Programmer charged with stealing $10M code from Fed bank

[Andy Nguyen]

A contract programmer who worked at the Fed, Bo Zhang, was charged with illegally copying software to an external hard drive, according to the complaint.

The authorities said the software, owned by the Treasury Department, cost about $9.5 million to develop.

It was not immediately clear if Mr. Zhang was in custody. But the complaint, signed by an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said Mr. Zhang had admitted to copying the code onto a drive and taking it back to his home.

Mr. Zhang told investigators he took the code “for private use and in order to ensure that it was available to him in the event that he lost his job,” the complaint said.

Mr. Zhang was hired as a contract employee in May by an unnamed technology consulting company that was working with the Fed on its computers, the complaint said.

It appears that investigators uncovered the suspected breach only after one of Mr. Zhang’s colleagues told a supervisor that Mr. Zhang had said he lost a hard drive containing the code, the complaint said.

It was not clear if Mr. Zhang had retained a lawyer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/technology/us-charges-programmer-with-stealing-code.html

 

[DominiConnor]

One thing I picked upon was that SecurityWeek described him as "Chinese" in the headline, which given that his name is Zhang anyone who cared could work out for themselves.
There is of course the issue of the People's Republic spying on the US, but this very clearly is not the case, he lifted some code and used it to teach programming in a business he ran. That's not state espionage and nothing to do with his race.

There are various issues here, that the racists at SecurityWeek didn't cover and the the bozos at the Fed should be ashamed of.

Firstly, how come he could ?
Secondly, I would bet real money that Zhang did not have read-only access to the code, I would be actually shocked if it were not possible for him to commit changes to the system. There will of course be a procedure for testing and decisions about what changes may be made, but that will be a bureaucratic process, not a technical one, by that I mean that there will be no permission based system to stop him.
I am using the present continuous case in English here...

There will be such a mechanism, bought at extraordinary expense from a government contractor who "just happens" to have made a serious campaign contribution to the right elected officials.
It will effectively bring software development to a complete halt, since it will be hierarchical, a senior manager will have to approve every change and given that he's not likely to be technical, all sorts of fun will occur.