Japan has strict anti-authoritarian rules, as a relic of occupation by the US military after WWII. This has just manifested in corporate security, leading to an investigation and incarceration of Nissan’s Chairman

The chief executive revealed that a whistle-blower had passed information to Nissan’s auditors who then began a wider investigation. The evidence was then passed to Japan’s public prosecutor.

The story calls out anti-authoritarianism rules, very specifically

Facing the press alone, the chief executive added that he felt the mistake had come after allowing a concentration of power in one individual. Saikawa said the misconduct went on for “a long period” and it looked like Kelly had been allowed to take control of internal operations, as he had the direct backing of Ghosn.

I’ve written before about recent history and why Japanese resistance to authoritarianism is so interesting to study. A key turning point was the 1931 Mukden Incident, which allowed a small cabal to solidify control and foment war.

While it was clear Japanese militant leaders had used false-pretense to breach the post-WWI agreements on peace, nonaggression and disarmament they also faced little tangible resistance and they flatly refused to stand down.

Occupation of Manchuria by Japan soon expanded in threat; the stage was set for escalation into the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and destabilization/expansion into the region, which eventually led to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Japan and Germany have essentially become time-capsules of US theories in anti-authoritarian thinking, due to the occupation and lessons forced upon them post-1945.

Meanwhile the US clearly has drifted away from the lessons it used to teach, letting the CSO of Facebook roam freely instead of going to jail after years of alleged acts of misconduct far worse than the Chairman of Nissan.

Just this week it was revealed on top of all the other breaches during the CSO tenure that Facebook engineers in 2018 were writing passwords to the URL and storing them, which is literally the worst possible management of security.

This is a rather jarring and basic security lapse for Instagram and Facebook, which hasn’t done much at all to prove to users it knows how to handle sensitive data. It certainly raises the question of other security practices…

Facebook’s CSO literally had no real security management experience other than a short attempt at Yahoo (also massively mis-mangaged and breached at record levels). He now arguably is the security industry’s face of executive fraud. How long before wanted posters go up for his arrest?