That's a good point. Also, you don't want all competing corps going "we need to steal some research to get ahead on the market, lets go for Shiawase, we can get some runners cheap because they never try to track intruders down".

Also, Lone Star doesn't cost the corp anything except the time spent talking to them, and they can be discrete.

You clearly don't run Lone Star like I do. In my game, Lone Star only costs cash if you actually want them to do something after the interview.

You have Lone Star cost cash? They're contracted by the city to do all the law enforcement work, at no cost to citizens or businesses except the taxes they pay.

Well, since most corps hire out their own security, and are responsible for their own coverage...I could easily see Lone Star adding a surcharge for "Territory Zone Change" whenever they have to enter one of the Megacorps territories.

Lone Star is contracted to keep crime at a reasonable level in areas populated by tax payers. If given the choice between prosecuting two vehicular manslaughters by Joe Smiths who were driving while talking on the cell phone and got into accidents, or one homicide second done by a professional who has gone through great pains to cover his tracks, the Star will choose the former. It's cheaper, looks better for statistics, and impacts more people (since the latter is more likely to be covered up and therefore won't have any publicity).

So the Star will come in, look around long enough to realize the perp won't immediately present himself, make a show of doing an investigation, and head home. If they're feeling especially productive, they'll collar some dumb ork down in Pullyup and pin the crime on him.

Now if the corp mentions they'll be helping the investigation through investing say $100,000, the officer in question will probably do a DNA scan and make a reasonable attempt to collar a person of at least the same race. Alternatively, if the case is all over the news, the Star will actually get the guys with the "CSI" jackets in and do the whole astral tracking thing.

They prosecute shoplifters who are caught. They don't send armed mercenaries out the ventilate the shoplifters who got away. Its not like these big modern department stores can't afford death-squads. They most certainly can. But, they cannot afford to assign a death-squad to every one of their facilities.

And then there is the fiasco that happens when the woman you kill on suspicion of stuffing a basketball under her shirt turns out to just be pregnant.

Sigged for truth and absolute hilarity.

Actually, from the novels, that is exactly why the Corps do not try to track down Runners after a drop...I am sure when Runners first came into being, the Corps DID try and prosecute them..but eventually, just got tired of the resources that were getting bogged down, and started letting them go.

Also, ADMITTING that runners got in and stole something or someone would hurt their reputation. Who outside the corp would know of someone making a break in into any facility other then an arcology? Keeping things quiet and discrete is SOP for the Corps and for good runners.

Besides: The death benefits the corps would have to pay the families of the people who get killed going after the runners would be so high that it REALLY is not worth it...and THAT would make things more public...which the Corps do NOT want..so...why would they go after runners full force every time?

The runners who got away would know, and their Johnson would know, and sooner or later all of the shadows would hear the rumours. The exec who dropped the ball and let the runners win would know, and sooner or later his bosses would know.

Some corps might actively let some runners go in some circumstances, but that's certainly not my rule of thumb.

EDIT: And as for paying out death benefits, well they should have thought about that before they went all extraterritorial and started hiring their own gun-toting personal armies.

You know, banks let slide most fraud for exactly the reasons mentionned earlier. They don't want to appear weak.

It's not rare that when an employee is found embezzling some funds he'll just be fired and told : Don't ask for reference.

Note how whenever a bank fraud ends up in the news, it's 99% because it started with a customer calling the cops. If it can be buried, it usually is.

Banks don't want to be seen as vulnerable, as a rule of thumb.

No, I'm not talking SR here. RL. So I figure a lot of the same rational would apply to corp. No need making a big deal out of tracking runner and appear vulnerable if there is nothing left to be gained by capturing the runner except for salvaging some pride.

Takes a special reason to track runner days after the run. Oh, I can come up with quite a few. But the typical run wouldn't qualify.

Clearly you don't read the FBI computer security surveys. I haven't checked this year, but I believe last year they expected 60+% of all data theft is unreported. Huh, speaking of which, I got another invitation to the CSI conference. Lemme see if that links to the FBI's latest survey...

Here we go.

48% of respondents indicated negative publicity would hurt stock/image
36% said competitors would use the information to their advantage

It is worth commenting that participation in the survey was voluntary, so we can safely assume companies that didn't want to report incidents to law enforcement before, did not want to partake in the FBI's survey (this is an ongoing criticism of the survey in question). As a result, we can say with some degree of confidence that in excess of 75% of all computer security incidents are NOT reported to law enforcement.

