Hello again. Are you awaiting the Second Wave or simply ignoring the continuation of the first one? Just keep wearing those masks!
The Plain View
“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” is what King Henry II reputedly said in the year 1170, referring to Thomas Becket. His knights took the hint, and the Archbishop of Canterbury was no more. Over 800 years later, in mid-2019, then-CEO of eBay Devin Wenig was upset that the editor of a small ecommerce blog was writing critical stories about his company. “Take her down,” he texted to one of his underlings.
According to a federal indictment filed on Monday, Wenig’s knights took his words to heart. The conspirators included the firm’s top security officers, including its senior director of safety and security, its director of global resiliency, its senior manager of global intelligence, a manager of its global security team who was formerly a police captain, and other analysts and contractors. They set forth on an anonymous harassment campaign explicitly meant to destroy the lives of the journalist and her husband, The eBay group mailed live cockroaches, larval worms, and a bloody pig mask to the Natick, Massachusetts, home of their targets. They sent hard-core porn to neighbors, making it look like misdirected mail ordered by the victims. They put ads on Craigslist inviting swingers to drop by the victims’ home at any time. They sent gruesome texts threatening violence. They sent a book about coping with the death of a loved one, then sent a funeral wreath. They even traveled across the country to physically surveil them.
The plans went awry when local police detected evidence that the terror campaign might lead to Silicon Valley, kicking off an investigation that charged six of the officials (but not Wenig) with a variety of offenses.
Here is what happened last year when eBay was confronted with the evidence of this astonishing behavior by some of its senior employees whose job it was to sustain trust in its community: It fired the employees directly involved. But it allowed Wenig to leave voluntarily, paying him $57 million in 2019, a sum that, according to an SEC filing, included doubling his salary and bonus, and accelerating his stock grants. No mention was made about Wenig’s presiding over a company where a criminal gang of top officers felt empowered to act like a goon squad in a grade D horror movie. A subgroup of eBay’s board of directors oversaw an investigation that apparently concluded that no further changes were required beyond firing those still with the company. eBay did not make the report public.
And this week, when the United States government filed one of most damning indictments in the history of Silicon Valley against eBay’s now-former officers, the company’s only comment was an unsigned four-paragraph statement distancing itself from the acts of its officials. Its apology to the people whose lives it attempted to destroy appeared midway through the third pa
