5 ms·

To be fair, I doubt the police just "popped the SD card out of dashcam"... more likely Uber had managers (and lawyers) at the scene within a short time window a

by drcode 8y ago

To be fair, I doubt the police just "popped the SD card out of dashcam"... more likely Uber had managers (and lawyers) at the scene within a short time window and Uber had time for very careful deliberations before handing anything to the NTSB (though as you say it's still more likely the got they raw dashcam footage instead of an altered video) Here is the more likely order of events: 1. Driver calls supervisor 2. Supervisor redirects call to senior Uber lawyer 3. Uber lawyer says "Don't do anything until we get to the scene. Be polite to police but tell them to wait until our legal team arrives" 4. Legal team at scene, talks with uber CEO (and senior lawyers over phone) then after an hour or so tells NTSB they will hand over footage after engineer arrives and extracts the dashcam footage 5. Engineer hands dashcam footage to lawyers, who then hand it to NTSB

lhorie 8y ago
That still sounds pretty farfetched IMHO. You're basically saying that both the supervisor and a senior lawyer were on call at 10:30pm on some random day _and_ were immediately available upon request _and_ knew exactly what to do and who to call next _and_ the police were just twiddling their thumbs the whole time, despite there being a dead body on the scene. And lawyers/engineers can teleport from SF to Tempe somehow since there's no way they would've been able to fly in with that short notice so late at night. If anything, I'd imagine that the police would be blocking access to the accident area and the car, especially to an alleged Uber employee trying to muck around with evidence without a government-sanctioned body overseeing forensics. If I were to make a guess, I'd imagine it would've gone like this: - "omg, I just hit someone" - driver sees victim on the ground, panics and calls 911 - police and paramedics arrive - police interviews driver, gets the account of the story, checks paperwork, get driver's information - driver tries calling supervisor to escalate the issue (potentially unsuccessfully) - paramedics declare victim dead, driver gets upset, body eventually is taken away while police tries to calm the driver - tow truck arrives, takes car into police custody - next morning, local police investigators look at the car in the impound, find the dashcam and look at the video. Uber ATG wakes up to the bad news and scrambles to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. The engineering team is still nowhere near Arizona and probably too busy wading through TBs of sensor/AI data to even remember there was a cheap dashcam installed in the car. - Police releases a statement (w/ the dashcam video) - NTSB gets involved in the investigation and gets in contact with Uber to understand how to acquire forensic data out of the SDV's databases.
- drcode 8y ago
  So our differences in interpretation are exactly what distinguishes a "fantastic lawyer" from a "mediocre lawyer"- I agree if Uber has mediocre lawyers your scenario is more likely. A "fantastic lawyer" will have someone competent at ground zero dealing with the police on behalf of the company and handling the temp worker driving the car (otherwise the only representative of the Uber corporation and likely to incriminate the company) in 45 minutes.
  - lhorie 8y ago
    > A "fantastic lawyer" will have someone competent at ground zero in 45 minutes Gonna be honest, that sounds like something straight out of a hollywood movie. In reality, when suddenly presented with a unexpected event, real people simply aren't physically able to coordinate narrative-altering eloquence training so perfectly on a 30 minute notice close to midnight on some random day. That's kinda like saying that if a macdonalds night-shift employee witnessed a customer choking to death on a lye-contaminated drink, a super star legal team would be on the scene in 45 minutes to instruct the employee on how to avoid incriminating the company when talking to the police. That simply isn't how the world works.
    - drcode 8y ago
      If they are doing a self driving car pilot, it would be stupid not to have some junior legal staff in the same or nearby county. The senior lawyer just calls the junior staff (who are always potentially on the clock when it comes to that type of work) and says "get your ass down there!" That doesn't seem like a Hollywood movie to me, that just seems like the way competent people operate.
      - lhorie 8y ago
        Again, the whole notion seems completely misinformed. It would be ridiculously wasteful to have junior lawyers sit around in a completely different office from HQ just in case something happened. And if you ever do on-call, you need a rotation system. In my team, on-call rotates among 9 people, none of which is required to get their ass anywhere in the wee hours of the night even if the world is ending. Requiring such commitment on top of a regular workload is completely unrealistic, and the notion that it actually got carried out as efficiently as could be is borderline wishful thinking. The alternative is shiftwork, which is fundamentally incompatible with the nature of the legal industry, and thus doesn't actually happen. What's more, talking with the police is not a skill that is cultivated by corporate lawyers at all, or any lawyer for that matter, especially if we're talking about a 911 call. Perhaps another obvious indication that uber would be unable to deploy SWAT-style legal teams is the number of outages they experience and their durations, despite having literally hundreds of highly paid engineers on call who are able to rollback bad deploys from their phones.

