At a federal courthouse in Manhattan, a witness was called to the stand.

He was testifying for the prosecution.

The witness, Patrick Vovore, had been the chief software engineer at a financial aid startup called Frank.

On the stand, he recounted a story from back in 2021.

Frank's founder, a woman named Charlie Javise, was on the precipice of selling her business to J.P. Morgan Chase.

It would be a big, life-changing deal.

And this witness testified that Javis had an unusual request.

She tells him, I need you to create a synthetic database,

containing 4 million profiles,

essentially artificial data.

That's our colleague Alexander Saidi.

So how does this engineer testify that he responded to this request? Well, at first, he says, is this even legal?

And he then says he refused to do it

because he wasn't sure it was even legal what was being asked of him.

In reply, Charlie said to him,

Don't worry, I don't want to end up in an orange jumpsuit.

It was when the jumpsuit comment happened that it was like,

this is a real trial about real crimes.

There are 12 real people sitting here, listening and deciding whether or not

you're going to really go to jail or not.

And when he said it in front of the jury,

you could feel it in the room

...