ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Imagine a neighbor who quietly lifted your house key, made a copy and returned the original, all behind your back. Now imagine that he labeled your key with your home address and left it in an open box on the street corner. Is that neighbor not culpable when your home is robbed, as it inevitably will be?
Equifax is that neighbor. In what is widely reported to be the worst security breach in U.S. history (and there have been some whoppers before), this company left a digital hole wide open in its treasure trove of personal data on over 143 million of us. Your name, address, social security number, driver’s license number, passwords, date of birth, financial and personal history – and mine – are likely to have been stolen.
Equifax executives apparently knew about the digital hole for two weeks and failed to close it with the patch provided by the software company.
Equifax was criminally negligent about protecting our intimate information. After all, we’re not even their customers; we are just their product. (And who gave them the right to collect our information? That’s a whole ’nother story.) Equifax compounded the crime by waiting more than a month to report it (July 29-September 7). During that month, company executives managed to sell their shares, and protect themselves – but not their shareholders and data theft victims - from loss.
I am not a lawyer, but if you asked me whether Equifax executives are guilty of insider trading, I’d say, without a doubt. Guilty of criminal corporate negligence? Absolutely. Will anyone serve prison time? Probably not.
Although “buyer beware” has long been good advice, these days corporate malfeasance is magnified by our reliance on large systems and the Internet. Sophisticated methods of stealing, cheating and manipulating, have outpaced the development of law to protect the public from harm. There are criminal laws on the books that would apply to executives of, say, a chemical factory who knew that it had sprung a giant leak into a river, then failed to fix the leak or to warn the public of harm…and even tried to profit from it. Those folks would go to prison. Shouldn’t the laws also apply to a giant data leak?
We have had scandal after scandal involving cynical financial manipulations that harmed large numbers of innocent people – without anyone serving one day of jail time.
As long as we’re locking up corporate criminals, on my list of Most Wanted are the senior management of Wells Fargo who pressured their employees to open nearly 4 million fake bank accounts, charged fees for those bogus accounts, and when they were not paid, ruined people’s credit. For this massive crime Wells Fargo paid fines that hardly dented its bottom line. The CEO in charge of the mega scam, John Stumpf, lost his job over it, and took $133.1 million into retirement.
In his case, crime certainly did pay.
Congress plans to hold hearings on the Equifax fiasco, but will they make any difference? Or are our lawmakers in the pockets of businesses like Equifax?
Candidate Trump talked a great deal about law and order. Now he has a chance to to keep his promise.
We need to send corporate criminals to jail.
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