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Honest question: What does it mean to "raid" the offices of a tech company? It's not like they have file cabinets with paper records. Are they just seizing empl
by stickfigure 9mo ago
Honest question: What does it mean to "raid" the offices of a tech company? It's not like they have file cabinets with paper records. Are they just seizing employee workstations?
Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. Not much interesting in an office these days.
- beart 9mo agoOffline syncing of outlook could reveal a lot of emails that would otherwise be on a foreign server. A lot of people save copies of documents locally as well.
- cm2187 9mo agoMost enterprises have fully encrypted workstations, when they don't use VM where the desktop is just a thin client that doesn't store any data. So there should be really nothing of interest in the office itself.
- direwolf20 9mo agoFrench has a password disclosure law.
- cm2187 9mo agoEven if you seize the workstation and obtain the password, the files are unlikely to be stored locally.
- bsimpson 9mo agoI had the same thought - not just about raids, but about raiding a satellite office. This sounds like theater begging for headlines like this one.
- direwolf20 9mo agoThey do what they can. They obviously can't raid the American office.
- paxys 9mo agoWhether you are a tech company or not, there's a lot of data on computers that are physically in the office.
- ramuel 9mo agoExcept when they have encryption, which should be the standard? I mean how much data would authorities actually retrieve when most stuff is located on X servers anyways? I have my doubts.
- BrandoElFollito 9mo agoThe authorities will request the keys for local servers and will get them. As for remote ones (outside of France jurisdiction) it depends where they are and how much X wants to make their life difficult.
- ramuel 9mo agoMusk and X don't seem to be the type to care about any laws or any compelling legal requests, especially from a foreign government. I doubt the French will get anything other than this headline.
- Retric 9mo agoGetting kicked out of the EU is extremely unattractive for Twitter. But the US also has extradition treaties so that’s hardly the end of how far they can escalate.
- ronsor 9mo agoThese days many tech company offices have a "panic button" for raids that will erase data. Uber is perhaps the most notorious example.
- politelemon 9mo agoIt's sad to see this degree of incentives perverted, over adhering to local laws.
- caminante 9mo ago>notorious What happened to due process? Every major firm should have a "dawn raid" policy to comply while preserving rights. Specific to the Uber case(s), if it were illegal, then why didn't Uber get criminal charges or fines? At best there's an argument that it was "obstructing justice," but logging people off, encrypting, and deleting local copies isn't necessarily illegal.
- intrasight 9mo agoIt is aggressive compliance. The legality would be determined by the courts as usual.
- caminante 9mo ago> aggressive compliance Put this up there with nonsensical phrases like "violent agreement." ;-)
- fragmede 9mo agoviolent agreement is when you're debating something with someone, and you end up yelling at each other because you think you disagree on something, but then you realize that you (violently, as in "are yelling at each other") agree on whatever it is. Agressive compliance is when the corporate drone over-zealously follows stupid/pointless rules when they could just look the other way, to the point of it being aggressively compliant (with stupid corporate mumbo jumbo).
- alex1138 9mo agoWhy is this the most upvoted question? Obsessing over pedantry rather than the main thrust of what's being discussed
- KaiserPro 9mo agoGather evidence. I assume that they have opened a formal investigation and are now going to the office to collect/perloin evidence before it's destroyed. Most FAANG companies have training specifically for this. I assume X doesn't anymore, because they are cool and edgy, and staff training is for the woke.
- niemandhier 9mo agoIf that training involves destroying evidence or withholding evidence from the prosecution, you are going to jail if you follow it.
- hn_go_brrrrr 9mo agoWhat a strange assumption. The training is "summon the lawyers immediately", "ensure they're accompanied at all times while on company premises", etc.
- niemandhier 9mo agoThat can start with self deleting messages if you are under court order, and has happens before: “Google intended to subvert the discovery process, and that Chat evidence was ‘lost with the intent to prevent its use in litigation’ and ‘with the intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation.’” https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.373179/gov.uscourts.cand.373179.469.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.37... VW is another case where similar things happens: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-12/vw-officials-destroyed-files-e-mails-as-diesel-scheme-unraveled https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-12/vw-offici... The thing is: Companies don’t got to jail, employees do.
- niemandhier 9mo agoGather evidence against employees, use that evidence to put them under pressure to testify against their employer or grant access to evidence. Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care. That was legal. Guess what, similar things would be legal in France. We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power. Western liberal democracies just rarely use it. The same way the president of the USA can order a Drone strike on a Taliban war lord, the president of France could order Musks plane to be escorted to Paris by 3 Fighter jets.
- mmooss 9mo ago> Western liberal democracies just rarely use it. Also, they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process. > Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care. Though things like that can happen, which are very serious.
- VBprogrammer 9mo ago> defendents have rights and due process. As they say: you can beat the rap but not the ride. If a state wants to make your life incredibly difficult for months or even years they can, the competent ones can even do it while staying (mostly) on the right side of the law.
- colechristensen 9mo agoWe are not entirely sure the rule of law in America isn't already over. People are putting a lot of weight on the midterm elections which are more or less the last line of defense besides a so far tepid response by the courts and even then consequence free defiance of court orders is now rampant. We're really near the point of no return and a lot of people don't seem to notice.
