Crime was already a big deal on the Wild West Internet; but Uber has taken it to new depths. The more the judge in the Waymo/Alphabet case against Uber digs, the bigger maggots he digs up. Given Uber, this is no surprise. But the implications of what passes for "accepted business practices" on the Internet should terrify everyone.

One must begin by realizing that Uber is heavily funded by Wall St. to run at a massive loss ($3B in 2016, projected $5B in 2017 - its 7th year as a "startup"). You can look at the 2016 Hubert Horan series at Naked Capitalism to get the details on how it can never be profitable, except as a monopolistic rent extractor. (Cheap cab ride? You must have missed Uber’s true cost) Given that its business model is a fraud, it is hardly surprising that its business tactics are criminal. Be clear, this "competing Mafia families" business model is what the elites are driving towards with their massive looting and their complete compromising/bribing of governments around the world.

How did we get to this point? In the same way that nuclear weapons had a massive impact on military tactics and strategy, internet weaponry (server farms, big data, and machine learning, DDoS, ransomware, identity theft) is mutating business strategies and tactics into something more akin to those of an Italian Rennaisance city state. Think Machiavelli, condotieri, and spies.

The defensive tactics used by Uber are every bit as paranoid as the precautions taken by Edward Snowden when he had the entire MIC against him. The offensive tactics resemble the kind of skulduggery that the CIA deploys against hapless third world targets - right down to lying to courts and judges.

(Uber) Competitive Intelligence, or COIN...set up...Hell, a program Uber used to track the location of Lyft drivers and offer them deals to switch to Uber. By scraping data from Lyft’s app, Uber was able to collect driver ID numbers and therefore track Lyft drivers’ locations...Marketplace Analytics focused on gathering competitor data online, while (Strategic Services Group) SSG hired contractors to travel overseas and glean information about threat groups and other companies in person—in at least one instance, obtaining a surreptitious recording of a conversation between executives at Grab and Didi Chuxing, according to court testimony from an Uber employee.

The team stored the information it collected about competitors on its more secure server, detached from Uber’s corporate infrastructure and kept hidden from most of the company’s employees, two sources said. Members of the Marketplace Analytics team were issued new computers to access the server and were expected to use them only for competitive intelligence work, so that no data on the devices could be formally traced back to Uber. They also used the encrypted, ephemeral messaging app Wickr to communicate with each other ...the server needed to remain invisible to hackers and competitors. Even if Uber’s own systems were hacked, the company wanted to make sure that this system remained hidden. In addition to being issued non-attributable laptops that couldn’t be traced back to the company, employees also had access to pre-paid phones and Mi-Fi wireless internet devices...

Judge Alsup acknowledged the implications Marketplace Analytics’ work could have on the case. “You stood up so many times and said, Judge, we searched our servers; these documents never hit a Uber server,” he said in a rebuke of Uber’s lawyers. “You never told me that there was a surreptitious, parallel, nonpublic system that relied upon messages that evaporated after six seconds or after six days. You never mentioned any of that stuff. You never mentioned that there were these offline company-sponsored laptops.”

Uber's Massive Scraping Program Collected Data About Competitors Around the World

You read that right. Uber's computer infrastructure is compartmentalized like a black op. They tried to palm off a Big Lie on the judge; but a whistleblower named Jacobs blew their cover.

Jacobs (the whistleblower) started at Uber in March 2016 as a manager of global intelligence. He reported to Mat Henley, Uber’s head of global threat operations, and his work involved reviewing and parsing data from press reports, social media, and crime statistics in an attempt to understand potential threats in the regions where Uber operates,

"Strategic Services", "Competitive Intelligence", "Global Threat Operations" - these names and missions belong in the Pentagon or the FBI (crime statistics), not in some supposedly customer-friendly corporation. Corporations have long been known to run two sets of books, the real one and the one they show the IRS. Now, they have two sets of computer systems.

The government has been browbeaten into a hands-off attitude on internet criminality by techno-libertarians. For example, in the OP I recently posted about Russian Hacking, the FBI had to turn to private corporate resources to track down the Mirai bug. We spend $1 Trillion per year on defence, but the FBI has no internet forensic tools? Only because corporate gangsters like Uber, and their bankrollers on Wall St., don't want them to.

But, now, with plausible deniability laid on as thickly as for a CIA black op, Uber tries to hide its dirty tricks under the guise of standard business practices - despite the fact that they repeatedly get caught behaving criminally.

