by far more damaging than anything paid trolls could actually do by themselves. It ends debate and closes people's minds. They can rest easy without having to be troubled by arguments that suggest they may be wrong, because ZOMG RUSSIA! Where by $RUSSIA you can of course substitute almost any government, as if there's one thing Snowden showed us it's that the idea of western exceptionalism on the internet is pretty naive.