Uber Is At It Again, This Time Withholding Evidence In A Trial

With all the chaos surrounding the tax bill and the Flynn guilty plea, I haven't had the time to write about the latest outrage from my favorite criminal organization, Uber. Just days after admitting to a data breach that it had kept hidden from customers and authorities for nearly a year, the company was also essentially charged by a federal judge with withholding evidence in the intellectual theft trial brought by Waymo.

The case revolves around the poaching of an important engineer in Waymo's autonomous vehicle project and conspiring with that engineer, who allegedly stole 14,000 files, to transfer Waymo's trade secrets about that project to Uber. The case was scheduled to go to trial this week, but in a highly unusual move, the US Attorney of Northern California alerted the court to existence of documents and other evidence that Uber had been less than forthcoming in the discovery process by not releasing a 37 page letter from the lawyer of the former head of Uber's security team that outlined "questionable behavior at Uber, including spying on competitors and using special laptop computers and self-destructing messaging apps that would hide communications."

Uber contends this letter was essentially an extortion attempt by their security head who had been fired for downloading company information to his own computer. The security head responded with his own letter to Uber executives, including former CEO Travis Kalanick, reiterating his claims. Neither letter was produced for this trial.

Uber contends that the reason the letters were not produced was because doing so would interfere with its own internal investigation. But those letters had been provided to the three US Attorneys because, according to Uber, the company wanted to "take the air out of his [the security head's] extortionist balloon."  In addition, the company was also forced to admit that it did use a self-destructing messaging app and that the same app was also used by the engineer they were attempting to poach from Waymo along with the company's intellectual property.

Despite that supposed "extortion", Uber decide to eventually pay off the security head with a $4.5 million settlement and, incredibly, retained him specifically to investigate the claims in the original letter. In another highly unusual move, Uber also paid his lawyer an additional $3 million. If that sounds like hush money to you, you wouldn't be the only one.

Needless to say, the judge in this case was not particularly happy. In discussing the unique settlement with the security head, he said, "To someone like me, an ordinary mortal, and to ordinary mortals out there in the audience — people don’t pay that kind of money for B.S." Regarding the letters and emails that had not been provided to the court, he noted, "on the surface, it looks like you covered this up" in an attempt to hide it from Waymo's lawyers. He then summarized Uber's behavior, saying, "I have never seen a case where there were so many bad things done like Uber has done in this case."

The real problem is that what the judge says applies to Uber's actions not just at this trial but in how it conducts its so-called business in general. And it appears it hires lawyers with a similar disposition. Just as with Trump, it appears the law is finally beginning to close in on this criminal enterprise with multiple investigation opened not only here in the US but around the world as well. As I've said many times before, if there was ever a company that deserves to get the Arthur Andersen death penalty, Uber is surely it.