The news will travel up the grapevine a few levels, until it reaches someone with enough authority to say "handle it quietly". Then it travels back down. Shareholders never find out, so there's no drop in stock. If news gets out, Ares can deny it because the fact the prototype existed in the first place probably was not public news, or if it was, it wasn't concise enough to pin down what exactly the prototype looked like. Stockholders rarely have any idea what the company they invest in is actually producing, they just know its monthly revenue. Investors don't care a whit if the company they invest in is stolen from regularly or not. They care that revenue continues to go up. If investors were actually as intelligent and discerning as you seem to think they are, we'd never have had the dot com crash.

Depends on the details of the situation. Regardless, if Renraku now has the Ares prototype, there is nothing Ares can do about it except try to push their product out first, before Renraku has the time to reverse engineer it. Alternatively, Ares can send out shadow resources to retrieve it. What else are they going to do? Publicly say "Renraku stole our prototype and we're looking for it?" Then everyone invests in Renraku (or in both, to hedge their bets). They can't take Renraku to corporate court, they have no grounds for it since they can't prove Renraku has it. They can't directly use their forces against Renraku for the same reason. Squashing the runners after the delivery is a red herring, so there's no benefit there.

Once the runners have dropped off the prototype, Ares best course of action is to release the product first. That's really the only alternative open to them. Sure, some low level people, mostly security guards, will get canned or moved around, but anything else is a waste of time. There is absolutely no benefit to letting the information go public.

I have this vivid image of a runner catching a stray round in a gunfight, and dying of ammonia toxicity as the ruptured cells from the temporary cavitation dump a bunch of it straight into his bloodstream.

Yes. Without coverup they'd have had a quiet bankruptcy a decade before they did.

Enron was never 'found out'. It crashed because it could no longer keep up the pretense that it was rolling in gold when in truth it had been leaking red all over the place for over ten years and the only division that kept them afloat was using criminal activities to bring in the cash (The futures trading on California energy market). It self desructed, it wasn't brought down by savvy investigator and analysts. The company simply wasn't making any money and none of these pros could even figure that most basic of fact before it was far too late.

That was one whopping failure on the part of your 'Professional' investors. By the time they figured out the boat was sinking, there was water in the captain's cabin and sharks eating the passengers.

These days, we're trying to improve the situation by forcing more disclosure, and if anything the US is at the vanguard with more severe laws than most any other countries. But in the SR context, the situation would revert back to the wild 90s and 80s and then become even worse. With Extraterritoriality and various free havens it would be hard as hell to get any significant disclosure in the dystopian SR world.

PS : I'm surprised you insist things are that different in Europe. There a lot of very ancient and proud institutions over there that would rather swallow cyanid than publicly admit they've been had.

Try making a Swiss Bank admit they've been defrauded, just for fun. Perhaps the Dane are a rare breed but still...

Well, nobody said non-detection was without risks, neh? I mean, look at the Pain Editor, the Adrenal Pump, and many other pieces of ware. Gearing yourself up does have drawbacks. Shit, oxygenated fluorocarbons by themselves drastically increase the chance of your runner having a sudden bubble embolism.

By the rules, this isn't the case. They don't explain why you can still heal when you have oxygenated fluorocarbons instead of blood, but my assumption has always been the OF replaces the red blood cells, while white blood cells, platelets, macrophages, et cetera continue to be produced and work as normal.

It kinda reminds me of the Underworld movie. The first one with the liquid UV light slugs.

You're getting the owners confused with the employees. The employees (like the CEO) might want to hide the fact that they're not doing a good job. So they'll keep on cashing their fat pay check for a decade while running the company to the ground.

The owners do very explicitly not want that. The want the CEO to come clean when it starts going wrong, and either correct it or the owners can find a new CEO who can make sure that they won't get hit by a bankruptcy dropping their stock value to zero.

And you can be sure that given extraterritoriality, the owners will make sure that if someone is covering things up and keeping them in the dark, they'll have laws that punish them at least as severely than what happened to the Enron CEOs.

The same mechanism works for potential owners. If they think there's a big risk they're being tricked into buying their shares too expensively, they'll just stay away. If you lose credibility, a lot of people will not want to buy or own the stock.

