[Algent]

That's basically what happened when they tried (twice I think ?) to raid Uber offices in France, their boss pressed a kill switch and everything went down in seconds. It completely blocked the investigation.

Afterward Uber helped Macron campaign who then ordered National Financial Prosecutor's office to "stop bothering them" so I don't think anything new happened since.

Edit: Some sources in below replies for infos on both. Turn out I'm wrong for 2nd part it started earlier than his campaign.

[stuaxo]

That sounds so illegal, it's crazy there aren't consequences for that.

EDIT: Article on the kills switch https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-bosses-tol...

[0cf8612b2e1e]

If you are a little person in the USA, I believe that would be spoliation of evidence.

[telotortium]

I don’t think any of these kill switches involved deleting data, just temporarily removing access of systems in the affected office.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

Not a lawyer, but let’s say the cops were searching my house. If I threw the keys to my unbreakable safe out the window, such that they could never be found, I doubt a judge would care for the distinction. That the evidence exists but cannot be accessed is still going to find you in contempt.

[svieira]

Now let's say that instead you threw the keys to your unbreakable safe to your friend across the Atlantic Ocean. And you say that you didn't know that the people entering were cops. And your friend won't give the keys back. The evidence may exist, you cannot access it, neither can the police. The court has no jurisdiction over your friend and you have no authority to force your friend to give you the keys back.

At that point, whether you are in contempt or not depends on the answer to the question "did you know that the cops were entering to look for evidence before you threw the keys?" Whether the judge holds you in contempt or not is a function of the free choice of the judge and is not related to the answer to the first question (though whether or not the judge should hold you in contempt is a function of what the judge believes about what you believed).

[tonygiorgio]

If it were keys to a safe that existed outside of the warrant requirements (in another country in fact), then it would likely not be illegal. The regulators would unlikely be able to legally access that safe anyways without extra due process, so it’s mostly about protecting against unwarranted access.

[Onavo]

Do the folks at Brussels have the concept of "fruit of the poisoned tree" and parallel construction?

[telotortium]

The keys still exist and are accessible. What the kill switches does is make a fishing expedition harder. If the police knew of the existence of a specific document, or even all documents pertaining to certain terms, they could issue a targeted subpoena which Uber would have to comply with (at least in the US).

[mewse-hn]

That metaphor doesn't seem directly applicable to cutting off cloud access.

If we're trying for a metaphor that would be a similar situation pre-digitization, the cloud servers containing business documents could be considered head office, and the office being raided would be the branch office. The branch office would continually be communicating with head office for their operations, and that communication would be shut down during the raid.

This isn't a great metaphor because the "head office" has become sort of stateless and ephemeral with digitization, but that's part of the interesting question the OP was posing, how does law enforcement collect evidence when that evidence is hosted on cloud servers in nebulous datacenters?

[eastbound]

By creating a law for seizing the IT system of a company. “Provide everything”, and if we later find that any other document existed back at that time, then it’s contempt of court.

[fossislife]

As long as no police has confiscated (in most countries this involves the police man touching it, I bet) the equipment you can break it or make it inaccessibility however you like. It's your stuff, after all.

[shiroiushi]

>Not a lawyer, but let’s say the cops were searching my house. If I threw the keys to my unbreakable safe out the window, such that they could never be found, I doubt a judge would care for the distinction.

What if the safe was never in your house at all, but it was in a foreign country across an ocean? And when the cops showed up, you simply threw the keys across the ocean too?

If the cops know of something particular in the safe, then maybe the judge could find you in contempt for not producing that thing when ordered by the court, but otherwise, I don't see how they have any legal leg to stand on.

[jjallen]

This is like not giving them the password to your phone which I thought was protected at least in the US. They’re both literally keys.

[onlypassingthru]

Your password is sort of protected. A judge can hold you in prison for contempt for refusing to provide a password but there is an 18 month jail limit, at least in federal court.[0]

[0]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/man-who-refused-...

