A former Goldman Sachs computer programmer plotted for two months before leaving the investment bank for a rival about how to steal the confidential source code for Goldman's high-frequency trading platform, a federal prosecutor said.

In his opening statement yesterday, Assistant US Attorney Joseph Facciponti said Sergey Aleynikov located a computer server in Germany that wasn't blocked by Goldman's firewalls and secretly uploaded portions of the code in the days before he left the investment bank.