[_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.

[pjerem]

Your analogy doesn’t work. Your neighbor is not you.

$COMPANY is $COMPANY all around the world and if $COMPANY wants to do business in $COUNTRY (which is not an obligation, they choose to), then yes, they have to entirely cooperate with $COUNTRY.

If they don’t want to, they can still do business elsewhere.

[AnthonyMouse]

> $COMPANY is $COMPANY all around the world

This is the thing which is not the case. The subsidiary in the US is nearly always a different company than the one(s) in Europe. They'll have different management and different lawyers etc. Sometimes they even have different owners, e.g. because one of them is a joint venture with some other company, or a franchise. And they have to be different, because different countries have different laws and those laws often conflict with each other. So the subsidiary in the US follows US law and the one in France follows the law in France.

You could try to make it otherwise, but it's pretty obvious what would happen then. Companies couldn't formally operate in multiple countries because their laws are incompatible, so instead there would be a straw front company in any given country that nominally isn't owned by the conglomerate, but is effectively just reselling their product/service in that country for an additional margin that only pays the salary of local management. To prevent this you would have to ban companies from having foreign suppliers, which is not very practical.

And since countries know that's what would happen, they allow foreign subsidiaries to be regarded as separate entities even if they have shared ownership, instead of demanding the charade.

[pjerem]

In absolute, I agree with you. But personally if I had to chose between tax evasion (permitted by those schemes) and having less multinational companies because it’d be more difficult… well, my country was doing pretty okay before multinationals and is not doing okay since every taxes are evaded.

Well Netflix is nice and all but I prefer social security and teachers in school.

[AnthonyMouse]

Federal revenue as a percent of GDP:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Basically flat since the end of WWII, significantly lower before the war. At the height of the New Deal, less than half of what it is now. And that's in the face of significant growth in real GDP per capita. Probably not a dissimilar story in most other Western countries.

The problem isn't in the amount of taxes being collected, it's in where the money is going.

[Dylan16807]

I don't think a warrant to search an office should let them use the keys they find there on a company truck five miles away, either. Despite being the same company. (If it's in the parking lot then it's a maybe.)

[_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]

The point you're making is valid, but also exposes a common theme in litigation against big tech. It's pretty common to hear something like "company XYZ used data ABC to train a model about their users and is court ordered to delete it". It's unlikely that anyone in the justice system has even the slightest clue how to ascertain if this actually happened and certainly no way to prove it has been deleted. The court gives the order, the company says they have complied, & everyone pretends to go back to the way things were before hand.

[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.

[chollida1]

These two issues are very far apart.

Ross could argue he forgot his password to unlock the data in a single users case.

In the corporate case it would be hard for Uber to argue that the entire company now has no access to any of the subpoenaed data.

[Forgeties79]

Yeah that doesn’t really shift my opinion lol If I activated a kill switch to wipe my local computers when the FBI entered my house I can’t even imagine the hell I’d reap, let alone that my data would be safe because it’s scattered on servers in other countries.

Also we can claim whatever we want but that doesn’t mean it’ll protect us in court.