Surveillance software boss thrown in the clink for cooking the books The head of a defunct surveillance and communications software company has been given the longest-ever prison sentence for back-dating stock options. Jacob "Kobi" Alexander will spend the next 30 months behind bars, ordered by Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the US District Court in Brooklyn, New York. Alexander had been the CEO …
Ah-HA! Not so "crazy" are you, Mr. Operations Guy! :) 100% in agreement with your modest proposal!
"a New York-based software developer that, with the backing of the Israeli government, offered both services for phone providers and surveillance tools for government and law enforcement agencies to record conversations."
I would have locked up this whole band of spies for offering hacker tools to governments. This is in no ones best interest. Selling out to your government is a shit move. If you have some awesome VLUNs, then contact the vendors and get paid or threaten them with release. This is the way of things. Or perhaps you could win a nice T-Shirt? :P
As a person who participated in the Apple Employee Stock Purchase Plan in the early 1990s I can tell you the goal was to offer all employees company stock at a bargain price. This was a (I think) six month window, and you could get the stock at 85% of the lower of the two prices at either the beginning or end of the stock purchase window. Most stock option plans that I've witnessed are like that. It was probably the exec level employees planing fast and loose with the stock purchase plan that gets the company in trouble. As a normal rank & file employee there were many safeguards wrapped around the stock purchase plan to keep us from having a bit of fun.
One AC here wants to throw the book at Comverse because they believe they sell hacker tools to the guvmint. That is not what Comverse did or do. But Comverse have quite a convoluted history that is worth spelling out so that people see that it is not quite as defunct as you might think.
Once upon a time there was Comverse Technology, one of those Israeli startups that grow out of their military-industrial complex. They did a good line in voicemail, SMS server technology and lawful intercept. Our man Kobi here ran this gig. The lawful intercept was not hacker tools but CALEA stuff: you show up with a warrant and the phone company use the software to tap the call.
Comverse then imploded with the stock options scandal and out of the ashes came Xura and Verint. Verint still do the lawful intercept stuff. Xura, well no one quite knows what they do. They mopped up Acision and mopped up Mavenir, a provider of IMS software to telcos (who themselves had just been jettisoned by Mitel). The guy who founded Mavenir now runs Xura.
Clear as mud? I thought so.
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