[tptacek]

I am not smart enough to understand how anything NSA did could have justified Nacchio defrauding his shareholders by willfully and knowingly selling them stock in his company at an inflated price.

Neither, it seems, was the court.

[etherael]

In my humble opinion, the least morally questionable action to take in this scenario would have been to ignore the gag order, explain in public why the business was being lost, and take the rational sale option because of it.

Even this option isn't that great from his perspective though, I don't know what the penalty on breaking those gag orders is, I guess it's more than the penalty for insider trading?

They put him in a situation with a stack of bad options and even the best ones weren't that great, sitting back and criticising his actions after the fact whilst laying none of the blame on the people and institutions that created the situation is something I'm not smart enough to understand why you think is an acceptable analysis to take?

[tptacek]

He committed a fraud. Not against the government. Against his own shareholders. He sold equity in Qwest at prices he knew were not reflective of the underlying value of the stock, based on actual actionable secret information available to him as a company insider. That's a crime, as it should be.

NSA shouldn't pressure people to comply with gag orders, but that doesn't excuse Nacchio from choosing to harm his own shareholders simply to make additional tens of millions of dollars over what he already had. You can come up with 1,000 different ways to rephrase what you said; it will never convince me that multimultimultimillionaires should be excused for defrauding their own shareholders to increase their own bank balances.

[etherael]

> NSA shouldn't pressure people to comply with gag orders, but that doesn't excuse Nacchio

I agree with you, I just think what the state did was worse. Not only that but that kind of behaviour is par for the course for them rather than an exception to the rule that they resorted to in order to deal with a situation not of their own creation.

You are right though, he was no angel.

[tptacek]

If you want to use Nacchio as an example of the unscrupulous tactics of NSA, I have no objection, as long as you don't try to rehabilitate Nacchio in the process.