
Uber Tries to Remotely Encrypt Corporate Data During Government Raid - jellicle
http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/justice-et-affaires-criminelles/actualites-judiciaires/201505/26/01-4872822-saisie-chez-uber-des-donnees-auraient-ete-modifiees-a-distance.php
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dang
Hacker News is an English-language site. We don't in the least disparage other
languages, but a submission like this is off topic here.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'd really prefer some latitude offered for stories which:

1\. are generally significant, particularly

2\. about a company closely followed by the HN community, and where

3\. no obvious english-language alternative exists.

Sometimes it's through just such postings that the English language coverage
_is_ initiated.

------
jellicle
Background: Uber's offices in Montreal were raided a few days ago by Revenue
Quebec: [http://globalnews.ca/news/1998322/montreal-uber-offices-
raid...](http://globalnews.ca/news/1998322/montreal-uber-offices-raided-by-
revenu-quebec/) . What is new news is that the URL above (a major Montreal
newspaper) says that the local CEO called Uber HQ in San Francisco, who then
tried to remotely encrypt data on Uber corporate servers, laptops, phones, and
so on, during the raid. Revenue Quebec investigators noticed and are now
expanding their seizure order.

------
gizi
It is funny to see how 30+ different governments are now up in arms against
something that is essentially just a set of computers running on the internet,
i.e. the Uber platform.

I wonder how many copycats will spring up in the future, and become Uber2,
Uber3,and so on?

In Canada, Uber obviously made a serious mistake. They should not be
physically present anywhere. Their strategy does not work, if governments can
physically attack them. They are themselves missing the point about
themselves.

I see governments everywhere seething and claiming that they want to shut down
AirBnb, but where to do that? AirBnb does not have offices or staff over
there, and therefore make it impossible for these governments to engage in
their core business, that is, to use violence in order to impose their
stupidity onto others.

~~~
ethana
Or block of their bank transactions.

~~~
cpursley
Bitcoin

~~~
Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd
That'd probably cut AirBnB's customer base to 1% of what it's now.

~~~
addandsubtract
Not if the app converts USD into Bitcoins on the fly.

------
laurencei
I dont understand why they were trying to do this remotely?

Wouldnt it have made more sense to have all the devices already encrypted?
Then if someone does a raid - simply turn off all the devices - and your
protected?

~~~
davidmr
I'm not sure what the benefit of encryption there is anyway. Governments have
a very effective way of decrypting stuff like this: getting a court order to
hold employees in prison until the data are decrypted.

Maybe they have no actual non-contractor employees in Québec? I'd be pretty
pissed off if I was sitting in a Québec jail because someone in SF decided
that during a raid was the appropriate time to implement encryption on my
devices.

------
InTheArena
Are we sure that the government agency really understood what happened here?
It may be that a single laptop was doing a file vault update or something, and
they jumped all over the place.

~~~
jcwilde
Yeah, we're pretty sure... if you read the article, you might be, too:
multiple laptops and cell phones were remotely rebooted via the remote
management facility at the same time (10:40), leaving them in an encrypted and
unlockable state.

Commenters seem to think their servers were being remotely encrypted as well,
but I didn't see any info to that effect.

------
ezzaf
What strikes me as odd about this is that the laptops weren't encrypted to
begin with.

Relying on remote encryption to protect the data could have been defeated by
simply taking the network offline at the beginning of the raid.

Potentially a remote lock prevents employees of Uber Canada being ordered to
decrypt the data as they lack the means, but presumably such a court order
would lead to head office having to decrypt the data anyway.

------
cmsmith
>Investigators are looking for evidence to demonstrate Uber Canada is
violating the tax law by not collecting GST and QST on behalf of its drivers
to UberX.

For those who don't want to google translate. Further down it says that this
is one of those things Uber doesn't think it has to do because it's an app,
not an employer. Quebec seems to disagree and be willing to follow up.

------
web007
Reminds me of Cryptonomicon,
[http://www.euskalnet.net/larraorma/crypto/slide82.html](http://www.euskalnet.net/larraorma/crypto/slide82.html)

------
tedchs
I wonder if the devices were actually encrypted already, and were simply
rebooted so they would all be sitting at a boot password prompt.

