7 ms·

That's pretty interesting. It must be extremely risky for local employees to alert the main offices to lock down. I'd imagine obstruction of justice isn't a cri

That's pretty interesting. It must be extremely risky for local employees to alert the main offices to lock down. I'd imagine obstruction of justice isn't a crime your average employee would risk.

umanwizard 9y ago
Why would this count as obstruction of justice?
- ForHackernews 9y ago
  Deliberately hiding or destroying evidence to prevent it being found by police executing a proper search warrant is certainly obstruction of justice. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519
  - justinjlynn 9y ago
    at the very least conspiracy to obstruct
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      If the police have a warrant for the data on that machine, then remotely locking it down will not matter. All this protects Uber from is fishing expeditions where the police hope to come across an "unlocked door" so they can sift through everything hoping to find something. I get that we don't like Uber, but I support this type of action and think it should be standard operating procedure for every organization.,
      - justinjlynn 9y ago
        This has nothing to do with liking or disliking uber. If the police are executing illegal searches then Uber has every right to sue and recover damages. They, unlike your average natural person, have the coffers to pay for it such that they acquire the "don't fuck with us illegally or we'll financially ruin your department" reputation. What I am worried about is the employee that gets directed to lock things down and then, as a result, is possibly personally targeted by police and prosecutor both for it.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    If police have a proper search warrant then locking the computer will not matter, because the police will have a warrant to compel the company to turn over the specific evidence in question.
    - Joky 9y ago
      Pushing this way of thinking about it, you could also say that a raid from the police is useless in general since a judge can simply send a request compelling the company to turn over the evidence in the first place.
      - Consultant32452 9y ago
        Yes, a raid, in this case, is almost certainly an abuse of force and an attempt to create social/emotional problems for Uber.
      - jimktrains2 9y ago
        And shouldn't that be the case? Shouldn't a raid be a last resort when the evidence being sought is at high risk of disappearing?
        Consultant32452 9y ago
        There is no suggestion at this point that data is disappearing. HN is so weird sometimes. When Google, or Facebook, or whoever grants the authorities free access to our private data without a warrant everyone freaks out. Uber protects our private data and suddenly it's evil. I get that we don't like Uber, but principles still matter and I'm glad they are protecting their own data as well as any customer data from a fishing expedition by the authorities. Now if Uber destroys or refuses to provide data covered under a properly scoped warrant, then I will gladly pick up the pitch fork with you.
      - ethbro 9y ago
        A judge "can simply simply a request compelling the company to turn over evidence" in what jurisdiction? My understanding of the majority of warrants are that they have a nebulous grasp on transnational corporations. For example: if I (the police) have a French warrant and serve it on the Paris offices of Uber, but Uber has a pager service that performs whole disk encryption and sends the keys to a server in Panama, where does that leave me? The French government isn't going to raise a diplomatic ruckus over a taxi company operating illegally in Paris. And I'd strongly suspect a judge wouldn't be inclined to allow me to forceably repatriate the data (which data?) without further evidence (exactly why I was serving the warrant!). So essentially, I don't see it as being technologically hard to construct a system where I am enabled to operate illegally in a country, as a matter of corporately-sanctioned policy, while skirting around local technical ability and federal legal will to call me to account.
  - Bud 9y ago
    >If police have a proper search warrant then locking the computer will not matter, because the police will have a warrant to compel the company to turn over the specific evidence in question. Wrong. Compelling them to do so does not mean that compulsion will be successful. Encryption exists.
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      In the US at least you can be held in contempt and jailed indefinitely for not providing the decryption keys. Presumably other countries have mechanisms to deal with this beyond, "Oh gee, you password protected it, guess you get to go free forever."
      - Zak 9y ago
        If I was designing a remote lockdown procedure to secure systems against a state, I would not design it such that local employees could unlock it without remote authorization, preferably from someone physically located in another legal jurisdiction.
        Consultant32452 9y ago
        Congratulations, you just won an injunction from the court which requires you cease all business functions in the country until the data is provided.
        Zak 9y ago
