Hello again. Are you awaiting the 2nd Wave or merely neglecting the continuation of the very first one? Simply keep wearing those masks!
The Plain View
” Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” is what King Henry II reputedly stated in the year 1170, referring to Thomas Becket. His knights took the hint, and the Archbishop of Canterbury disappeared. Almost 800 years later, in mid-2019, then-CEO of eBay Devin Wenig was upset that the editor of a little ecommerce blog site was composing vital stories about his company. “Take her down,” he texted to among his assistants.
According to a federal indictment submitted on Monday, Wenig’s knights took his words to heart. The conspirators included the firm’s leading gatekeeper, including its senior director of safety and security, its director of international resiliency, its senior supervisor of global intelligence, a supervisor of its international security team who was previously a police captain, and other analysts and specialists. They set forth on a confidential harassment campaign explicitly indicated to damage the lives of the journalist and her other half, The eBay group mailed live cockroaches, larval worms, and a bloody pig mask to the Natick, Massachusetts, house of their targets. They sent out hard-core porn to neighbors, making it appear like misdirected mail purchased by the victims. They put advertisements on Craigslist inviting swingers to stop by the victims’ home at any time. They sent gruesome texts threatening violence. They sent out a book about dealing with the death of a loved one, then sent out a funeral wreath. They even took a trip across the nation to physically surveil them.
The strategies went awry when local police spotted proof that the fear campaign may result in Silicon Valley, starting an investigation that charged 6 of the officials (but not Wenig) with a variety of offenses.
Here is what occurred in 2015 when eBay was faced with the proof of this astonishing habits by some of its senior workers whose job it was to sustain trust in its community: It fired the employees directly involved. It permitted Wenig to leave willingly, paying him $57 million in 2019, an amount that, according to an SEC filing, included doubling his salary and reward, and accelerating his stock grants. No mention was made about Wenig’s commanding a company where a criminal gang of leading officers felt empowered to act like a jerk squad in a grade D scary motion picture. A subgroup of eBay’s board of directors supervised an examination that obviously concluded that no additional changes were needed beyond firing those still with the business. eBay did not make the report public.
And this week, when the United States federal government submitted among the majority of damning indictments in the history of Silicon Valley against eBay’s now-former officers, the company’s only comment was an anonymous four-paragraph declaration distancing itself from the acts of its authorities. Its apology to the people whose lives it tried to destroy appeared midway through the third p