Example 1: Greyball (crime: interfering with police investigations)

Greyball was basically a way of identifying users who were suspected to be law enforcement or regulators...Uber used geolocation, phone model, credit card information, user behavior (including social media profiles), and other pieces of data to create a shadow app.

When a profile fit the makeup of a law enforcement officer, Uber would send that profile to the shadow app. Here users would see “ghost” cars that couldn’t respond to requests for rides, and that obscured the locations of real cars.

Uber acknowledged the tool’s existence in March and promised to stop using the software.

https://consumerist.com/2017/09/15/uber-also-used-greyball-software-to-e...

Example 2: Sanitizing "blown" operations. (crime: destruction of evidence)

“As part of Uber’s incident response team, I would be called when governmental agencies raided Uber’s offices due to concerns regarding noncompliance with governmental regulations,” Spangenberg said. “In those instances, Uber would lock down the office and immediately cut all connectivity so that law enforcement could not access Uber’s information. I would then be tasked with purchasing all new equipment for the office within the day, which I did when Uber’s Montreal office was raided.”


Spangenberg’s allegations were reported by the Centre for Investigative Reporting’s (CIR) Reveal project, but it isn’t the first time Uber has been accused of mistreating customer data. In 2014, Buzzfeed revealed the existence of the “God View” tool, after Uber’s New York general manager discussed using it to track a reporter’s journey. The tool’s existence appears to date back to 2011, when venture capitalist Peter Sims says he was tracked by a visitor to Uber’s Chicago offices, where the God View data was shown on a large public screen.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/13/uber-employees-spying...

"Lock down the office." Geez, its like bookies flushing the betting slips down the toilet. Notice how, despite massive, repeated, deliberate schemes to violate the law, the company has not been shut down, nor have any of the officers been indicted for anything. All Uber gets are "cease and desist" orders and lawsuits that can be settled for Wall St.'s chump change.

--------

What is really a disaster about Uber is that it is sucking up all the oxygen for how to regulate the internet. That is SOP for capitalism - have a land rush in which a handful of people become mega-rich, and deal with the destruction wreaked by the landrush later, if at all. If government was still functioning, we would be drafting laws to set the rules; instead of relying on outdated and irrelevant precedents.

Courts are already wrestling with new forms of electronic communications. Today’s office creates so much data, the discovery process no longer involves handing over all your communications, there's simply too much of the stuff. Instead, parties often agree on a set of search terms they'll use to scan their databases, and hand over any files those turn up. Ephemeral messaging apps, like Wickr, Telegram, and Snapchat, add a new level of complication. What happens when the tech biz’s fetish for privacy runs headlong into the legal profession’s fetish for documentation?

Businesses have good, non-nefarious reasons for using ephemeral messaging. “There’s very little doubt that there are really strong and persistent efforts by nation states to undertake computer theft of trade secrets,” says Joel Wallenstrom, Wickr’s CEO.

The legal community isn't so sure. There are a few federal, state, and local regulations that require specific sorts of companies to keep specific documentation, like tax records, on hand. And if you have an inkling that you could be sued, you're supposed to keep hold of your documents, instead of routinely destroying them. Thanks to federal court decisions dating back to the early 2000s, companies under threat of suit must save even electronic documents, and turn them over in discovery, if asked.

Uber's Not the Only One That Should Be Wary of Disappearing Messaging Apps

From a legal POV, the internet is still lawless. There may be a few Wyatt Earp prosecutors out there trying to deal with things on a case by case basis. But, as a society that no longer does Big Picture/long range thinking, we have de facto stepped aside to let gangsters like Uber and their Wall St. backers define the future of our economics and politics by whatever dirty tricks they can pull. They will pretend the internet is "evolving", when in fact they are pushing it to devolve into the Law of the Jungle.

The internet already had well-known anonymity problems (Dark Net). The intelligence-agency-level secrecy that corporations are now implementing will complete the destruction of legal regulation of corporations, except insofar as they themselves choose to limit themselves. When this latest King of the Hill game is won by someone, then the obvious control points on the internet (e.g., the DNS service) will be "discovered" to be useful for enforcement; but they will only be used to the benefit of the winners. That is, the predators may put in some rules to protect themselves from mad dog predators; but the 99.99% prey will still be clueless, defenceless victims of whatever scam the plausibly-deniable corporations want to run.

The internet, increasingly controlled by a handful of megacorporations, increasingly behaving like spies and gangsters, is rapidly turning into the executioner of our democracy, not its savior (as many naive lefties have hoped).

Do I have to say it? We.are.screwed.