Comment by donkeybeer
21 days ago
How is this obstruction? Unless it's part of a proper investigation, they are just another private individual. You are free to do or not engage in business contracts with them, and any data given true or false or data not gievn can hardly be a criminal matter as its not an investigation and simply a business dealing between two parties.
A company is absolutely free to choose whether or not to do business with them, but an employee acting to try to undermine them as a customer or their relationship with the business is what would open the door to all these sort of laws and consequences, especially when that relationship is precisely in the furtherance of a law enforcement purposes, and the interference was motivated by an effort to impair that enforcement.
Stuff like actively expressing opposition to taking them on as a customer, trying to persuade management to do otherwise, and so on would all be perfectly kosher. But the stuff the top post in this thread alludes to, let alone what it links to, is how you end up in prison for a very long time after the 'I didn't know it was illegal' defense fails.
An employees actions would be a matter of judgment between the company leadership and themsleves, I don't understand how it's a criminal matter. To the outside entity it's a business contract, to the company it's an internal matter if and how to deal with any specific activities of the employee.
> An employees actions would be a matter of judgment between the company leadership and themselves
There has been a few news articles (and court cases) where this question has been raised and it is not strict true. Employee actions are only actions for which the employee has been given as an task as part of their employment and role. Actions outside of that is private actions. When this end up in court, the role description and employee contract becomes very important.
A clear case example is when a doctor is looking up data on a patient. Downloading patient records from people who they are not the doctor for can be criminal and not just a breech of hospital policy, especially if they sell or transfer the data.
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You're granting an employee a special status that doesn't exist. Imagine a random person working to undermine a contract between the government and a business, motivated by an effort to obstruct law enforcement from enforcing the law. I'm sure you'd agree that this would obviously be illegal - that doesn't change simply because the person happens to be working for the business in question.
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The other side of this is, if you don't obstruct, you will eventually have to be the guy saying "I was just following orders" [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
The Nazis were engaging in systematic and large scale genocide. ICE is deporting people in the country illegally back to their home countries, free of charge. I'm not being snarky there either, immigration offenses are taken seriously worldwide and in many places you can end up in indefinite detention, required to pay for your own deportation + fines, and more. The 'penalty' being a free ticket home is a pretty sweet deal.
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I mean why not, if they are just taking on a blanket software or data proposal, its no different than say a local government contracting the construction of some accounting software. At most they could claim failure of contract, I don't see how it should be a criminal matter if non functional or bad outcome was delivered.