An internal crisis-management paper gave advice on what to say if discovered.
What the internal crisis-management paper did not give advice on is what to say if the "advice on what to say if discovered" was discovered.
What the internal crisis-management paper did not give advice on is what to say if the "advice on what to say if discovered" was discovered.
This team sounds interesting but I get the feeling the WSJ is trying hard to make it seem like some sort of clandestine spy operation. This practice isn’t uncommon… I’ve worked at airlines and they sometimes have people fly on a competitor airline and they don’t broadcast broadly “hey united flight attendant!! I work at American Airlines!” but it isn’t because they’re trying to be a spy.
The subsidiary is literally called “big river” (Amazon is a big river), the employees of Big River listed amazon as their employer on LinkedIn, and it took a simple google search to see the owner of Big River was Amazon… they weren’t exactly trying hard to hide it. A spy operation this was not.
I've heard that part of Amazon project planning includes pre-writing press releases, so why would this project not do the same?
Whatever is being revealed here is probably NOT as bad as it gets in reality.
So the DOJ is merely alleging (i.e. has not proven) that Google (one specific tech company) routinely engages in this practice, and that is your basis for the claim that this is “common practice” in all “big tech companies”?
When a company is deciding whether or not to do something that may expose them to legal liability, part of the process is to include attorneys in those discussions. The attorneys will then provide legal advice about the proposed course of action. If you are an attorney employed at a company like Amazon, it is literally your job to be involved in these discussions. It’s not an abuse of client-attorney privilege for a company to discuss with its own attorneys whether or not the company should do things that may or may not be legal. That is literally what it means to ask for legal advice, and the explicit purpose of client-attorney privilege is to protect these very discussions. Now, the flip side of this is that if the company is actually trying to do something illegal, the attorney has an ethical duty to advise them not to do that. And since there are gray areas and disagreements over the exact interpretation of the law all the time, the attorney’s duty to the client is not to merely find one possible interpretation of the law that allows for whatever they want to do, but rather to consider the full range of possible interpretations that might be enforced or even seriously considered by a court. So there is such a thing as an unscrupulous attorney abusing attorney-client privilege to take part in a criminal conspiracy. But the line for this isn’t drawn at, “the company wants to do something ‘shady’ and asks legal if it’s okay”; it’s drawn at “the lawyer knows that it isn’t okay but has ideas about how to get away with it anyway”.
And just on another note, allegations made by the DOJ aren’t always true. The DOJ gets things wrong sometimes; just consider the case of Aaron Swartz for one. Unlike the situation of asking for legal advice before you do something, once you’re in the middle of litigation over something that’s already happened, lawyers can and do just come up with whatever legal theory fits their purposes. And the prosecutors at the DOJ are exceedingly creative in this respect. In the Google case, they seem to be making a fairly transparent gambit during the discovery process to try and get access to privileged emails they otherwise wouldn’t get access to. It never hurts to try something like that, but it also doesn’t mean anything until a court actually rules in their favor.