[atmosx]

> I doubt a judge would care for the distinction.

If the judge receives a call from the ministry of justice, they will care a great deal about the distinction.

[izacus]

This theorycrafting is cute, but in reality you've mixed up corporate entities and yourself as a person in a criminal case.

And if a corporate entity finds a way to openly defy a national government, it tends to happen that those governments find a way to change the law (they're the ones making it, right? :P) for that defiance to become punishable by other parts of those governments which can sanction the corporation, prevent their operations within the country or even throw people in jail.

[AnthonyMouse]

You're conflating two different things here.

One is, what does the law say? Did they violate it? Is it illegal for a foreign subsidiary to temporarily shut off access to a branch office? How would we like this to work? Policy arguments about law enforcement vs. due process and government overreach.

The other is, politics. If the local government is captured by a cartel of taxi medallion holders who don't like Uber, the government is going to find a way to screw Uber, regardless of whether Uber is complying with existing law. But then it's politics and Uber is a multi-billion dollar corporation, so they have the option to capture the government themselves.

Of course, that leaves the meta argument. Maybe deciding what should happen based on the second method is worse than the first, so how do we prevent that from being what happens?

[throwawaymobule]

Even if you do it before you could have known you were being served a warrant?

IIRC, they did it in the US too.

[spellbaker]

Ok I'll bite... wtf

[lokar]

Nothing uber does is crazy anymore

[NBJack]

Not by comparison to Uber at least. 'Historical' documentaries about it are going to be wild. And probably on Netflix.

[fragmede]

If you haven't seen superpumped or read the book and are interested in Uber's story, it's worth a read/watch, though it's dramatized for tv.

[lokar]

I meant they have redefined the bar for crazy to be so high no one will ever cross it. They are the GOAT for crazy.

[DoctorOW]

History is written by the winners sadly enough.

[exe34]

you'd think a judge could order you to provide the documents and then jail you for contempt of court until you do?

[golemotron]

The alternative, giving them a password that gives them read/write access to sensitive systems, would be insane. Subpoena for particular data.

[atoav]

You are aware of the fact that tax evasion means these companies are freeloading on the tax money the rest of us (including: you) are paying? Especially in the case of uber which is essentially using public infrastructure to make their money having them pay taxes should be normal.

I agree that customer data needs to be protected, but it is bold to assume that is the case at all with these powerful corporate entities: if they lie to the state when filing taxes what makes you believe they are ernest when it comes to the protection of their users privacy?

Maybe it is a weird ideology I am holding here, but the more powerful an entity is, the more transparent it should become — nowaday we got this completely reversed with poor people being naked in front of the state and big corps literally fooling everyone.

Edit: some also seem to think the state is the behemoth that jumps on the poor little companies here. To that I just have to think about the account of the German public prosecutor Bäumler-Hösl (of wirecard fame) where she told about a raid on a bank where she and 4 collegues were opposed by 130 (!) company lawyers.

[AnthonyMouse]

> if they lie to the state when filing taxes

In general this is not what they do. What they do is read the tax code carefully and structure their operations in such a way as to minimize taxes, e.g. because tax is paid on "profits" (revenues minus expenses) so they shift more expenses into jurisdictions with high tax rates etc., causing "profits" to go down in those jurisdictions and up somewhere else.

Then they don't pay any taxes in the jurisdictions with higher tax rates and politicians go on TV and complain about the companies following the laws that the politicians enacted. Because if they actually fixed the laws, the taxes would be paid based on the extent to which the company does business in that jurisdiction, and then companies could only avoid taxes by not doing business there (costing the country jobs) or, for taxes associated with local sales, by raising prices there. Neither of which the politicians actually want to do, so instead they pass laws that allow companies to avoid taxes and then complain about it when the companies do it.

[haccount]

The law was always there to step on the little man, the VIPs always had it easier. Stop thinking too much about it.

[atoav]

nah I think we need systemic rules that help the little man while making it harder the bigger an entity grows.

