Honest question: What does it mean to "raid" the offices of a tech company? It's not like they have file cabinets with paper records. Are they just seizing employee workstations?
Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. Not much interesting in an office these days.
Sadly the media calls the lawful use of a warrant a 'raid' but that's another issue.
The warrant will have detailed what it is they are looking for, French warrants (and legal system!) are quite a bit different than the US but in broad terms operate similarly. It suggests that an enforcement agency believes that there is evidence of a crime at the offices.
As a former IT/operations guy I'd guess they want on-prem servers with things like email and shared storage, stuff that would hold internal discussions about the thing they were interested in, but that is just my guess based on the article saying this is related to the earlier complaint that Grok was generating CSAM on demand.
It is a raid in that it's not expected, it relies on not being expected, and they come and take away your stuff by force. Maybe it's a legal raid, but let's not sugar coat it, it's still a raid and whether you're guilty or not it will cause you a lot of problems.
I mean it's not like people get advanced notice of search warrants of that police ask pretty please. I agree that the way people use the term it's a fine usage but the person using is trying to paint a picture of a SWAT team busting down the door by calling it that.
> I'd guess they want on-prem servers with things like email and shared storage
For a net company in 2026? Fat chance.
Agreed its a stretch, my experience comes from Google when I worked there and they set up a Chinese office and they were very carefully trying to avoid anything on premises that could searched/exploited. It was a huge effort, one that wasn't done for the European and UK offices where the government was not an APT. So did X have the level of hygiene in France? Were there IT guys in the same vein as the folks that Elon recruited into DOGE? Was everyone in the office "loyal"?[1] I doubt X was paranoid "enough" in France not to have some leakage.
[1] This was also something Google did which was change access rights for people in the China office that were not 'vetted' (for some definition of vetted) feeling like they could be an exfiltration risk. Imagine a DGSE agent under cover as an X employee who carefully puts a bunch of stuff on a server in the office (doesn't trigger IT controls) and then lets the prosecutors know its ready and they serve the warrant.
Part of the prosecution will be to determine who put the content on the server.
Under GDPR if a company processes European user data they're obligated to make a "Record of Processing Activities" available on demand (umbrella term for a whole bunch of user-data / identity related stuff). They don't necessarily need to store them onsite but they need to be able to produce them. Saying you're an internet company doesn't mean you can just put the stuff on a server in the Caribbean and shrug when the regulators come knocking on your door
That's aside from the fact that they're a publicly traded company under obligation to keep a gazillion records anyway like in any other jurisdiction.
> publicly traded company
Which company is publicly traded?
> They don't necessarily need to store them onsite but they need to be able to produce them.
... within 30 days, right? The longest "raid" in history.
Who has on prem servers at an office location?
I'm guessing you're asking this because you have a picture of a 'server' as a thing in a large rack? Nearly every tech business has a bunch of machines, everything from an old desk top to last year's laptop, which have been reinstalled with Linux or *BSD and are sitting on the network behaving, for all intents and purposes, as a 'server.' (they aren't moving or rebooting or having local sessions running on them, Etc).
I've worked in several companies and have never seen this. Maybe for a small scale startup or rapidly growing early stage company. I would be pretty shocked to see an old desktop acting as a server nowadays.
Gather evidence against employees, use that evidence to put them under pressure to testify against their employer or grant access to evidence.
Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.
That was legal. Guess what, similar things would be legal in France.
We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power. Western liberal democracies just rarely use it.
The same way the president of the USA can order a Drone strike on a Taliban war lord, the president of France could order Musks plane to be escorted to Paris by 3 Fighter jets.
> We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power.
Interesting point. There's a top gangster who can buy anything in the prison commissary; and then there's the warden.
No, state decides on the rules of the game any business is playing by.
I think both you and the comment you're replying to agree with the gp.
> We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power.
I remember something (probably linked from here), where the essayist was comparing Jack Ma, one of the richest men on earth, and Xi Jinping, a much lower-paid individual.