------
sciencerobot
If the devices were encrypted beforehand, would that even help?

I wonder if these actions could be legitimized by Uber claiming that they were
merely trying to protect user data.

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rdl
Wow, no FDE on laptops, etc.? I'm glad Uber just hired Joe Sullivan as CISO;
seems like best practice for any reasonable company these days.

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PhantomGremlin
Oh, man.

An attempted coverup is often punished harshly. Richard Nixon and Martha
Stewart should have taught everyone that. How is this not obstruction of
justice[1], or whatever Canada calls it?

    
    
       Obstruction charges can also be laid
       if a person alters, destroys, or conceals
       physical evidence
    

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstruction_of_justice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstruction_of_justice)

~~~
jrockway
Obstruction of justice might be punished less harshly than whatever the data
they were encrypting implicates them in.

Generally the best legal strategy is to not do anything illegal, but sometimes
that window has already closed ;)

~~~
nstoddar
Was this article just removed from the front page?

------
xacaxulu
Un peu trop tard Uber...

------
sauronlord
Is anyone else excited for this development? This is going to make good
reading for months to come...

~~~
striking
Get your popcorn ready, Canada's going to set Uber on fire.

According to the article (and what I can make of it via Google Translate) this
is for tax reasons, because Canada considers Uber Canada an employer and it
must collect tax.

I honestly don't understand why they would bother doing this what with an
almost certain Obstruction of Justice charge and the fact that it's pretty
obvious that money goes from people to workers via Uber.

~~~
djoldman
I don't know anything about the formal structure of working as an Uber driver,
but could Uber make the argument that their drivers work for the passengers
and that Uber merely facilitates the connecting of drivers to passengers?

~~~
striking
I think Canada's revenue service wanted to obtain evidence that money went
through Uber from consumers to employees. If it were possible to pay any Uber
rider directly (perhaps with a separate payment to Uber) then Canada couldn't
call Uber drivers "employees." But they are, really. Uber processes the
transaction and skims some off the top while passing on the rest to a driver.
So Uber drivers are employees in Canada (or will be soon, at any rate)

~~~
giaour
That's quite an autocorrect snafu.

~~~
striking
Um, yeah. I guess I had it coming, with the length of that comment and my
inability to check my writing.

------
aikah
wow, this clearly is criminal behavior from Uber HQ. Instead of fully
complying with the investigation and using legal means to contest it they are
behaving like a bunch of pedophiles trying to encrypt their hard drives so the
police cannot get to their kiddy porn stash, despicable...

edit: obviously i'm not against data encryption it's just funny how encryption
is used in this case to obstruct justice, article in French, obviously but the
headings are saying something like this :

    
    
        SF Uber engineers attempted to remotely encrypt the 
        data of Uber Canada computers during a search at Uber 
        Canada headquarters led by the Québec IRS in Montréal
        last week.
    
        Search at Uber Canada's office
    
        Last May 14, dozens of investigators from "Revenue Québec"
        proceeded in searching computers at Uber Canadas's office, 
        on Notre-Dame street. Investigators were looking for evidence
        showing that Uber Canada is violating tax laws
    
        Around 10:40 am, one of the investigators noticed 
        that "some handsets, computers and tablets 
        were remotely turned on" during the search. Another 
        female investigator, who was performing a second  
        search warrant in another office, noticed the 
        same exact phenomenon, also at 10:40 am."computers      
        were being remotely accessed and manipulated, we took 
        control of them then turned them down given the    
        emergency and the high risk of remote data
        manipulation", can be read in the case made by judge   
        Jean-Pierre Braun
    

(work in progress)

~~~
woah
Only pedophiles encrypt data?

~~~
tzs
Nothing he wrote implies that. He offered pedophiles as an example of a class
that uses encryption to aid crime, not as an exhaustive list of all classes
that use encryption.

If I wrote that in a recent program I used a functional approach, like they do
in Lisp, would you think I'm claiming that Lisp is the only language with
functional programming support? Because that's the kind of error you made in
reading his statement.

------
chx
Uber is constantly trying to run from the law but eventually the law will
catch up with them and finish this farce. Good.