[aaronax]

Thinking the systems that a company has are so sensitive that the company is basically above the law is the insane thing.

It is just a company--a group of people granted certain rights. They have databases...fancy filing cabinets. Just because the company is famous shouldn't preclude their filing cabinets from being searched (presuming legal processes are used and not abused).

[gruez]

> They have databases...fancy filing cabinets. Just because the company is famous shouldn't preclude their filing cabinets from being searched (presuming legal processes are used and not abused).

That analogy doesn't work, because the "filing cabinets" are actually sitting somewhere else, possibly in another country/continent. It's not obvious that authorities in one country has authority over documents stored in another country.

[aaronax]

I think it is not crazy to think that if the contents are used from some country then intentional obstruction of justice stuff like kill switches or dropping VPN connections should be treated as intentional obstruction of justice. AKA reality of use matters more than "location" of data.

[valval]

I and many others think the government should have 0 business in my filing cabinet. That difference in world view might be what makes this topic more complex than you seem to think.

[Terr_]

[Not parent poster] So even the most heinous act of violence become unprosecutable when the suspects/accomplices have moved all remaining evidence into a magically inviolable filing cabinet?

No? Then the world is a lot more complex than property rights trumping everything else.

[valval]

I think it’s very hard to say, and it just gets harder the more I think about it (like many things tend to).

On one hand, if the condemning evidence can’t be provided by someone other than me, should the case be prosecutable?

On the other hand, any sentient human can come up with examples of cases where it might be reasonable to search my belongings for evidence; multiple independent witnesses point to me being guilty of murder and investigations have otherwise stalled. Or anything of the sort.

What if all the independent witnesses are not independent? What if I’m not the guy, but just a lookalike? What if I’m being set up by the authorities?

The easy thing to do here is to say well okay SOMETIMES it’s okay to search one’s belongings but not for like any silly reason or anything like it has to be a real serious one. Then it’s just a matter of where to draw the lines, and who should get to decide.

I like the more absolute stance I made earlier; the government shouldn’t have any business in my personal belongings. Some crimes will go unpunished and that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

[pyrale]

Uber has a history of serving falsified data to the justice, though. Their offices are raided because they can’t be trusted with a subpoena.

[golemotron]

The real issue is that technology has rendered office raiding useless. People are welcome to explore alternatives.

[pyrale]

> People are welcome to explore alternatives.

For companies that deliberately obstruct justice work? Have the board and a healthy amount of executives serve 20 years in a high security prison, seize the assets and investigate their investors' due dilligence process. Gather proof with infiltrated workers.

Tech leaders need to learn that criminal conspiracy is not part of a good business plan. If they start using mafia tactics, so can Justice.

[dh2022]

You can give them read access tokens that expire every couple of hours....

[golemotron]

The problem is deeper than that. When a physical space is raided, its scope is obvious. Digital spaces don't have that characteristic. There can always be hidden indexes.

[MichaelZuo]

Yeah it's hard to see how any French official would have authority to conduct searches 10 meters beyond French borders, let alone over all of Uber's computers located in dozens of other countries.

[wang_li]

Hard to see how a company can imagine it can do business in a country and not follow that country’s record keeping laws and be subject to criminal and civil statutes in that country.

[MichaelZuo]

How is this relevant to Uber's files and computers located in other jurisdictions?

[jraph]

If you do business in France, you are accountable in France. Your problem to provide the asked documents if it's the law to provide them. That you are using computers elsewhere to store stuff should not be any relevant.

You shouldn't really be able to have it both ways, should you?

[tokinonagare]

If a company is doing business here, the actual location of file is irrelevant.

Also when the government is really motivated, he can arrested the founders or executives directly (Pavel Durov). Which is what they should do to Netflix execs if they are doing business illegally.

[gruez]

>Also when the government is really motivated, he can arrested the founders or executives directly (Pavel Durov). Which is what they should do to Netflix execs if they are doing business illegally.

