'Hit the Kill Switch': How Uber Used Covert Tech to Thwart Government Raids

The Washington Post shares details from 'a trove of more than 124,000 previously undisclosed Uber records.' For example, in 2015 Uber CEO Travis Kalanick often pulled an emergency kill switch on its data — that is, 'ordered the computer systems in Amsterdam cut off from Uber's internal network, making data inaccessible to authorities as they raided its European headquarters, documents show.'
'Please hit the kill switch ASAP,' Kalanick had emailed, ordering a subordinate to block the office laptops and other devices from Uber's internal systems. 'Access must be shut down in AMS,' referring to Amsterdam. Uber's use of what insiders called the 'kill switch' was a brazen example of how the company employed technological tools to prevent authorities from successfully investigating the company's business practices as it disrupted the global taxi industry, according to the documents.

During this era, as Uber's valuation was surging past $50 billion, government raids occurred with such frequency that the company distributed a Dawn Raid Manual to employees on how to respond. It ran more than 2,600 words with 66 bullet points. They included 'Move the Regulators into a meeting room that does not contain any files' and 'Never leave the Regulators alone.'

That document, like the text and email exchanges related to the Amsterdam raid, are part of the Uber Files, an 18.7-gigabyte trove of data obtained by the Guardian and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a nonprofit newsroom in Washington that helped lead the project, and dozens of other news organizations, including The Washington Post. The files, spanning 2013 to 2017, include 83,000 emails and other communications, presentations and direct messages. They show that Uber developed extensive systems to confound official inquiries, going well past what has been known about its efforts to trip up regulators, government inspectors and police. Far from simply developing software to connect drivers and customers seeking rides, Uber leveraged its technological capabilities in many cases to gain a covert edge over authorities....

According to the documents and interviews with former employees, the company used a program called Greyball to keep authorities from hailing cars — and potentially impounding them and arresting their drivers. It used a technology called 'geofencing' that, based on location data, blocked ordinary use of the app near police stations and other places where authorities might be working. And it used corporate networking management software to remotely cut computers' access to network files after they had been seized by authorities.... Greyball was created as a fraud-fighting tool to limit scammers' access to the app, a former executive said, and was at times used to frustrate violent Uber opponents hunting drivers. But Uber operations executives took control of the program and redeployed it against the government, former employees said.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists describes their trove of documents as 'the secret story of how the tech giant won access to world leaders, cozied up to oligarchs and dodged taxes amid chaotic global expansion.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.