First off, a corp who is dependant on developing their products repeatedly loses a significant amount of their research or whatever to shadowrunners will be dead anyway. It will never get any edge over the competition, so it'll sink whether or not anyone finds out about it.

Second, when the corporation releases a press statement saying "the status of our research projects are good and we'll really cash in out it next year", and investors think that for all they know about the corporation's credibility, the research might as well have been stolen or botched already, then they won't buy the stock. A corporation that is credible on the other will be able to increase their stock value alone on the market's expectation of future profits through research. Of course there's a risk of the research going wrong still - probably shadowrunners are the smallest risk, more often research projects fail because their new painkiller causes cancer in rats or that new techno-gizmo is really smart but it can't be produced at a competitive cost or something like that.

Of course coverups happen, but it is almost never company policy, because it usually hurts the company more in the long run. Individuals covering their own butt is another case, but a lot of this stuff can't be covered up in any meaningful way and a smart suit will know that it'll just hit him worse at a later date. A lot of suits think they can walk on water of course and recover the lost ground before it catches up to them.

Corporations will probably rutinely try to cover up things that are only image-related and/or only will cost something if found out, like their top researcher likes snuff BTLs or a toxin spill. Trying to pretend that their prototype hasn't been stolen when it has, that'll hurt them too much in investor credibility when it is found out (and the thiefing corp will make sure it is).

But whatever, SR isn't about simulating corp behaviour the right way. The way I see, extraterritoriality means that corps revert to the same methods that enemy states use towards eachother - espionage, sabotage, and being corps they've outsourced it, hiring runners on a per mission basis instead of maintaining their own set of agents. They are still corporations though, focused on shareholder value instead of sovereignity, forcing them to act in many ways like corporations do today - they need credibility, and they inform a lot to the public because what really gets their stock up is their potential to generate even more revenue in the future. I also have them treat a lot of their employees very well - of course the minimum-wage crowd doesn't get benefits, but above that they cater well for their people and try to motivate them to attract the best people (and to get them to drop any social life outside of the office of course).

Others may like to have their corps act like alien overlords, filled with wageslaves that are treated like shit and all hate their job and their boss and would love to help some runners blow it all up.

By the rules of biology I'm pretty sure it is the case. Red blood cells get bound up with the coagulation factors like bricks between mortar. I don't suppose anybody has thought to test whether clotting would work just fine without RBCs but my educated hunch says no.
Anyway, RBCs don't contain DNA, while white blood cells etc do. So I don't quite understand the point of replacing the former and not the latter!
Who are 'they' exactly?

Heh. Double Whammy. You rob the corp of one of its major projects, then you blackmail them with the threat of revealing the fact to shareholders!

I'm not confusing things, I'm specifically talking about Enron, which you specifically brought up. The Professional Investors had no idea the boat was sinking until it was too late. That was in reply to your previous post where you said because of professional investors and analysts, you couldn't hide the sort of fraud/runs we're talking about in this thread and gave Enron as example.

My point was yes you can, Enron specifically did worse than that for at least a decade. Not minor frauds perpetrated against them but a major fraud perpatrated by the CEO and other officers themselves, plus the ouright criminal manipulation of the California futures energy market. It's not hiding the fraud that killed them, it's the simple fact they had been losing money for years but hid this fact through creative accounting tricks while borrowing heavily that did them in. Basically, they were bleeding to death but convinced the world, analysts and professional alike, to keep investing.

So Enron didn't sink because of the fraud. They survived for ten year more than they should have because of the fraud. And their stock soared for these ten years in which logic dictate it should have sunk to the bottom! And when they ran out of accounting tricks, they were leaking red ink all over the place and the bankruptcy was ten time worse than if they had never frauded and died quietly in 1995 or so as they should have.

Compare this to simply hiding the fact you've been hit by runners in SR and there is no common measure! If you can hide a Enron-type of fraud to analysts for 10 years, you can easily cover up the effect of mosts runs.

So yeah, you can pull the wool over theyes of these savvy analysts. Especially for minor things. Especially in SR were corps suffer this kind of hassle routinely and it therefore makes it almost a zero sum game when you compare the financial statements of your rivals at the end of the year. And in SR, the accountability is dramatically lesser than what it is today, making it even easier than it would be for a Caiman Islands bank to do the same today.