You're in favor of holding executives hostage to demand access to data? If they actually did something illegal, they can be arrested/tried for that, but arresting executives as a means to coerce companies into doing stuff is a total perversion of the rule of law.

[izacus]

> You're in favor of holding executives hostage to demand access to data? If they actually did something illegal, they can be arrested/tried for that, but arresting executives as a means to coerce companies into doing stuff is a total perversion of the rule of law.

Turns out that witholding data as a company executive is outright illegal, so yeah, we're in favor of it and they can get arrested and charged for for it.

[sealeck]

> You're in favor of holding executives hostage to demand access to data?

This is a very emotional way of saying "you're in favour of enforcing contempt of court rulings against people who try to obstruct the judicial process".

[nerdbert]

What if it is illegal to withhold the data during an investigation? Isn't the executive then committing a crime?

[multjoy]

The executives are the company.

[avidiax]

That sounds like a pretty poor precedent when e.g. Russia or China raids the local office of a social media company to get data on a dissident.

[Dracophoenix]

This situation already happened with X/Twitter when the Brazilian Supreme Court attempted to compel Elon & co to disclose the social media accounts of alleged rioters. Unfortunately, it seems few people learn from even recent history.

[MichaelZuo]

Irrelevant according to who?

[nicce]

> Afterward Uber helped Macron campaign who then ordered National Financial Prosecutor's office to "stop bothering them" so I don't think anything new happened since.

Isn’t that kinda definiton of corruption?

[Algent]

I do need to correct myself, look like "friendship" started before his election: https://www.euronews.com/2023/07/18/a-privileged-relationshi...

Pretty crazy to support a business designed to never pay tax. This bring nothing beside "precarious employment".

[grecy]

Woah, slow down there citizen.

It’s been rebranded to “lobbying” and “campaign contributions”. Much cleaner. Better optics.

[lm28469]

Ahahahah you fool, don't be ridiculous, in civilized western countries we call it lobbying

[hulitu]

No. Corruption is when the others are doing it. /s

[sensanaty]

How the hell can any of what you just described be legal?

Do you have any articles about this? Because this is insane if true.

[barrenko]

It kinda sounds like you can't raid Uber / Netflix without hackers, Ghost in the shell type raid. Which is probably the future of raids.

[andylynch]

This is one of the prime threat models for things like encryption of data at rest on servers

[YetAnotherNick]

Why should it be illegal? Isn't it akin to "right to remain silent"? Why the need to present any information to police unless it is asked by court. Assuming that they didn't delete the data, just moved it to somewhere safe where it couldn't directly be taken away.

We had a raid in one of my previous company due to copyright violation due to a user uploaded content. Authorities came in to take in all the codebase, reports and even employee devices. Basically once given court permission, police would try to collect all the unrelated things which could be taken in the permission, so that they could extort you later.

[LunaSea]

It can be destruction of evidence, which is illegal.

[_bin_]

Denying access to data that could still be specifically subpoenaed isn't destruction of evidence, it's a normal security measure. They still have the warrant to search everything in the office, but not the right to use those computers to access uber's entire worldwide infrastructure.

I have no idea what french law says about it but I think it's morally fine and don't care that uber did it.

[dh2022]

I think this is an example of law lagging technology. A warrant gives the police the right to inspect and seize contents of a safe inside a house. Similarly, the law should be updated so that a warrant gives the police the right to inspect and seize contents of local computers. Local computers surely have valid certificates that allow the computers to connect to the mothership, right?

[dmurray]

Does a search warrant for your house give the police the right to search your car, if they found your car keys in your house? What about your neighbour's or your employer's car - perhaps on the other side of the world - if you happened to have those keys? To compel you not to tell your employer to change the locks, so the seized keys won't work?

These seem like closer real-world analogies for what exactly a warrant to search someone's computer should entitle the police to do.