They indicated that Xi got Ma into a chokehold. I think he "disappeared" Ma for some time. Don't remember exactly how long, but it may have been over a year.
From what I hear, Ma made 1 speech critical of the government and Xi showed him his place. It was a few years, a year of total disappearance followed by slow rehab.
But China is different. Not sure most of western europe will go that far in most cases.
Trump kidnapped Maduro to show the latter his place, but then the US is neither China nor Western Europe so that does not count.
Arrested and the vast majority of Venezuela love that it happened.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/venezuela-survey-trump-ma...
The vast majority of France doesn't like Musk or the nonces that use GROK so let's not go there it's mob rule...
According to USA sources, USA actions are universally approved.
Color me surprised.
Ah, so the daily LARGE protests, in Venezuela, against his kidnapping are not indicative of "the vast majority of Venezuela".
But the celebratory pics, which were claimed to be from Venezuela, but were actually from Miami and elsewhere (including, I kid you not, an attempt to pass off Argentine's celebrating a Copa America win) ... that is indicative of "the vast majority of Venezuela"?
If I were smarter, I might start to wonder why, if President Maduro was so unpopular, why would his abductors have to resort to fake footage - which was systematically outed & destroyed by independent journalists within 24 hours? I mean, surely, enough real footage should exist.
Probably better not to have inconvenient non-US-approved independent thoughts like that.
do you have links, all the chatgpt and gemini references I've seen show the large protest happened 1 time, not daily. And beyond that, the chatbots suggest it's overwhelming support for the arrest.
There are no news sites claiming large daily protests that you claim.
I mean, come on, we kidnapped him. Yes, he was arrested, but we went into another sovereign nation with special forces and yoinked their head of state back to Brooklyn.
To be fair he isn't legitimate head of state- he lost an election and is officially recognized as a usurper and the US had support of those who actually won.
Soke people argue Trump isn't a legitimate head of state. (One of those people is Trump, since he says he was already the president twice.) Should Xi kidnap him?
Please.
Even if that were true - I don't know nor care whether it is - what business is it of the US and Trump to mess around in other countries?
Large amounts of people call Joe Biden's election illegitimate. You could even say thats the official position of the current government. Would his kidnapping by a foreign nation be okay with you too?
And also killed over hundred people don't forget that.
He is not a legitimate head of state. He lost the election.
Rand Paul asked Rubio what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot. Every US President from Truman onwards is a war criminal.
https://www.tampafp.com/rand-paul-and-marco-rubio-clash-over...
I never liked the Paul's and their opinions, but I must say that they usually speak according to their principles, rather than make up principles to fit what they want to happen.
To me, that's the distinction between political opponents I can respect, and, well, whatever we're seeing now.
The people of the US mostly wouldn’t like it the people of VZ mostly did and consider Maduro a thug who lost and stayed in power not their president. Ideologies like Paul have trouble with exceptions to their world view.
> the people of VZ mostly did and consider Maduro a thug who lost and stayed in power not their president.
You got this information from American media (or their allies')
In reality, Venezuelans flooded the streets in marches demanding the return of their president.
How many of them?
Ah, the "rules based disorder" on display: we do dis, you no do dis.
Hypocrisy at its finest.
It's legal to just put kids in foster care for no reason but to ruin someone's life?
In France it's possible without legal consequences (though immoral), if you call 119, you can push to have a baby taken from a family for no reason except that you do not like someone.
Claim that you suspect there may be abuse, it will trigger a case for a "worrying situation".
Then it's a procedural lottery:
-> If you get lucky, they will investigate, meet the people, and dismiss the case.
-> If you get unlucky, they will take the baby, and it's only then after a long investigation and a "family assistant" (that will check you every day), that you can recover your baby.
Typically, ex-wife who doesn't like the ex-husband, but it can be a neighbor etc.
