Many people equate standards in criminal law to "beyond any doubt", when the reality is "beyond reasonable doubt".
When you write a program like this, and you can be shown to have executed it at a police raid, _followed by_ a call to your company's general counsel (or in this case to a "special team", "specially trained" to run a program called "Ripley", with the purpose of "nuking a site from orbit") to advise them, the claim that "this is common practice" goes out the window and "we're specifically obstructing a warrant until counsel/whatever other process happens takes place" becomes entirely "reasonable" as a depiction of what you are doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Magnitsky#Exposing_the_...
TL/DR: police had given the materials taken during the police raids to organized criminals, who used them to fraudulently reclaim $230m of the taxes previously paid by the company.
Actively building a specific system to counter a warrant is probably going to go a long way to prove its obstruction. Uber's less than lawful reputation won't help here.
Some guy in Canada pages a number - as the company training teaches - hen cops show up. That's plausibly not an attempt to fail to comply with a court order. Pretty sure telling your boss your office is being raided isn't an easy thing to prove contempt for, especially if it's company policy in subpoena-able training manuals.
Then some anonymous team initiates a nuke-it-from-orbit sitewide computer lockdown remotely from the US. Where they're quite likely fairly well shielded from Canadian contempt-of-court rulings.
Sneaky.
>> When the call came in, staffers quickly remotely logged off every computer in the Montreal office, making it practically impossible for the authorities to retrieve the company records they’d obtained a warrant to collect. The investigators left without any evidence.
Just because some people in uniforms show up at your door and demand access, doesn't mean that's the entire process. Even if they have a nice piece of paper from a court, it's just the start of the process.
What if its just a ruse and they aren't really cops? What if they are cops, but the government is corrupt? What if the warrant was obtained in a faulty manner?
This sort of measure allows the company to engage with the process in a less disadvantaged way.
This is the whole point of why police conduct raids:
...to use the element of surprise to arrest targets that they believe may hide contraband or other evidence, resist arrest, be politically sensitive, or simply be elsewhere during the day.
If he refuses to comply or try to alter the evidence while complying, sure, they are guilty and I'm pretty sure there's a legal process for this situation, but at this point right now if they seized the data, they can no longer alter it.
Making a mistake in this regard gets you a obstruction of justice charge. Call a lawyers, but don't expect a judge not to take this badly when they have issued a warrant.
> What if they are cops, but the government is corrupt? What if the warrant was obtained in a faulty manner?
That's for the lawyers to deal with in court. Once again, obstruction of justice on a legally issued warrant is going to be bad news for you.
I keep my head above water so I really don't really care if the police can access the data. I do have a problem with the raid giving them access to data well beyond the scope of their warrant and relying on the courts to pare it down after the fact.
However, the problem is that this represents a nuclear escalation that I'm not sure tech companies really want to have.
These warrants will probably now move directly to "comply or shut down."
I suspect that the next time this occurs, the police will decide that intimidation is the better part of valor, seize EVERYTHING, arrest EVERYBODY, and tell Uber to come sort it out.
They may not be able to get Uber, but I suspect that they will grind enough employees through the police and legal system with enough force that everybody will think twice about calling a shutdown number ever again.
Since when was Canada considered a lousy jurisdiction? Last I checked, most of the jurisdictions they operate in are no worse than the US. Unless you’re saying that all first world countries are lousy jurisdictions, I think you are being rather hyperbolic.
I can easily see this tool having been built for operating in those kinds of countries.
What's upsetting people is that this got used in a country which is nominally not corrupt in order to hide from "proper" law enforcement.
If this was being used to hide from a raid in Russia, people would be cheering instead.
Personally, I wouldn’t be cheering. I’m of the mind that if you’re going to do business in a country, you can’t choose to ignore the local laws and expect zero repercussions.
That said, do I care that Uber built this system, nope! But I would laugh if it backfired on them and got them into more legal trouble.
* there are too many entities that may think they can get this information
* you are to ignore them all, execute a physical intrusion protocol (lock every and make everything inaccessible ) and notify your contact at USAO.
* our legal signed off on it.
We have executed intrusion protocol four times during my time there. In one case it involved a dick waving contest between state police and state court and USAO, USMS and federal court.
The bottom line, learned in trenches, is that if you are a reasonably big fish, you classify all search warrants as intrusions and deal with them as you deal with other physical intrusions. Documents/data will be turned over in an orderly fashion by your legal.
You are a person entitled to rights. A company is not a person. Border searches are warrantless, arbitrary, and lack any oversight whatsoever. The company was searched by a court order signed by a judge for suspicion of a specific crime. In every way possible, these situations are entirely different.
To me this just falls under the category of unauthorized access. If my threat model included people physically present using force to access my sysadmins' computers I would be implementing the same security with a company-wide lock-down triggered by a panic button on every machine.