There was also a strong current of discussion about the legality of the underlying actions. The tone did remained civil, after a few choice edits on all sides.

Tptacek can bother me because he often presents the best possible form of the counterposition, as can Rayiner. We have different minds about jurisprudence, but I respect them both tremendously.

The discussion was in large part about the legality of the actions, as you can see through Rayiner's comment:
>"The Court concluded that he had in fact tried to take 500,000 lines of valuable and mostly proprietary source code, but that his conduct didn't fall within the reach of the two laws charged in the indictment. Solid legal analysis, but an ordinary person would say that he got off on a technicality."

Although my central point was indeed regarding the FBI's outsourcing of its investigation to Goldman Sachs, a private corporation and interested party, which seemed to offend fundamental notions of justice.

But the discussion most definitely significantly touched upon the legality of Aleynikov's actions.

See e.g. Rhino paraphrasing Rayiner's analysis:
>"Aleynikov definitely violated New York trade secret law.

He got off the federal charge because the trading software wasn't a product for sale, it was a product for internal use. The law was poorly drafted and once that came to light it was immediately fixed.

Like Rayiner said, in layman's terms, he got off on a technicality."

Or Rayiner himself:
>"That was his defense. But the jury found that he had in fact grabbed valuable proprietary software, and the Second Circuit agreed that the 500,000 lines that he uploaded were mostly proprietary, valuable code."

For example, this exchange:

"tptacek: >I have a passing understanding of the policies and procedures binding on developers at trading firms.
I dispute the idea that any senior developer could work at Goldman Sachs on an HFT infrastructure and believe that they were authorized to --- or, indeed, that they would not be immeditely fired for --- uploading the code to a proprietary automated trading system to a random SVN host in a different country. This is the code we, as security testers, were never allowed to see, even after owning up the machines hosting it. These firms are not kidding around about this stuff. It is a huge smoking gun to have uploaded any of it to some off-brand foreign svn host.

These are firms where you can be fired for plugging a thumb drive into your computer, or for using the company network to access Dropbox. I have worked for more than one financial firm that spent literally millions of dollars merely on the problem of detecting their network users trying to reach Google Mail.
I also dispute the idea that because developers commonly use ssh, gzip, and svn, that it is common practice to (1) gzip a tarball of source code, (2) encrypt that source code, (3) commit that compressed encrypted blob to svn, (4) remove all traces of the encryption key from their work computer. That's something happens zero times on normal dev machines.
The conviction was overturned because the technical details of exactly what Aleynikov took from GS didn't fit the ambitious charge the DOJ filed against him. But the appeal doesn't refute the finding of facts from the original trial, which include:
There was more than sufficient evidence presented at trial, however, for a rational juror to conclude that Aleynikov intended to steal Goldman Sachs' proprietary source code. First, it was undisputed at trial that Aleynikov actually did take proprietary source code from Goldman Sachs. As Aleynikov concedes in his motion papers, the code he took from Goldman Sachs included a “purposefully designed” portion of the Goldman Sachs “proprietary, custom-built trading system.” Indeed, the evidence showed that Aleynikov took a significant percentage of the proprietary source code for that system. While Aleynikov attempted to show that there was open source code embedded within the proprietary code and to identify the files in which that might be true, his expert witness was only able to identify one file among those taken by Aleynikov that both bore a Goldman Sachs copyright banner and appeared to contain open source code.

I'm just fine with Aleynikov's conviction being overturned. Again, the charges against him seemed ambitious.
But this is a forum full of software developers.

Rayiner is a lawyer and a compiler developer. It's somewhat insulting to everyone's intelligence to pretend that people here are unfamiliar with ssh and svn. We understand how software development works. What happened here was extremely sketchy. You can't play the "well in the world of software development, this is totally normal" card on HN.""

s_q_b: > "...Agreed, but it was established that he did this fairly consistently throughout the course of his employment. It's idiosyncratic, but not unexplainable. Sure, it was poor development practice, but I'm not convinced it was malicious.

Again, if the intent was trade secret theft, why not take the valuable part, the trading strategies?"

I held that his actions violated neither state nor Federal law, so I'm razzing those that insisted his action were criminal, just a bit, all intended in fun. Perhaps the language could have used a bit of softening :)