[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.