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From SFChronical: http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Uber-Waymo-case-...

> While he didn’t believe that work was illegal, “I had questions about the ethics of it,” Jacobs testified.

> He confirmed that Uber used encrypted, ephemeral messaging “to protect sensitive information and ensure we didn’t create a paper trail that would come back to haunt the company in any potential criminal or civil litigation.” It also used “non-attributable devices” to communicate with third parties providing on-the-ground intelligence about threats to Uber, and to research Uber protestors, he testified.

...sound like "Just another Fortune 500" to you?

Actually, yes. I have seen Fortune 500 C-level execs use this exact behavior. When there is a merger in the works, use of burners and anonymous e-mail accounts are commonplace.

Not that it excuses Uber's behavior, but corporate execs don't trust that their comms aren't being monitored (by either the govt or hackers in their systems). I-banks and traders have spied on them for years, so it's not an unfounded fear.

> When there is a merger in the works, use of burners and anonymous e-mail accounts are commonplace.

That's to prevent leaks from driving the stock price up, and causing the buyout cost to increase. That's a little different than using it to hide the fact that they were knowingly breaking the law. Do you understand the difference?

> That's to prevent leaks from driving the stock price up, and causing the buyout cost to increase. That's a little different than using it to hide the fact that they were knowingly breaking the law. Do you understand the difference?

You're making the assumption that they did it for that reason. It could be that covering up the crimes was just a side effect.

I keep all my e-mail in gmail forever, and it's delivered substantial business benefits. If someone asks me for details of something I did fifteen years ago, I can pull it up with ease.

Other than covering up crimes, what advantage do you imagine would be worth the loss of those benefits?

Well, in the current context, deleting stuff that could be used against you in a lawsuit. Doesn't need to be something you did that was wrong but maybe just something you wrote that expressed doubts about a strategy, for example.

But there's also just cleaning out all the cruft which makes finding useful stuff harder. Since going all-in on Gmail, I delete far less than I used to and that's not entirely a bad thing but I also have to sift through a lot more stuff when I'm looking for something.

> deleting stuff that could be used against you in a lawsuit.

> Doesn't need to be something you did that was wrong

Deleting something that can be produced of evidence of wrong-doing is illegal all by itself.

Leaks can be incredibly expensive. Millions of dollars of lost revenue.

Yes I do; and the F500 Cs I know use it for both purposes. There's somewhat of a code of honor between F500-level execs that anything said in private stays private; you need to be able to have frank backchannel conversations without worrying about antitrust or regulatory problems. Most common is when a communication is rather innocent, but taken out of context or worded in the wrong way it could look very bad.

If the objection is to the technology: Lots of companies use special techniques to avoid creating a paper trail.

It's called "phone calls" and "talking privately". Using that to do bad stuff is bad, but conducting certain matters in a way that doesn't leave a paper trail is not by itself objectionable. I don't know any workplace that tries to ensure all communications leave a paper trail (though I did have a Facebook friend who insisted he only worked at such places, which must be false, since he's employed).

>If they objection is to the technology: Lots of companies use special techniques to avoid creating a paper trail. It's called "phone calls"

I had a friend who worked at a nonprofit who always knew when the general counsel wanted to discuss something sensitive - because he'd call on your office phone. (I suspect he thought it was harder to record a phone call than a 1:1 convo)

What's funny is he didn't realize that the mere chain of calls contained metadata. For example, if the first workday after a boozy company party the HR rep in charge of the interns gets a call, then an intern, then the intern goes into HR, then a senior staffer gets a call, then the senior staffer goes in to speak with HR... certain inferences can be drawn.

Ya, but only inferences. Anyways, it’s much harder for discovery than a complete conversation.

Once you put everyone under oath, unless everyone agrees to the same story, it's not too difficult to make the truth come out.

Sounds like union busting activities from the 1870s well into the 1940s, so business as usual in the neo-gilded age.

Having worked at multiple large companies I can say this is unusual behavior. Most companies want to maintain a paper trail to defend their actions because on average it's a net gain, not assume their actions are problematic and by default remove all evidence as soon as possible.

