A person who legally obtains insider information — as a corporate official or an investment banker, for example — will almost certainly break the securities law if he or she trades on the basis of that information before it is made public.

But it is far less clear that someone who illegally gets their hands on such information will have violated the securities laws by trading on it.

The problem is the law requires some form of deception and the SEC lawyers on the case are essentially left to argue that the attacker "deceived" the computer. Thus, the philosophical question, can a computer be deceived? HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey had a famously bad reaction to deception but what about simple devices storing information?

One take on this is that the deception wasn't against the computer but against the market where all the participants are presumed to be following the rules and using non-public information to make trade decisions constitutes a deception of others in the market.

A more interesting argument, at least from my non-lawyer perspective, is to argue that computers are an extension of our own agency, that is they do what we program them to do and so are something of a middle-man in the deception process. It's not unheard of to assume non-human things can have some rights of humans (e.g. corporations can own property) why not extend some degree of "deceptability" to programs? What can of worms would such a move open?

The case against the Ukrainian resident isn't over yet and the SEC still has a chance to make some other argument for insider trading but the bigger question I think is the agency of computer systems we design. That won't go away with the case.