One worker explains that they don't really have time to investigate when processing reports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG9y_-4kGQA and they have to act very fast, and by default, it is safer to remove from family.
The boss of such agency doesn't even take the time to answer to the journalists there...
-> Example of such case (this man is innocent): https://www.lefigaro.fr/faits-divers/var-un-homme-se-mobilis...
but I can't blame them either, it's not easy to make the right calls.
I can't believe theres a country out there that has recreated the DMCA but for child welfare
This is very common, all "think of the children" laws are ripe for abuse. I'm convinced the secrecy around child abuse/child protective services is regularly abused both by abusive parents and abusive officials.
Canada and Germany are no different.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnipeg-mom-cfs-bac...
[1] https://indianexpress.com/article/india/ariha-family-visit-t...
I mean, that's surely not as simple as you make it out to be.
Its not.
If you call 119 it gets assessed and potentially forwarded to the right department, which then assesses it again and might (quite likely will) trigger an inspection. The people who turn up have broad powers to seize children from the home in order to protect them from abuse.
In general this works fine. Unfortunately in some circumstances this does give a very low skilled/paid person (the inspector) a lot of power, and a lot of sway with judges. If this person is bad at their job for whatever reason (incompetence/malice) it can cause a lot of problems. It is very hard to prove a person like this wrong when they are covering their arse after making a mistake.
afaik similar systems are present in most western countries, and many of them - like France - are suffering with funding and are likely cutting in the wrong place (audit/rigour) to meet external KPIs. One of the worst ways this manifests is creating 'quick scoring' methods which can end up with misunderstandings (e.g. said a thing they didn't mean) ranking very highly, but subtle evidence of abuse moderate to low.
So while this is a concern, this is not unique to France, this is relatively normal, and the poster is massively exaggerating the simplicity.
In Sweden there is a additional review board that go through the decision made by the inspector. The idea is to limit the power that a single inspector has. In practice however the review board tend to rubber stamp decisions, so incompetence/malice still happens.
There was a huge mess right after metoo when a inspector went against the courts rulings. The court had given the father sole custody in a extremely messy divorce, and the inspector did not agree with the decision. As a result they remove the child from his father, in direct contrast to the courts decision, and put the child through 6 years of isolation and abuse with no access to school. It took investigative journalists a while, but the result of the case getting highlighted in media was that the inspector and supervisor is now fired, with two additoal workers being under investigation for severe misconduct. Four more workers would be under investigation but too long time has passed. The review board should have prevented this, as should the supervisor for the inspector, but those safety net failed in this case in part because of the cultural environment at the time.
Wait, so someone acted illegally (against law / courts) AND ALSO kidnapped a child for 6 years, and all that happened is that they're... fired?!
That's insane. Don't live in Sweden if you have kids, I guess!
It is fairly lenient. The review board, assigned political, do hold a bit of moral responsibility and got no punishment.
The reason I mentioned that this occurred right after metoo is that the cultural environment in Sweden was a bit unstable. Some people felt they could not trust the courts, which include people who worked as inspectors for the government. The review board is also selected politically, which may add a second explanation for why they permitted the misconduct. It was a very political time and everyone wanted to be perceived as being on the right side of history.
The case has been debate in Swedish parliament but the reaction has been to not really talk about it. People ignored the law and rules, and they shouldn't have done that, and that is then that.
> Don't live in Sweden if you have kids, I guess!
I heard of countries where parents are fond of having firearms around.
like Switzerland?
Good example, there are scandals around custody too!
“ If this person is bad at their job for whatever reason (incompetence/malice) it can cause a lot of problems. It is very hard to prove a person like this wrong when they are covering their arse after making a mistake.”
This seems guaranteed to occur every year then… since incompetence/malice will happen eventually with thousands upon thousands of cases?
> This seems guaranteed to occur every year then…
Not at all. This job will go to an "AI" any moment now.