Not a lawyer, but I don't think it's unusual to have a retention policy that says when documents should be deleted. This is apparently legal as long as it's a blanket policy. (For example, by default all email gets deleted after a year, unless someone takes action to save it.) Of course anything under legal hold has to be kept.

It's also not unusual to make sure employees know about attorney-client privilege and how to use it properly, or that you should avoid discussing legal matters in a discoverable medium under the assumption it may be used against the company in a lawsuit. This is basic employee training stuff.

So, yeah, no. Sometimes maintaining a paper trail is the thing to do but this isn't the only thing companies do.

While a specific retention policy is always a good idea 1 year is very short and would often cost you information for any annual process. Their are various standards like 5 years in banking or 7 years in healthcare. And some industry's are required to maintain records for significantly longer than that

I worked for a big pharma (#2 in the world by most measures), and their email retention policy was 90 days. If you have built any enterprise messaging software, you know you have to support retention policy or it won’t sell to the big companies. Slack can be configured to be aggressive as delete-after-one-day

Not to call big parma ethically challanged, but international documents are more likely to Hirt them than help.

The article relaying the whole communication has been published:

http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Uber-Waymo-case-...

> The unit acquired leaked code from competitors via Github, dug up information on overseas drivers and researched global competitors, he said. While he didn’t believe that work was illegal, “I had questions about the ethics of it,” Jacobs testified.

> Tactics included use of attorney-client privilege on written documents, and encrypted, ephemeral communications.

> It also used “non-attributable devices” to communicate with third parties providing on-the-ground intelligence about threats to Uber, and to research Uber protestors, he testified.

> The unit acquired leaked code from competitors via Github, dug up information on overseas drivers and researched global competitors, he said. While he didn’t believe that work was illegal, “I had questions about the ethics of it,” Jacobs testified.

Fair point... But I'm not sure this has any bearing on Waymo vs Uber. This can, however, expose them to all sorts of patent litigation from the parties whose code they looked at.

> Tactics included use of attorney-client privilege on written documents, and encrypted, ephemeral communications.

I'm not sure about the former, but the latter is SOP at any company that has a legal department and regulatory concerns.

> It also used “non-attributable devices” to communicate with third parties providing on-the-ground intelligence about threats to Uber, and to research Uber protestors, he testified.

Shady shit, but not sure what bearing this has on Waymo vs Uber.

You don't understand. The problem is the letter itself, not even necessarily what it says. The letter should have been handed over as part of discovery. It wasn't. It only came to the judge through an independent case.

Too late to edit my other reply.

But I want to add a correction here. If I understand correctly, it didn't come to the judge through an independent case. It came to the judge because the judge referred the situation (Uber hiring Levandowski after Levandowski took documents from Waymo) to federal prosecutors. Those federal prosecutors got back to the judge with stuff that Uber should have turned over as part of discovery, but didn't. The judge is not amused.

And therefore, since Waymo just now finds out about this, they get more time to see if there's anything in this that affects their case. And Uber has nobody to blame but themselves for the delay.

>Does this mean that all Uber employees have been trained to 'communicate carefully', that their e-mails get deleted after X months, and that sensitive conversations that could hypothetically, and out of context, be held in person, as opposed to electronically?

>If that's all it does, I would like to remind everyone - that's the kind of training that everyone in any Fortune 500 company receives.

Both of the Fortune 500 companies I've worked for have also followed that up with something to the tune of "and if you don't want it quoted in the New York times you should think about why you're discussing it in the first place."

this is so downvoted that I can't even read it.

Drag your mouse over it to highlight the text.

that doesn't improve readability for me, instead of light grey on lighter grey, it becomes isoluminant light grey on light blue

Then either something got screwed up in your config or your monitor is severely miscalibrated. Highlighted text should not be hard to read, and the blue should not be light at all.

Toss something like this in usercontent.css?

  ::selection { color:white; background:black;}
  ::-moz-selection { color:white; background:black;}