Uber News: Ex-Employee Accuses Company of 'Intelligence Gathering' From Politicians and Rivals
A detailed letter from former Uber employee Richard Jacobs recently came to light as it cited alleged "intelligence gathering" activities that the company reportedly perpetrated against various groups such as business rivals and politicians.
A redacted copy of the document, which is now commonly known as the Jacobs letter, was recently made public, and it detailed the alleged intelligence gathering misconducts that Uber conducted.
The Jacobs letter, which was addressed to Uber's deputy general counsel Angela Padilla, claimed that Uber had created a unit under its Threat Operations division called the Strategic Services Group (SSG) that was identified as responsible for "human intelligence collection." The document emphasized that the SSG "frequently engaged in fraud and theft" with the help of third-party vendors to collect "unauthorized data or information."
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Jacobs also alleged Uber had created a department called the Marketplace Analytics which operated under the ThreatOps division which "exists expressly for the purpose of acquiring trade secrets, code base, and competitive intelligence."
There were also allegations that Uber had recruited help from "undercover agents" to gather information from taxi driver unions as well as "political figures" and eventually created a "local network of contacts with connections to police and regulatory authorities."
Uber is also accused of collecting information on their rivals' connections to political personality and regulatory officials. "These facts demonstrate that vendors, directed by Uber employees, conducted foreign espionage against a sovereign nation despite Jacobs' objections," the Jacobs letter claimed.
Jacobs also accused Uber of deliberately damaging information to erase any paper trail. He claimed that he had initally proposed to set up an encrypted and secured database for the intel data they gathered, but it was turned down by Mat Henley and Craig Clark. The latter was quoted as saying that keeping a record of documents of this nature is "exactly" what they want to avoid.
The Jacobs letter first surfaced during last month's proceedings of Uber and Waymo's legal dispute. In the light of Jacobs' court testimony and his letter, Uber resorted to calling Jacobs an "extortionist" noting that he had previously won a $4.5 million-worth of settlement.
However, according to reports, US District Court Judge William Alsup had dismissed Uber's statement against Jacobs and even called out the company for not entering the Jacobs letter into discovery. Alsup decided to push back the jury trial, possibly until February 2018, so Waymo's legal team will have enough time to go scrutinize the document.
Meanwhile, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi reportedly provided an internal memo to Uber employees last Nov. 29 that read (via The Verge): "As I hope you've seen over the past 2.5 months, I will always be fair when people admit mistakes or bring hard problems to me. ... I will not tolerate misconduct or misbehavior that was endorsed or excused in the past. Period."