/i
I've seen that during harassment; in one YouTube live the woman claimed:
but she was saying it normally, like any normal person does when they are angry.-> Whoops, someone talked with 119 to refer a "worrying" situation, baby removed. It's already two years.
There are some non-profit fighting against such: https://lenfanceaucoeur.org/quest-ce-que-le-placement-abusif...
That being said, it's a very small % obviously not let's not exaggerate but it's quite sneaky.
I heard there's a country where they can even SWAT you out of existence with a simple phone call, but it sounds so outrageous this must be some evil communist dictatorship third-world place. I really don't remember.
> Gather evidence against employees
I'm sure they have much better and quieter ways to do that.
Whereas a raid is #1 choice for max volume...
Wait, Sabu's kids were foster kids. He was fostering them. Certainly if he went to jail, they'd go back to the system.
I mean, if you're a sole caretaker and you've been arrested for a crime, and the evidence looks like you'll go to prison, you're going to have to decide what to do with the care of your kids on your mind. I suppose that would pressure you to become an informant instead of taking a longer prison sentence, but there's pressure to do that anyway, like not wanting to be in prison for a long time.
> We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power.
Elon has ICBMs, but France has warheads.
France has Ariane, which was good enough to send Jame Web Telescope to some Lagrange point with extra precision. It's all fun and and games until the French finish their cigarette, arms French Guyana and fire ze missiles.
France has a little more than that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_de_dissuasion
Yes but using such power unscrupulously is a great way to lose it.
>Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.
>That was legal. Guess what, similar things would be legal in France.
lawfare is... good now? Between Trump being hit with felony charges for falsifying business records (lawfare is good?) and Lisa Cook getting prosecuted for mortgage fraud (lawfare is bad?), I honestly lost track at this point.
>The same way the president of the USA can order a Drone strike on a Taliban war lord, the president of France could order Musks plane to be escorted to Paris by 3 Fighter jets.
What's even the implication here? That they're going to shoot his plane down? If there's no threat of violence, what does the French government even hope to achieve with this?
fighter jets ARE a threat of violence, and it is widely understood and acknowledged.
Again: the threat is so clear that you rarely have to execute on it.
>fighter jets ARE a threat of violence, and it is widely understood and acknowledged.
That's not a credible threat because there's approximately 0% chance France would actually follow through with it. Not even Trump would resort to murder to get rid of his domestic adversaries. As we seen the fed, the best he could muster are some spurious prosecutions. France murdering someone would put them on par with Russia or India.
Don’t forget that captain of the plane makes decisions not Elon.
If captain of the plane disobeyed direct threat like that from a nation, his career is going to be limited. Yeah Elon might throw money at him but that guy is most likely never allowed again to fly near any French territory. I guess whole cabin crew as well .
Being clear for flying anywhere in the world is their job.
Would be quite stupid to loose it like truck driver DUI getting his license revoked.
>Don’t forget that captain of the plane makes decisions not Elon.
>If captain of the plane disobeyed direct threat like that from a nation, his career is going to be limited. Yeah Elon might throw money at him but that guy is most likely never allowed again to fly near any French territory. I guess whole cabin crew as well .
Again, what's France trying to do? Refuse entry to France? Why do they need to threaten shooting down his jet for that? Just harassing/pranking him (eg. "haha got you good with that jet lmao")?
I think in this hypothetical, France would want to force Musk's plane to land in French jurisdiction so they could arrest him.
I think the implication of the fighter jets is that they force the plane to land within a particular jurisdiction (where he is then arrested) rather than allowing it to just fly off to somewhere else. Similar to the way that a mall security guard might arrest a shoplifter; the existence of security guards doesn't mean the mall operators are planning to murder you.
Guards can plausibly arrest you without seriously injuring you. But according to https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/68361 there are no safe options if the pilot really doesn’t want to comply, so there is no “forcing” a plane to land somewhere, just making it very clear that powerful people really want you to stop and might be able to give more consequences on the ground if you don’t.