BTW : in Enron's Case, Ken Lay was the chairman of the Board and very much part of the Fraud. And a major shareholder, not an 'employee'. He started unloading a bit before things went to hell. And technically, the CEO and high officers we're all substantial shareholders of the company. They received large bonus in options and had a strong incentive to keep the stock raising at any cost, hence a good part of the mess.

But the stockholders that weren't part of the inner circle of Lay and the CEO (Skilling?) never saw it coming and most got shafted hard.

But it did.

It was huge and yet it wasn't spotted for a decade.

And so it is damn easy in comparison to hide the aftermath of a normal run to the investors in the dystopian and unregulated world of Shadowrun when compared to the diffculty of hiding a fraud the size of what Enron did for over a decade in a more regulated environment to the same investors.

And so it doesn't makes much economical sense for Megacorps to expand ressources to doggedly track runners after the fact just to make an example of them. They're more likely to dust up the mess, keep quiet, and to set up their own run against the opponents who contracted against them in an effort to gain back the lost ground. For they are in the business of making money, not in the business of tracking runners for revenge if it's going to have no appreciable benefit to the bottom line (Sometime it does, often it doesn't).

And that was what we were aguing about, right?

---

You got lost in the Enron example. It was never my point.

Just that they covered up an Elephant in the boardroom and no one noticed. So don't tell me it's hard to keep investors from learning about the ups and downs of the shadowruns led by and against the corporation should you want to, especially in the world of SR which is 10x more favorable to that kind of things due to extra-territoriality and low regulations.

As Nezumi pointed out, the majority of corporations today already don't report most computer crimes commited against them

I'm just saying it would be much the same with shadowruns. And should the corporation have a significant amount of public stock, it wouldn't be hard to prevent the shareholders to find out.

Keep in mind, the majority of owners are people like me. I have $4,000 tucked away for retirement in the market. TSP, mutual funds, IRA, Coverdell. However, I could not name a single individual corporation my money goes to because that's not how the system works. I just know I have X amount in "International" and Y amount in small cap, so on and so forth. And I"m certainly not unusual in that fact. So most owners really have absolutely no idea where their money is or what it is doing right now. In this case, that means that while I, as a partial owner of Enron, don't want it to go down, I really don't know enough to have much of a say in how Enron runs. My broker might have a say, but he mostly looks on the growth and returns Enron has been publishing (plus, of course, any obvious statements that their research has been stolen by shadowrunners). It's not his money, and he really does get paid regardless (even if he did get a percentage cut, because the money is distributed so much between investments and investors, it really doesn't make a real difference to him). So us owners have no idea.

The CEO and the few named investors who owned 40% of Enron or whatever were PROFITING from Enron covering up. It became a pyramid scheme. They were making money by convincing other people Enron was stable. As soon as news gets out that Enron is going down, THEN they lose (because their stock becomes worthless). So the owners, and by this I mean ALL the owners, do not want information about scandal to get out until after they've sold their shares. Since I own .00001% of Enron, they don't care enough to tell me. But the big name owners know, and they know when to jump out. That's all they need, keep the ship together and give us warning if the crash is inevitable. Stealing the Ares prototype does not make the crash inevitable. These owners, BTW, cashed in on the fraud and got away with hundreds of millions in their golden parachute. The small time owners like me maybe lost $50 at most, since my money is so spread out. The people who really got screwed were the employees, who got no paycheck and worse, no retirement.

This is a load of hooie. Of course, it really depends on the size of the coverup. A lost $100,000 can be swept under the rug in a corp the size of Ares.

This is exactly the point. The info the companies release. If Ares reports every six months that something has been stolen, they lose credibility and their stock drops. Not only that, but they get a reputation for being easy to steal from, creating a vicious cycle. Despite what you say, there's nothing to show that every hidden problem is eventually revealed (and the owners, BTW, would prefer that nothing is ever revealed to the public. They lose money if the public finds out.)

If you really want to obfuscate DNA evidence what you do is specify on your character sheet that you are a tetragametic chimera and be explicit about which parts of your body grew from which zygote.

Now, since you are your own fraternal twin you would have two distinct sets of DNA in your blood and possibly two distinct blood types. Before going out on a run have your street doc filter your blood so that it contains only blood of one type. After the run have your street doc put the old blood back in and filter out the blood of the other type.

Simple.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Fairchild