Uber remotely locked down offices during police raids, shutting off computers

Making a mistake in this regard gets you a obstruction of justice charge. Call a lawyers, but don't expect a judge not to take this badly when they have issued a warrant.

> What if they are cops, but the government is corrupt? What if the warrant was obtained in a faulty manner?

That's for the lawyers to deal with in court. Once again, obstruction of justice on a legally issued warrant is going to be bad news for you.

This is the whole point of why police conduct raids:

...to use the element of surprise to arrest targets that they believe may hide contraband or other evidence, resist arrest, be politically sensitive, or simply be elsewhere during the day.

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

I can easily see this tool having been built for operating in those kinds of countries.

What's upsetting people is that this got used in a country which is nominally not corrupt in order to hide from "proper" law enforcement.

If this was being used to hide from a raid in Russia, people would be cheering instead.

Actively building a specific system to counter a warrant is probably going to go a long way to prove its obstruction. Uber's less than lawful reputation won't help here.

Many people equate standards in criminal law to "beyond any doubt", when the reality is "beyond reasonable doubt".

When you write a program like this, and you can be shown to have executed it at a police raid, _followed by_ a call to your company's general counsel (or in this case to a "special team", "specially trained" to run a program called "Ripley", with the purpose of "nuking a site from orbit") to advise them, the claim that "this is common practice" goes out the window and "we're specifically obstructing a warrant until counsel/whatever other process happens takes place" becomes entirely "reasonable" as a depiction of what you are doing.

You are a person entitled to rights. A company is not a person. Border searches are warrantless, arbitrary, and lack any oversight whatsoever. The company was searched by a court order signed by a judge for suspicion of a specific crime. In every way possible, these situations are entirely different.

That seems like it would fit the definition of “destroy” to me.

Once the warrant is served, anything done to delete anything off that computer is obstruction of justice, it doesn't matter what the mechanism of storage is- whether it's RAM, Hard Disk or floppy disk.

Secondly, the warrant is what compels uber to give access to the evidence, there's no 'We don't feel like it right now, go to the courts to try something else'. The ability of the authorities to gain evidence through other legal avenues provides literally no defence for uber in failing to comply with a warrant.

"Uber", the legal person is who. Why does HN think the law is a series of fixed instructions rigidly executed by a computer and can be easily hacked by overly clever constructs? "Well, I didn't shoot my wife, I just set-off the first domino on this rube goldburg machine - the hamster pulled the trigger - gotcha! ha ha ha".

This will be put in front of a judge, and they will see through this for what it is.

Wrong. Compelling them to do so does not mean that compulsion will be successful. Encryption exists.

The page might also trigger other processes such as alerting council, that they have the right to do.

So possibly not as risky?

Is this what the on-site employees were doing though? According to the article they were:

> they’d been trained to page a number that alerted specially trained staff at company headquarters in San Francisco

Depending on whether they knew what the "specially trained staff" was "specially trained" to do, this seems logical and harmless? If the police came to my office I would probably text the company owner to find out WTF is going on.

Are you an expert in identification and warrant? I never saw one, you could print a fake one and I couldn't tell if it's right. Same for any identification.

Once we talked about doing some relatively public MILSIM with friends. It didn't take 5 minutes for us to realize that it would end badly because of that. If your goal is to access Uber data or any big corporation for that matter, you can see how easy it would be to profit from that.

Thus, lock everything down and let legal experts actually take care of that seems like a pretty good solution to avoid this kind of situation. They are there to seize data, they can do it as much as they want. They can then force Uber to unencrypt the computers.

If enforcing law is seen as adversarial to private interests, then those private interests are by definition, against the law.

https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Document...

> What I fear is an even greater cause for concern – and it is for me a real concern – is something symptomatic of a deeply rooted culture in the family courts which, however long established, will no longer be tolerated. I refer to the slapdash, lackadaisical and on occasions almost contumelious attitude which still far too frequently characterises the response to orders made by family courts. There is simply no excuse for this. Orders, including interlocutory orders, must be obeyed and complied with to the letter and on time. Too often they are not. They are not preferences, requests or mere indications; they are orders. This principle applies as much to orders by way of interlocutory case management directions as to any other species of order. The court is entitled to expect – and from now on family courts will demand – strict compliance with all such orders. Both parties and non-parties to whom orders are addressed must take heed. Noncompliance with an order by anyone is bad enough. It is a particularly serious matter if the defaulter is a public body. Non-compliance with orders should be expected to have and will usually have a consequence: see Re W (A Child), Re H (Children) [2013] EWCA Civ 1177.

But you're talking about a parent ignoring court orders, I guess, in which case this one is more relevant: a mother made false allegations of abuse against the father, and continued to do so; and removed the child; and continued to do so; and she did those things after being ordered not to, and she got a (suspended) prison sentence as a result: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2017/3358.html

> The judge had indicated that she was prepared to authorise disclosure of her Judgment to the Judge at the Kingston Crown Court, and that if the 1st Respondent objected she would be required to make her objections known. On 25th January 2016, the judge ordered her judgment may be released to the sentencing judge. The 1st Respondent received a four-month sentence, suspended for six months on 27th January 2017.

EDIT: And here's a direct link to the cases he mentions at the end of the para I link above: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2013/1177.html