        And now that my lawyers and sysadmins have had the chance to review it, possibly challenge it and come up with a means to provide the data required without giving government agents unfettered access to my systems, I will comply.
        Consultant32452 9y ago
        When you first replied I incorrectly assumed you were talking about refusing to ever comply with the warrant. But what you just described is exactly how it should go down.
  - dhoulb 9y ago
    I’d imagine the employees aren’t told why they’re paging the number, just that they should. The page might also trigger other processes such as alerting council, that they have the right to do. So possibly not as risky?
    - Bud 9y ago
      That excuse, thin as it is, could perhaps have sufficed for the first occurrence of such an act. But now it's been publicized. And it's a bit hard to pretend that, during a police raid, you're secretly and cryptically notifying the higher-ups, for some mysterious reason that you are completely ignorant of. It's just not credible that an intelligent tech worker who works for Uber and knows how to read English would not figure this out.
      - qbrass 9y ago
        But it's not in English and French.
  - paulcole 9y ago
    > Deliberately hiding or destroying evidence 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.
    - Bud 9y ago
      No. Not logical and harmless. Yes, you might very well text the execs to find out what is going on, in plain English, like, "what the fuck is going on"? What you would not do is to send a cryptic, pre-arranged signal, which is what happened here.
      - paulcole 9y ago
        > What you would not do is to send a cryptic, pre-arranged signal Where are you getting this from the article? How do you know it is "cryptic"? Of course it is pre-arranged. Uber is known to run into problems with the government (which includes law enforcement). I'm not surprised there's a protocol for what a manager should do in this situation. If I was hired to work there my first question would be WTF do I do if the police show up? I hate Uber as much as the next fickle HN commenter, but the idea of sending a text/paging a number doesn't feel that odd.
        dane-pgp 9y ago
        Moreover, we should remember that Uber operate in countries whose police likely have a worse reputation than Canada's, so if the policy of "Page this number if the police (or people claiming to be the police) turn up" is applied uniformly across jurisdictions, that may be perfectly reasonable and a lot safer than Uber trying to make politicised judgements of which offices should be left to deal with the legal and security situation by themselves.
WalterSear 9y ago
Alerting the central offices isn't a crime, and whoever is in the central offices can vanish behind a wall of bureaucratic malicious compliance.
- Bud 9y ago
  It most certainly is a crime if it's done with foreknowledge of what the central office will then do, which is clear-cut obstruction of justice. And from all reports, employees were specifically trained to do this, and they knew why. Open and shut case.
  - FanaHOVA 9y ago
    Are you a lawyer?
  - cheez 9y ago
    The only open and shut cases are when the accused is a minority with a public defender.
    - detuur 9y ago
      Oh sorry did our conversation about tech companies interrupt awareness about institutional racism?
- mhandley 9y ago
  Not to mention that the central office is in the US, and this seems to be used to lock/wipe computers in other countries, so much harder to prosecute them. However, if the person alerting the central office can be shown to have known the expected effect of their alert, then likely they'd still be guilty of obstruction of justice.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  There are all sorts of acts that are not obstruction of justice, except when they obstruct justice.
oconnor663 9y ago
Two thoughts in the other direction: The internal alert might not have been "law enforcement has arrived with a warrant for our computers." It might have been more like "a bunch of armed men just demanded to be let into the building, I don't know who they are yet, shut everything down now and ask questions later." Employees might have a legal obligation to protect some of the data that's accessible from their office computers. Maybe credit card and banking information, or health information for drivers?
- viraptor 9y ago
  > a bunch of armed men just demanded to be let into the building, I don't know who they are yet, shut everything down now and ask questions later Yeah... Not buying it. Random armed men appear in the building and some employee is more worried about the company data, rather than calling police to alert/verify?
- learc83 9y ago
  >It might have been more like "a bunch of armed men just demanded to be let into the building, I don't know who they are yet, shut everything down now and ask questions later." The first thing the armed men will do is show identification and a warrant. This isn't a no-knock raid by a swat team in the middle of the night. Judges tend not to take those kind of coy answers very well.
  - dwild 9y ago
    > The first thing the armed men will do is show identification and a warrant. 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.
namlem 9y ago
How would they prove who did it? It could be done with an encrypted message.

