Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Employee's Letter

Re:Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Em... by Apocryphon on Friday December 15, 2017 @08:59PM (#15936940)

This is what the behavior of a wannabe megacorp looks like:

> Uber “used undercover agents to collect intelligence against the taxi groups and local political figures. The agents took rides in local taxis, loitered around locations where taxi drivers congregated, and leveraged a local network of contacts with connections to police and regulatory authorities.”

> the things Uber was doing overseas “needlessly exposed Uber and its employees to severe risk — including the likely termination of Uber's operations and possible imprisonment of its employees — should capable security services in many overseas locations discover Uber's espionage.”

> Uber hired at least one CIA-trained contractor to collect "mobile-phone metadata either directly through signal-intercept equipment, hacked mobile devices, or through the mobile network itself.

Or, perhaps, a nation-state.

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Re:Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Em... by JumpCrisscross on Friday December 15, 2017 @09:02PM (#15936955)

Taking rides in taxis and loitering where they congregate isn’t necessarily illegal. Bribing foreign officials and illegally tapping peoples’ phones is. There is a bright line between hustling and plainly violating the law.

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Re:Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Em... by subway on Saturday December 16, 2017 @02:29AM (#15938333)

Sadly that bright line is pretty dim in some companies. As soon as there is one "hard-to-fix" transgression, the organization finds a way to internally justify it. The first transgression makes additional transgressions feel easier.

This is often sold to staff under the guise of "but everyone does it" and "there's no way to be 100% compliant/legal".

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Re:Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Em... by solatic on Friday December 15, 2017 @09:17PM (#15937016)

IANAL but definitions of espionage are typically broader than that - if the information isn't published with the intention for it to become public knowledge, or at least somehow knowingly divulged (e.g. EULA/contractual), then it's private, and collecting (i.e. recording) the data which is private to a company or society is espionage.

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Re:Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Em... by skybrian on Friday December 15, 2017 @10:28PM (#15937275)

Well sure, the word "espionage" can be certainly be used to make things that aren't illegal or immoral sound bad.

Employees and other people sign contracts to keep company information private, but nobody else (including journalists, competitors, investors, or just anyone curious about them) is required to help them. We can share what we know and gossip about it.

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Re:Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Em... by vageli on Friday December 15, 2017 @10:56PM (#15937482)

How can someone derive publisher's intent from the content alone? If data is left on a publicly accessible URL, how do I know it's because a dev forgot to enable s3 bucket encryption?

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Re:Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Em... by tyingq on Saturday December 16, 2017 @06:26AM (#15939028)

There's some in-between behavior as well. Like where Uber finds a way to programmatically identify drivers that are also working for Lyft via API calls.

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Re:Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Em... by shas3 on Saturday December 16, 2017 @09:03AM (#15939564)

Just wannabe mega-Corp. Believe it or not, most mega-Corps are pretty ethical by Uber standards.

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Re:Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Em... by B1FF_PSUVM on Saturday December 16, 2017 @01:47PM (#15941071)

> pretty ethical by Uber standards

Well ... guess that's why the phrase "damning with faint praise" exists ...

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Re:Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Em... by toomuchtodo on Friday December 15, 2017 @09:08PM (#15936982)

Oh my, the FCC does not look kindly on private companies using Stingray cellular intercept devices that masquerade as legitimate towers.

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Re:Uber Accused of Espionage, Bribery, Hacking, in Former Em... by jsmthrowaway on Friday December 15, 2017 @09:56PM (#15937151)

Nor does law enforcement, for that matter. Operating a Stingray-like device to capture cellular user information is very, very illegal in the United States without proper authority to do so. Even capturing open Wi-Fi that you do not control is legally perilous and has divided courts on its legality, which seems counterintuitive on its face given the simple physics of radio, but is a fact.

It’s stupidly simple to run afoul of the CFAA and federal wiretapping laws, not to mention the expectation of privacy standard in California.

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