Planes are required to comply with instructions; if they don't they're committing a serious crime and the fighters are well within their international legal framework to shoot the plane down. They would likely escalate to a warning shot with the gun past the cockpit, and if the aircraft is large enough they might try to shoot out one engine instead of the wing or fuselage.
I suspect fighter pilots are better than commercial pilots at putting their much-higher-spec aircraft so uncomfortably close that your choices narrow down to complying with their landing instructions or suicidally colliding with one - in which case the fighter has an ejector seat and you don't.
I felt like you ruled out collision when you said they're not going to murder, though, granted, an accidental but predictable collision after repeatedly refusing orders is not exactly murder. I think the point stands, they have to be willing to kill or to back down, and as others said I'm skeptical France or similar countries would give the order for anything short of an imminent threat regarding the plane's target. If Musk doesn't want to land where they want him to, he's going to pay the pilot whatever it takes, and the fighter jets are going to back off because whatever they want to arrest him for isn't worth an international incident.
In the USA they would be allowed to down any aircraft not complying with national air interception rules, that would not be murder. It would be equivalent to not dropping a gun once prompted by an officer and being shot as a result.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html...
> Not even Trump would resort to murder to get rid of his domestic adversaries
Don't give them ideas
> lawfare is... good now?
Well, when everything is lawfare it logically follows that it won't always be good or always be bad. It seems Al Capone being taken down for tax fraud would similarly be lawfare by these standards, or am I missing something? Perhaps lawfare (sometimes referred to as "prosecuting criminal charges", as far as I can tell, given this context) is just in some cases and unjust in others.
> Western liberal democracies just rarely use it.
Also, they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.
> Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.
Though things like that can happen, which are very serious.
> defendents have rights and due process.
As they say: you can beat the rap but not the ride. If a state wants to make your life incredibly difficult for months or even years they can, the competent ones can even do it while staying (mostly) on the right side of the law.
We are not entirely sure the rule of law in America isn't already over.
People are putting a lot of weight on the midterm elections which are more or less the last line of defense besides a so far tepid response by the courts and even then consequence free defiance of court orders is now rampant.
We're really near the point of no return and a lot of people don't seem to notice.
> We're really near the point of no return and a lot of people don't seem to notice.
A lot of people are cheering it (some on this very site).
> Also, they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.
It's a nice sentiment, if true. ICE is out there, right now today, ignoring both individual rights as well as due process.
They were talking about western liberal democracies, though.
/s
> Also, they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.
As we're seeing with the current US President... the government doesn't (have to) care.
In any case, CSAM is the one thing other than Islamist terrorism that will bypass a lot of restrictions on how police are supposed to operate (see e.g. Encrochat, An0m) across virtually all civilized nations. Western nations also will take anything that remotely smells like Russia as a justification.
> As we're seeing with the current US President
Well, that's particular to the US. It just shows that checks and balances are not properly implemented there, just previous presidents weren't exploiting it maliciously for their own gains.
The USA voted to destroy it's checks and balances consistently for several decades, that is why they don't work now.
>> they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.
That due process only exists to the extent the branches of govt are independent, have co-equal power, and can hold and act upon different views of the situation.
When all branches of govt are corrupted or corrupted to serve the executive, as in autocracies, that due process exists only if the executive likes you, or accepts your bribes. That is why there is such a huge push by right-wing parties to take over the levers of power, so they can keep their power even after they would lose at the ballot box.
> Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.
This is pretty messed up btw.
Social work for children systems in the USA are very messed up. It is not uncommon for minority families to lose rights to parent their children for very innocuous things that would not happen to a non-oppressed class.
It is just another way for the justice/legal system to pressure families that have not been convicted / penalized under the supervision of a court.
And this isn't the only lever they use.
Every time I read crap like this I just think of Aaron Swartz.
One can also say we do too little for children who get mistreated. Taking care of other peoples children is never easy the decision needs to be fast and effective and no one wants to take the decision to end it. Because there are those rare cases were children dies because of a reunion with their parents.