[_bin_]

Not necessarily. Depending on how the org's set up, the system may be permissioned to access too much stuff. I think justice systems should lean less on a general warrant - too much of a fishing expedition - and instead focus on subpoenas specifically related to their area of investigation. E.g. if they seize the CEO's computer on accounting or tax concerns, I sincerely doubt they showed a judge probable cause to seize, I don't know, new product designs. As such they should not be able to access them.

[sidewndr46]

let me just extrapolate this out a bit for you. I live in the US (yes I visited France once long ago, it was nice). I use Uber. My phone is an Android phone running Uber's app.

Can a French prosecutor use Uber's systems to deliver a malicious payload to my phone to gather evidence? If so, is Uber required to assist them in this task?

[Forgeties79]

I just have a hard time believing that any of us could get away with that.

[_bin_]

Wasn't half of the concern with the arrest of Ross Ulbricht figuring when they could get him with his computer unlocked, without time to lock/wipe it? They'd have a pretty hard time proving destruction of evidence if 1. they didn't know for sure evidence was on that specific computer and 2. it was destroyed rather than just that the decryption key was removed from memory.

Regardless, the government violating an individual's rights doesn't mean we should yell at uber, it means we should yell at the government.

[staticautomatic]

Unless it wasn’t destroyed, in which case it might be interring with an investigation, which is probably also illegal in France.

[Algent]

It's definitely interference/obstruction at least of the raid itself yeah, but looking at the text and not being a lawyer I have a feeling it may be extremely hard to prosecute for something more substantial than a fine low enough for a french exec have it a as a guaranteed expense (bn€ in tax fraud vs a few k€ in fine). The law does also mention prison but it's not the kind of stuff that ever end up being applied for fiscal related cases.

[krisoft]

> I have a feeling it may be extremely hard to prosecute for something more substantial than a fine low enough for a french exec have it a as a guaranteed expense

I know nothing about French law, but this whole thing gives me “organised crime” vibes. In many jurisdictions the punishment dramatically increases when a crime is commited as an organised group whose purpose is to commit said crime. As i said i know nothing about French law so i don’t know if the same concept is present there, let alone if the letter of the law would fit the situation.

But yeah i agree with you they won’t care unless they are sitting in a cell with the chance of sitting a lot more in a cell.

[chollida1]

Because the government already has a warrant to obtain this evidence(they can't raid the office otherwise) and you as the company pushing this button are failing to turn over that evidence.

[charlieyu1]

I guess locally encrypted files in my computer is a problem as well then

[alexey-salmin]

In many jurisdictions it actually is a problem

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law

[electrozav]

And if raids are court ordered?

[dh2022]

I assume when the office was raided there was a warrant that would give police the right to inspect and seize property...

[spacemanspiff01]

My impression was that they were trying to get remote access to ubers US servers/infrastructure/data?

Might be wrong...

[sensanaty]

Presumably the French police aren't randomly deciding on a Tuesday for no reason to check the company for proof of them being tax cheats without some court somewhere requesting it, but even if they were, we're talking about a company here, not a person. A person has the right to remain silent, it doesn't make sense for a company to have that same right.

And the 2nd half just reads like pure corruption to me, they paid off some politician (who just so happens to wield the most power in the whole country) to pressure him to get them to stop their investigation into their illegal acts? In what universe could that 2nd sentence be construed as anything other than slimy, corrupt behavior?

[YetAnotherNick]

> And the 2nd half just reads like pure corruption to me

Why did you conclude that?

There were some user uploaded pirated content in our platform. As far as I know, some media company won approval by some judge for a raid to discover the extent of piracy. It's just in the police rulebook to get everything during the raid where there could be pirated content, including employees laptops.

[sensanaty]

Sorry, I meant the 2nd sentence of the OP, where they mention Uber paying off Macron.

[Izikiel43]

That’s so interesting, probably a good move for them, it’s not their job to make governments lives easier

[Muromec]

Sounds like obstruction of justice or what not

[jokoon]

do you have a source for the "kill switch"?

[intelVISA]

Some Saturday morning cartoon villain behavior, lol.