That's pretty interesting. It must be extremely risky for local employees to alert the main offices to lock down. I'd imagine obstruction of justice isn't a crime your average employee would risk.

umanwizard 9y ago

Why would this count as obstruction of justice?

ForHackernews 9y ago
Deliberately hiding or destroying evidence to prevent it being found by police executing a proper search warrant is certainly obstruction of justice. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1519
- justinjlynn 9y ago
  at the very least conspiracy to obstruct
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    If the police have a warrant for the data on that machine, then remotely locking it down will not matter. All this protects Uber from is fishing expeditions where the police hope to come across an "unlocked door" so they can sift through everything hoping to find something. I get that we don't like Uber, but I support this type of action and think it should be standard operating procedure for every organization.,
    - justinjlynn 9y ago
      This has nothing to do with liking or disliking uber. If the police are executing illegal searches then Uber has every right to sue and recover damages. They, unlike your average natural person, have the coffers to pay for it such that they acquire the "don't fuck with us illegally or we'll financially ruin your department" reputation. What I am worried about is the employee that gets directed to lock things down and then, as a result, is possibly personally targeted by police and prosecutor both for it.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  If police have a proper search warrant then locking the computer will not matter, because the police will have a warrant to compel the company to turn over the specific evidence in question.
  - Joky 9y ago
    Pushing this way of thinking about it, you could also say that a raid from the police is useless in general since a judge can simply send a request compelling the company to turn over the evidence in the first place.
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      Yes, a raid, in this case, is almost certainly an abuse of force and an attempt to create social/emotional problems for Uber.
    - jimktrains2 9y ago
      And shouldn't that be the case? Shouldn't a raid be a last resort when the evidence being sought is at high risk of disappearing?
      - Consultant32452 9y ago
        There is no suggestion at this point that data is disappearing. HN is so weird sometimes. When Google, or Facebook, or whoever grants the authorities free access to our private data without a warrant everyone freaks out. Uber protects our private data and suddenly it's evil. I get that we don't like Uber, but principles still matter and I'm glad they are protecting their own data as well as any customer data from a fishing expedition by the authorities. Now if Uber destroys or refuses to provide data covered under a properly scoped warrant, then I will gladly pick up the pitch fork with you.
    - ethbro 9y ago
      A judge "can simply simply a request compelling the company to turn over evidence" in what jurisdiction? My understanding of the majority of warrants are that they have a nebulous grasp on transnational corporations. For example: if I (the police) have a French warrant and serve it on the Paris offices of Uber, but Uber has a pager service that performs whole disk encryption and sends the keys to a server in Panama, where does that leave me? The French government isn't going to raise a diplomatic ruckus over a taxi company operating illegally in Paris. And I'd strongly suspect a judge wouldn't be inclined to allow me to forceably repatriate the data (which data?) without further evidence (exactly why I was serving the warrant!). So essentially, I don't see it as being technologically hard to construct a system where I am enabled to operate illegally in a country, as a matter of corporately-sanctioned policy, while skirting around local technical ability and federal legal will to call me to account.
- Bud 9y ago
  >If police have a proper search warrant then locking the computer will not matter, because the police will have a warrant to compel the company to turn over the specific evidence in question. Wrong. Compelling them to do so does not mean that compulsion will be successful. Encryption exists.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    In the US at least you can be held in contempt and jailed indefinitely for not providing the decryption keys. Presumably other countries have mechanisms to deal with this beyond, "Oh gee, you password protected it, guess you get to go free forever."
    - Zak 9y ago
      If I was designing a remote lockdown procedure to secure systems against a state, I would not design it such that local employees could unlock it without remote authorization, preferably from someone physically located in another legal jurisdiction.
      - Consultant32452 9y ago
        Congratulations, you just won an injunction from the court which requires you cease all business functions in the country until the data is provided.
        Zak 9y ago
        And now that my lawyers and sysadmins have had the chance to review it, possibly challenge it and come up with a means to provide the data required without giving government agents unfettered access to my systems, I will comply.
        Consultant32452 9y ago
        When you first replied I incorrectly assumed you were talking about refusing to ever comply with the warrant. But what you just described is exactly how it should go down.
- dhoulb 9y ago
  I’d imagine the employees aren’t told why they’re paging the number, just that they should. The page might also trigger other processes such as alerting council, that they have the right to do. So possibly not as risky?
  - Bud 9y ago
    That excuse, thin as it is, could perhaps have sufficed for the first occurrence of such an act. But now it's been publicized. And it's a bit hard to pretend that, during a police raid, you're secretly and cryptically notifying the higher-ups, for some mysterious reason that you are completely ignorant of. It's just not credible that an intelligent tech worker who works for Uber and knows how to read English would not figure this out.
    - qbrass 9y ago
      But it's not in English and French.
- paulcole 9y ago
  > Deliberately hiding or destroying evidence 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.
  - Bud 9y ago
    No. Not logical and harmless. Yes, you might very well text the execs to find out what is going on, in plain English, like, "what the fuck is going on"? What you would not do is to send a cryptic, pre-arranged signal, which is what happened here.
    - paulcole 9y ago
      > What you would not do is to send a cryptic, pre-arranged signal Where are you getting this from the article? How do you know it is "cryptic"? Of course it is pre-arranged. Uber is known to run into problems with the government (which includes law enforcement). I'm not surprised there's a protocol for what a manager should do in this situation. If I was hired to work there my first question would be WTF do I do if the police show up? I hate Uber as much as the next fickle HN commenter, but the idea of sending a text/paging a number doesn't feel that odd.
      - dane-pgp 9y ago
        Moreover, we should remember that Uber operate in countries whose police likely have a worse reputation than Canada's, so if the policy of "Page this number if the police (or people claiming to be the police) turn up" is applied uniformly across jurisdictions, that may be perfectly reasonable and a lot safer than Uber trying to make politicised judgements of which offices should be left to deal with the legal and security situation by themselves.

