Re:Uber’s Secret Tool for Keeping the Cops in the Dark
by BearGoesChirp on Thursday January 11, 2018 @11:40AM
(#16125270)
>You can’t keep them around and feed them fake intel on drug deals so they waste their time.
Any relevant case law on this? Lying to the police isn't allowed, but lying to some new guy at the bar is legal, regardless of your suspicions of who the new guy is.
Re:Uber’s Secret Tool for Keeping the Cops in the Dark
by SilasX on Thursday January 11, 2018 @01:36PM
(#16126451)
I don't, just basing it on the comments in the previous megathreads [1]. But any kind of prohibition on "lying to the police" is going to be bound up with the issue of the defendant's state of mind. They're guilty if they believed e.g. a particular man was a cop and were deceiving him on that basis. And it looks like that applies here and was what Uber was doing.
Believing that you're merely lying to "the new guy" or "an abusive user" isn't enough, as you note, so that part of the program (send spurious data to likely bots) wasn't illegal.
Re:Uber’s Secret Tool for Keeping the Cops in the Dark
by freeone3000 on Thursday January 11, 2018 @11:26AM
(#16125140)
Why can't you keep them around and feed them fake intel on drug deals so they waste their time?
If they had simply kicked off users who were likely cops, that would have been legal. That’s what (some) biker bars do.
But they went beyond that and actively misled such users in a way that wasted their time. That amounts to lying to investigators and is illegal.
You can kick people out of your bar for giving off a cop vibe. You can’t keep them around and feed them fake intel on drug deals so they waste their time.
You can pull your shade down to keep people from looking in your window. You can’t make shadow puppets of a homicide with the intent to get the cop outside to investigate a spurious lead.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14270214