Two separate stories of two different fairly amazing scams by engineers have come out recently. The first one is the more incredible one, and it involves a guy named William Grayson Hunter, who apparently secretly had two separate full time jobs at two different companies, but barely spent much time at either, instead "spending his days at bars, amusement parks and movie theaters," but sent in time cards, including some that billed for more than 24-hours a day. One of his two full-time employers, Aerospace Corp., just agreed to pay the government $2.5 million after it was investigating Hunter's work that was billed to the government at a premium. Of course, there's no punishment for Hunter, who died in 2010.

The other story is a bit more conventional. A network engineer at Verizon Wireless repeatedly used the company's warranty contracts with Cisco to order replacements parts that weren't needed, and then sold them off and kept the money -- which apparently added up to $4.5 million. Like Hunter above, Michael Baxter had interests outside of work:

[Baxter] spent the proceeds on jewelry, cars, international travel and multiple cosmetic surgeries for his girlfriend, prosecutors said.

Apparently, controls and audits on such things have gone out of style.

We frequently worry (or point out the negative consequences) of technologically illiterate politicians passing laws that impact technology. It goes beyond just laws, however, into other investigations. Frank Ahrens, at the Washington Post, highlights what happens when you have technologically illiterate politicians trying to investigate the Toyota acceleration problem, highlighting a troubling exchange between Toyota's boss, Akio Toyoda, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Congresswoman from DC:

Toyoda said that when his company gets a complaint about a mechanical problem, engineers set to work trying to duplicate the problem in their labs to find out what went wrong.

Norton said: "Your answer -- we'll wait to see if this is duplicated -- is very troublesome." Norton asked Toyoda why his company waited until a problem recurred to try to diagnose it, which is exactly what he was not saying.

Members of Congress are generally lawyers and politicians, not engineers. But they are launching investigations and creating policies that have a direct impact on the designers and builders of incredibly complex vehicles -- there are 20,000 parts in a modern car -- so there are some basics they should understand. Chief among them: The only way to credibly figure out why something fails is to attempt to duplicate the failure under observable conditions. This is the engineering method.

But, of course, understanding how engineering and technology works doesn't get you (re-)elected. Grandstanding does.

Via Against Monopoly comes an opinion piece from the EE Times suggesting that engineers who recognize how harmful the patent system can be should go on a patent strike:

Stop filing patents. Refuse to sign employment contracts that give your employer sole title to your inventions. Don't participate in any due diligence efforts on patent portfolios.

Basically, his argument is that most engineers recognize how harmful the patent system is, but are pushed into patenting by lawyers and management, and the only way to get the message out is to stop assisting with anything having to do with patents.

It's a nice idea, and if a lot of folks really got involved it might get some attention, but I have a hard time believing it could actually be effective. While many people do recognize the problems with patents, an awful lot either don't care or don't know enough to care about it -- and they'll just keep patenting away. It's similar to calls to "boycott" RIAA music or similar such things. It sounds good, but it's effectively impossible to make such a process really work in practice.