WalterSear 9y ago

Alerting the central offices isn't a crime, and whoever is in the central offices can vanish behind a wall of bureaucratic malicious compliance.

Bud 9y ago
It most certainly is a crime if it's done with foreknowledge of what the central office will then do, which is clear-cut obstruction of justice. And from all reports, employees were specifically trained to do this, and they knew why. Open and shut case.
- FanaHOVA 9y ago
  Are you a lawyer?
- cheez 9y ago
  The only open and shut cases are when the accused is a minority with a public defender.
  - detuur 9y ago
    Oh sorry did our conversation about tech companies interrupt awareness about institutional racism?
mhandley 9y ago
Not to mention that the central office is in the US, and this seems to be used to lock/wipe computers in other countries, so much harder to prosecute them. However, if the person alerting the central office can be shown to have known the expected effect of their alert, then likely they'd still be guilty of obstruction of justice.
mannykannot 9y ago
There are all sorts of acts that are not obstruction of justice, except when they obstruct justice.

oconnor663 9y ago

Two thoughts in the other direction: The internal alert might not have been "law enforcement has arrived with a warrant for our computers." It might have been more like "a bunch of armed men just demanded to be let into the building, I don't know who they are yet, shut everything down now and ask questions later." Employees might have a legal obligation to protect some of the data that's accessible from their office computers. Maybe credit card and banking information, or health information for drivers?

viraptor 9y ago
> a bunch of armed men just demanded to be let into the building, I don't know who they are yet, shut everything down now and ask questions later Yeah... Not buying it. Random armed men appear in the building and some employee is more worried about the company data, rather than calling police to alert/verify?
learc83 9y ago
>It might have been more like "a bunch of armed men just demanded to be let into the building, I don't know who they are yet, shut everything down now and ask questions later." The first thing the armed men will do is show identification and a warrant. This isn't a no-knock raid by a swat team in the middle of the night. Judges tend not to take those kind of coy answers very well.
- dwild 9y ago
  > The first thing the armed men will do is show identification and a warrant. 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.

namlem 9y ago

How would they prove who did it? It could be done with an encrypted message.