High-tech thief or bogus prosecution? Those were the opposing closing arguments offered on Thursday in the case of a computer programmer accused of stealing high-speed trading code from Goldman Sachs.
Sergey Aleynikov, 40, was charged with stealing critical parts of code as he left Wall Street’s most influential bank in June 2009 before joining Teza Technologies LLC, a high speed-trading start-up firm in Chicago.
The trial in U.S. District Court in New York over the past two weeks was punctuated by programming terms such as “bash history” and “tarball,” testimony by Goldman executives and trading experts and the occasional court closure for evidence deemed sensitive to the bank’s operation.
“The evidence is in now and it is clear he chose to become a thief, a high-tech thief but a thief nonetheless,” U.S. prosecutor Rebecca Rohr told the jury during a one hour-long summation of the government’s case against Aleynikov.
The programmer’s lawyer, Kevin Marino, said in his closing argument that the government had tried to present the case as a simple one from the day of Aleynikov’s July 3, 2009 arrest at Newark International Airport in New Jersey.
Marino told jurors that his client didn’t take the code used to trade stocks.
He argued that the FBI investigation failed to take enough time to consider that when his client downloaded directories from Goldman Sachs he was trying to retrieve “open source code,” which no firm has proprietary control over.
“This is bogus, bogus, bogus from day one to today,” Marino said. “This is a silly prosecution.”
Jurors began their deliberations on Thursday afternoon.
Aleynikov, an immigrant from Russia who became a U.S. citizen, has been free on bail since his arrest. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison on two criminal counts.
COMPETITIVE SPEED-TRADING
During the trial, the panel was told that high-frequency trading, or high-speed automated trading, has become an increasingly important and competitive business. The closely-guarded computer codes help firms trade shares in milliseconds and earns millions of dollars.
Marino said Aleynikov might have been “foolish” to copy Goldman’s proprietary information but he argued it was not a crime.
Many programmers have created and promoted the computer programming language known as “open source code,” to be shared on public sites at no cost, but licensing issues are murky.
Aleynikov was a longtime adherent of open source code, the court heard.
A Goldman spokesman, Ed Canaday, said he would not comment during the trial.
Prosecutors told jurors that Aleynikov put the code on a storage website hosted on servers in Germany and also copied it onto a flash drive and other computers so he could take it to Teza. They said he also consolidated the files into a single file known as a “tarball.”
Aleynikov tried to cover his tracks by deleting what is known as his “bash history” on his last day at Goldman Sachs on June 5, 2009, prosecutors said. The term refers to the most recent set of commands executed by a particular programmer or user of the system.
The case is USA v Aleynikov, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 10-96.
