Off topic: The name Office of Legal Compliance immediately made me think of 1984's Ministry naming. Similarly to how the Ministry of Truth's job is to spread propaganda and falsify history in the novel, this Office of Legal Compliance department's job is to ask themselves, "How far can we push the envelope toward being illegal, but still remain within legal boundaries?"
Essentially their job is dealing with things that border on being illegal. Determining how far you can get to illegality, while remaining technically inside legality.
For the first time the notion of "newspeak" in real life has clicked for me. I'd never grokked the idea from the novel, other than as some fear mongering fantasy that Orwell invented for the sake of compelling irony. But now I see, names actually make sense, from a certain angle. They weren't purely ironic devices.
For the record, I'm NOT comparing Microsoft to Big Brother. Just funny to draw that parallel in naming choices.
"How far can we push the envelope toward being illegal, but still remain within legal boundaries?"
This would be better phrased as 'how far can we go in pursuit of our employer's legitimate interests, but still remain within legal boundaries.' As phrased, you're treating illegality as a goal in itself, but this isn't the case. All companies have interests, but the most obvious and efficient means of pursuing those interests may be odds with any of the many regulations governing corporate activity. Compliance departments specialize in making sure firms stay on the right side of that line, and in a complex economy with complex regulatory regimes that's a full time job.
As far as naming choices go, 'compliance' is the standard term in industry for ensuring that a firm's behavior is lawful, and it doesn't carry any connotation of pushing boundaries or circumventing the law. There's no 'newspeak' here except in your own mind, unless you actually believe that companies aspire to illegal behavior as a matter of course.
Companies like Microsoft leave the legality of their actions to the compliance team. They have interest in pursuing both legal and illegal actions and their compliance department has the task of ensuring even the illegal stuff can be bent into comformance to the letter of the law. It's not aspiring to illegal behavior for the illegality of it. It's only that the closer you get to the edge, the more advantages you squeeze out of the situation.
I think you're pursuing a fantastical notion here. It's more like, "hey we can get a great business deal and corner a market by doing this, this and this - legal team: are we doing anything wrong here?" They aren't cackling in a corner somewhere thinking about opportunities to toe the line. They're legitimately trying to beat the competition and some of those ways might potentially be illegal, so they need to get the okay or not before fucking up publicly and majorly.
More than once I witnessed questions to the effect of "how far can we go before we break the law" be asked. The person who asked had full knowledge his/her plans were illegal. He/She just needed to know where to stop.
This statement is completely nonsensical. If the person had full knowledge that the plans were illegal, why would he/she ask how far they can go before breaking the law? He/she clearly didn't know where the boundaries were.
Huh? A person can have a plan to go from 0-100 miles an hour and ask where the speedlimit is. Stories similar in a business environment are reasonably normal. "Compliance" is strictly a legal CYA department (as is anything relating to HR or "Ethics", btw.)
This conversation between you and you is getting complicated. Maybe he/she (the parent post of my parent post) has credible information about he/she and does not want to expose the he/she's company or who he/she is referencing. I am a he, in case you would like to refer to me in your response. Please let me know your sex too.
Well, that's a good thing right? You're pretty much saying "I knew this person once who wanted to do something, knew it was illegal and so scaled back their plans to fit within the law. What a scumbag."
> "hey we can get a great business deal and corner a market by doing this, this and this - legal team: are we doing anything wrong here?"
Wrong question.
Should be: "are we doing anything illegal here?".
Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right. That's the whole point here.
If you have a Office of Legal Compliance whose job is strictly to decide whether something is within the law or not, a corporation might easily get the idea they can get away with doing all sorts of wrongs.
Is it legal? Possibly, apparently. But should you nose through somebody's private email without their consent? Is that ever the right thing to do? I'm gonna say no, almost always. There may be a few exceptions in some specific circumstances, but that is not for the Office of Legal Compliance to determine because ethics isn't their job.
To be honest: Some enterprises can operate fully within the law without ever experiencing a conflict of interest (example: you sew clothes, and sell them).
Some enterprises operate completely without regard of the law (example: drug smuggling, extortion, slave trade), and correspondingly have to hide a very large part of their operations from law enforcement.
A third category of enterprises has goals that are at least partly in conflict with the goals of laws and regulations. This obviously happens very frequently when said laws and regulations are set up for the protection of employees, farm animals, the environment, customers, market entrants, etc. in their respective role, versus employers in general, mass-production of animal products, exploitation of natural resources, selling of legal stimulants such as alcohol and tobacco. This third kind of company usually only hide part of their operations from law enforcement or the public, because their business model is compatible with compatible goals, but they are often seen (i) suppressing information about certain parts of their business, (ii) practicing aggressive lobbying and (iii) relying heavily on legal counsel in order to stay within the law while pursuing their business activities.