by drcode 8y ago

lhorie 8y ago

That still sounds pretty farfetched IMHO. You're basically saying that both the supervisor and a senior lawyer were on call at 10:30pm on some random day _and_ were immediately available upon request _and_ knew exactly what to do and who to call next _and_ the police were just twiddling their thumbs the whole time, despite there being a dead body on the scene. And lawyers/engineers can teleport from SF to Tempe somehow since there's no way they would've been able to fly in with that short notice so late at night. If anything, I'd imagine that the police would be blocking access to the accident area and the car, especially to an alleged Uber employee trying to muck around with evidence without a government-sanctioned body overseeing forensics. If I were to make a guess, I'd imagine it would've gone like this: - "omg, I just hit someone" - driver sees victim on the ground, panics and calls 911 - police and paramedics arrive - police interviews driver, gets the account of the story, checks paperwork, get driver's information - driver tries calling supervisor to escalate the issue (potentially unsuccessfully) - paramedics declare victim dead, driver gets upset, body eventually is taken away while police tries to calm the driver - tow truck arrives, takes car into police custody - next morning, local police investigators look at the car in the impound, find the dashcam and look at the video. Uber ATG wakes up to the bad news and scrambles to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. The engineering team is still nowhere near Arizona and probably too busy wading through TBs of sensor/AI data to even remember there was a cheap dashcam installed in the car. - Police releases a statement (w/ the dashcam video) - NTSB gets involved in the investigation and gets in contact with Uber to understand how to acquire forensic data out of the SDV's databases.

drcode 8y ago
So our differences in interpretation are exactly what distinguishes a "fantastic lawyer" from a "mediocre lawyer"- I agree if Uber has mediocre lawyers your scenario is more likely. A "fantastic lawyer" will have someone competent at ground zero dealing with the police on behalf of the company and handling the temp worker driving the car (otherwise the only representative of the Uber corporation and likely to incriminate the company) in 45 minutes.
- lhorie 8y ago
  > A "fantastic lawyer" will have someone competent at ground zero in 45 minutes Gonna be honest, that sounds like something straight out of a hollywood movie. In reality, when suddenly presented with a unexpected event, real people simply aren't physically able to coordinate narrative-altering eloquence training so perfectly on a 30 minute notice close to midnight on some random day. That's kinda like saying that if a macdonalds night-shift employee witnessed a customer choking to death on a lye-contaminated drink, a super star legal team would be on the scene in 45 minutes to instruct the employee on how to avoid incriminating the company when talking to the police. That simply isn't how the world works.
  - drcode 8y ago
    If they are doing a self driving car pilot, it would be stupid not to have some junior legal staff in the same or nearby county. The senior lawyer just calls the junior staff (who are always potentially on the clock when it comes to that type of work) and says "get your ass down there!" That doesn't seem like a Hollywood movie to me, that just seems like the way competent people operate.
    - lhorie 8y ago
      Again, the whole notion seems completely misinformed. It would be ridiculously wasteful to have junior lawyers sit around in a completely different office from HQ just in case something happened. And if you ever do on-call, you need a rotation system. In my team, on-call rotates among 9 people, none of which is required to get their ass anywhere in the wee hours of the night even if the world is ending. Requiring such commitment on top of a regular workload is completely unrealistic, and the notion that it actually got carried out as efficiently as could be is borderline wishful thinking. The alternative is shiftwork, which is fundamentally incompatible with the nature of the legal industry, and thus doesn't actually happen. What's more, talking with the police is not a skill that is cultivated by corporate lawyers at all, or any lawyer for that matter, especially if we're talking about a 911 call. Perhaps another obvious indication that uber would be unable to deploy SWAT-style legal teams is the number of outages they experience and their durations, despite having literally hundreds of highly paid engineers on call who are able to rollback bad deploys from their phones.