Uber bosses told staff to use ‘kill switch’ during raids to stop police seeing data, exclusive UberFiles leak reveals
The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian. The data consist of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant's most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.
Legal experts said the actions documented in the data raised questions about possible breaches of laws against obstructing justice inWhile it was known that Uber had used a kill switch system in some countries, including Canada and Hong Kong, the leaked files reveal its use was more extensive than previously known – and show how it was executed with the involvement of senior executives.
Belgian authorities wanted to obtain company data about drivers, which was held on servers in the US, documents show. Eight armed officers wearing bulletproof vests descended on the Brussels office unannounced on 12 March 2015, accompanied by half a dozen IT experts. Later that year, a Belgian court order forced Uber to suspend its unlicensed UberPop service in the country. But Uber executives had learned a valuable lesson from the experience, emails exchanged among executives show.
The following month, during the second of two raids in Amsterdam by the Dutch transport authority the ILT, top executives took charge of the kill switch strategy.At 9.25am, Gore-Coty emailed the same technician in Denmark who had cut access in Paris the year before, ordering him to repeat the trick. Seven minutes after Gore-Coty’s email, Kalanick followed up, copying in Uber’s lawyers: “Please hit the kill switch ASAP … Access must be shut down in AMS [Amsterdam].
MacGann told him: “Use the ‘Zachary De Kievit’ playbook: try a few laptops, appear confused when you cannot get access, say that IT team is in SF [San Francisco] and fast asleep, and anyway this is all controlled by [Dutch parent company] Uber BV so they should write to Uber BV with their request.”
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