The Infinite Brief

According to a bill introduced by Warren, executives of billion-dollar companies could be held criminally liable for data breaches — and perhaps even face jail time.

“When small-business owners cheat their customers, they go to jail,” Warren wrote in The Washington Post on Tuesday. “But when corporate executives at big companies oversee huge frauds that hurt tens of thousands of people, they often get to walk away with multimillion-dollar payouts.”

“If top executives knew they would be hauled out in handcuffs for failing to reasonably oversee the companies they run, they would have a real incentive to better monitor their operations and snuff out any wrongdoing before it got out of hand,” Warren wrote.