- 5upplied_demand 9mo ago> We're really near the point of no return and a lot of people don't seem to notice. A lot of people are cheering it (some on this very site).
- Aurornis 9mo ago> Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. This would be done in parallel for key sources. There is a lot of information on physical devices that is helpful, though. Even discovering additional apps and services used on the devices can lead to more discovery via those cloud services, if relevant. Physical devices have a lot of additional information, though: Files people are actively working on, saved snippets and screenshots of important conversations, and synced data that might be easier to get offline than through legal means against the providers. In outright criminal cases it's not uncommon for individuals to keep extra information on their laptop, phone, or a USB drive hidden in their office as an insurance policy. This is yet another good reason to keep your work and personal devices separate, as hard as that can be at times. If there's a lawsuit you don't want your personal laptop and phone to disappear for a while.
- charcircuit 9mo agoSure it might be on the device, but they would need a password to decrypt the laptop's storage to get any of the data. There's also the possibility of the MDM software making it impossible to decrypt if given a remote signal. Even if you image the drive, you can't image the secure enclave so if it is wiped it's impossible to retrieve.
- Aurornis 9mo ago> Sure it might be on the device, but they would need a password to decrypt the laptop's storage to get any of the data. In these situations, refusing to provide those keys or passwords is an offense. The employees who just want to do their job and collect a paycheck aren’t going to prison to protect their employer by refusing to give the password to their laptop. The teams that do this know how to isolate devices to avoid remote kill switches. If someone did throw a remote kill switch, that’s destruction of evidence and a serious crime by itself. Again, the IT guy isn’t going to risk prison to wipe company secrets.
- aucisson_masque 9mo ago> Are they just seizing employee workstations? Yes.
- nebula8804 9mo agoI read somewhere that Musk (or maybe Theil) companies have processes in place to quickly offload data from a location to other jurisdictions (and destroy the local data) when they detect a raid happening. Don't know how true it is though. The only insight I have into their operations was the amazing speed by which people are badged in and out of his various gigafactories. It "appears" that they developed custom badging systems when people drive into gigafactories to cut the time needed to begin work. If they are doing that kind of stuff then there has got to be something in place for a raid. (This is second hand so take with a grain of salt) EDIT: It seems from other comments that it may have been Uber I was reading about. The badging system I have personally observed outside the Gigafactories. Apologies for the mixup.
- malfist 9mo agoThat is very much illegal in the US
- int_19h 9mo agoIt wouldn't be the first time a Musk company knowingly does something illegal. I think as far as Musk is concerned, laws only apply in the "don't get caught" sense.
- rvnx 9mo agogive any country a gift / investment of 100B USD -> crimes ? what crimes ?
- scottyah 9mo agoEveryone defines their own moral code and trusts that more than the laws of the land. Don't tell me you've never gone over the speed limit, or broken one of the hundreds of crazy laws people break in everyday life out of ignorance.
- reverius42 9mo agoThe speed limit is not a law the same way "don't murder" is a law. And "don't destroy evidence of a crime" is a lot closer to "don't murder", legally speaking.
- jimbo808 9mo agoIt sounds better in the news when you do a raid. These things are generally not done for any purpose other than to communicate a message and score political points.
- eli 9mo agoWhy don't you think they have file cabinets and paper records?
- ChuckMcM 9mo agoSadly the media calls the lawful use of a warrant a 'raid' but that's another issue. The warrant will have detailed what it is they are looking for, French warrants (and legal system!) are quite a bit different than the US but in broad terms operate similarly. It suggests that an enforcement agency believes that there is evidence of a crime at the offices. As a former IT/operations guy I'd guess they want on-prem servers with things like email and shared storage, stuff that would hold internal discussions about the thing they were interested in, but that is just my guess based on the article saying this is related to the earlier complaint that Grok was generating CSAM on demand.
- chrisjj 9mo ago> I'd guess they want on-prem servers with things like email and shared storage For a net company in 2026? Fat chance.
- ChuckMcM 9mo agoAgreed its a stretch, my experience comes from Google when I worked there and they set up a Chinese office and they were very carefully trying to avoid anything on premises that could searched/exploited. It was a huge effort, one that wasn't done for the European and UK offices where the government was not an APT. So did X have the level of hygiene in France? Were there IT guys in the same vein as the folks that Elon recruited into DOGE? Was everyone in the office "loyal"?[1] I doubt X was paranoid "enough" in France not to have some leakage. [1] This was also something Google did which was change access rights for people in the China office that were not 'vetted' (for some definition of vetted) feeling like they could be an exfiltration risk. Imagine a DGSE agent under cover as an X employee who carefully puts a bunch of stuff on a server in the office (doesn't trigger IT controls) and then lets the prosecutors know its ready and they serve the warrant.
- direwolf20 9mo agoPart of the prosecution will be to determine who put the content on the server.
- 9mo ago
- anigbrowl 9mo agoThey do have some physical records, but it would be mostly investigators producing a warrant and forcing staff to hand over administrative credentials to allow forensic data collection.
- chrisjj 9mo ago> forcing staff to hand over administrative credentials to allow forensic data collection. What, thinking HQ wouldn't cancel them?
- direwolf20 9mo agoUsually they steal all electronic devices.