Basic economic sense tells you that retaining lobbyists and legal counsel costs money, hence organizations that don't need it would never spend money on either. "Complex regulatory regimes" usually don't happen by themselves, but because the people making laws are driven (by private or public interests) to assume that it is necessary to influence what companies and individuals do.
(from regular Microsoft employee perspective):
this article does make them seem like that. Usually, in my interactions with Legal Compliance, they make sure everything we do is 100% legal, and prevent us from even coming close to the border of legality. They assume that we programmers don't think about complicated legal matters, so they go over a lot of the projects we work on and make us adhere to very strict privacy compliance that most of our competitors breeze over.
Thanks for chiming in. I'm sure that's how legal departments work in most companies, and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. Yes, just in this case TFA is talking about an isolated situation where my comment happens to be pertinent.
I have no experience with Microsoft, but my experiences with equivalent legal departments in other big tech. companies matches his view - they play it safe to the point of being insanely anal about it. These guys aren't there to make sure the company can do as much as possible, they're there to make sure there's no way anything can go wrong legally, and given its their asses on the line if they take too big a risk, they'll always stray way away from the edge.
"Legal" and "compliance" offices are not unusual in large organizations; they do exactly what they sound like they do. Legal is the lawyers. Compliance is the group that audits the organization and ensures all relevant legal and industry regulations are being met.
Alternatively, the "office of Trustworthy Computing" over which Scott Charney[1] presides does sound creepy.
I think it goes beyond that: internal Legal Offices' advice tends to be even more conservative than that would explain because:
1) If the advice is too conservative, and the company refrains from some action that it could have undertaken safely, then leadership blames the law.
2) If the advice is insufficiently conservative, and the company undertakes some action from which it should have refrained and it blows up in their face, then leadership blames Legal for blessing the action.
My point is being within the law is not quite enough. You want to be so far within the law that you can get most court cases thrown out without actual litigation.
Or as a rich friend of mine put it. I like paying a little extra in taxes every year. Sure, I could take every deduction but I like knowing if I am ever audited I will end up with a nice check.
Note that "Trustworthy Computing (TWC)", by name and mission, is intentionally distinct from the "Trusted Computing" initiatives.
It's a subtle but essential distinction between trust meaning "to rely upon another party" and trustworthy meaning basically "reliable". (my own definitions)
> For the record, I'm NOT comparing Microsoft to Big Brother.
I will: Microsoft is a big corporation who spies on its users to protect its interests. Incidentally, there are many other Big Brothers like them: Facebook, Google…
People should read some cyberpunk literature. Read William Gibson's Neuromancer, or play Android Netrunner. We're halfway there.
There's probably quite a few people who are unfamiliar when back in the day, they were working with Prodigy to verify anybody using Prodigy didn't have a counterfeit MS license on their PC.
Nothing ever happened to either company, and you'd be hard pressed to find an article on it, but MS has been snooping on their users for a long, long time.
Orwell was pointing to a very real phenomenon with "newspeak". For the best examples look to how political leaders talk about military conflicts. Language regarding conflict is very well chosen and quite misleading. Terms like "collateral damage", "area denial weaponry", "enhanced interrogation", "enemy combatants" are not exactly ironic, but they do have true meanings and implications very far from what they superficially sound like. Examples of true ironic "newspeak" can also be readily found. You may have heard leaders talk about various military, police, and spying agencies protecting your "freedom", despite the obvious roles they have in restricting your freedom. Talk about freedom often actually means "freedom to do what we want", which is, of course, the opposite of freedom.
To give a common example, an invasion will often be talked about by the invading power as a "liberation". Yet the act of liberation by a foreign power always ends with that foreign power having significant local political influence and access to natural resources (and may involve permanent occupation).
Or take the "war on terror" for example. Superficially, a "war on terror" should make people LESS afraid. Yet, in practise the politicians engaged in the "war on terror" have actively tried to encourage fear (in order to justify granting extraordinary powers). The irony is so blatant it's right there in the name. Being at war makes people more afraid, so declaring war on terror is automatically ironic. It's like having an orgy to promote abstinence.
Might I recall that competing with foreign companies using Gmail accounts is silly too, but we still do it, betting they're not organized enough yet to find the information.
On the plus side, it shows that even Microsoft internal ennemies love Hotmail.
There are so many laws and regulations, and the larger a company is the more such applies. A staff is required to constantly review and make sure the law is complied with. Having good intentions is hardly sufficient.
Essentially their job is dealing with things that border on being illegal. Determining how far you can get to illegality, while remaining technically inside legality.
For the first time the notion of "newspeak" in real life has clicked for me. I'd never grokked the idea from the novel, other than as some fear mongering fantasy that Orwell invented for the sake of compelling irony. But now I see, names actually make sense, from a certain angle. They weren't purely ironic devices.
For the record, I'm NOT comparing Microsoft to Big Brother. Just funny to draw that parallel in naming choices.