[dead]
Offline syncing of outlook could reveal a lot of emails that would otherwise be on a foreign server. A lot of people save copies of documents locally as well.
Most enterprises have fully encrypted workstations, when they don't use VM where the desktop is just a thin client that doesn't store any data. So there should be really nothing of interest in the office itself.
French has a password disclosure law.
Even if you seize the workstation and obtain the password, the files are unlikely to be stored locally.
Whether you are a tech company or not, there's a lot of data on computers that are physically in the office.
Except when they have encryption, which should be the standard? I mean how much data would authorities actually retrieve when most stuff is located on X servers anyways? I have my doubts.
The authorities will request the keys for local servers and will get them. As for remote ones (outside of France jurisdiction) it depends where they are and how much X wants to make their life difficult.
Musk and X don't seem to be the type to care about any laws or any compelling legal requests, especially from a foreign government. I doubt the French will get anything other than this headline.
Getting kicked out of the EU is extremely unattractive for Twitter. But the US also has extradition treaties so that’s hardly the end of how far they can escalate.
I don't think US will extradite anybody to EU. Especially not white people with strong support of the current government.
White people already extradited to the EU during the current administration would disagree. But this administration has a limited shelf life, even hypothetically just under 3 years of immunity isn’t enough for comfort.
> But this administration has a limited shelf life, even hypothetically just under 3 years of immunity isn’t enough for comfort.
Depends on how much faith you have in the current administration. Russia limits presidents to two 6-year terms, yet Putin is in power since 2000.
Believe it or not, he's "just" off by two years.
Yes, he is in power since 2000 (1999, actually) but 1999-2012 he was Prime Minister. Only then he became President, which would make the end of his second term 2024. So the current one would be his third term (by the magic of changing the constitution and legal quibbles which effectively allow a president to stay in charge for four almost whole terms, AFAIU).
> don't think US will extradite anybody to EU
EU, maybe not. France? A nuclear state? Paris is properly sovereign.
> people with strong support of the current government
Also known as leverage.
Let Musk off the hook for a sweetheart trade deal. Trump has a track record of chickening out when others show strength.
> France? A nuclear state? Paris is properly sovereign.
That is true. But nukes are not magic. Explain to me how you imagine the series of events where Paris uses their nukes to get the USA to extradite Elon to Paris. Because i’m just not seeing it.
> nukes are not magic. Explain to me how you imagine the series of events where Paris uses their nukes to get the USA to extradite Elon to Paris
Paris doesn’t need to back down. And it can independently exert effort in a way other European countries can’t. Musk losing Paris means swearing off a meaningful economic and political bloc.
No need for nukes. France can issue an Interpol Red Notice for the arrest of Elon Musk, for whatever excuse is found.
France doesn't extradite its citizens, even absolute scumbags like Roman Polanski. Someone like Musk has lots of lawyers to gum up extradition proceedings, even if the US were inclined to go along. I doubt the US extradition treaty would cover this unless the French could prove deliberate sharing of CSAM by Musk personally, beyond reckless negligence. Then again, after the Epstein revelations, this is no longer so far-fetched.
If I'm an employee working in the X office in France, and the police come in and show me they have a warrant for all the computers in the building and tell me to unlock the laptop, I'm probably going to do that, no matter what musk thinks
Witnesses can generally not refuse in these situations, that's plain contempt and/or obstruction. Additionally, in France a suspect not revealing their keys is also contempt (UK as well).
100%. Only additional troubles for yourself personally, for practically no benefit (nobody in the company is going to celebrate you).
The game changed when Trump threatened the use of military force to seize Greenland.
At this point a nuclear power like France has no issue with using covert violence to produce compliance from Musk and he must know it.
These people have proven themselves to be existential threats to French security and France will do whatever they feel is necessary to neutralize that threat.
Musk is free to ignore French rule of law if he wants to risk being involved in an airplane accident that will have rumours and conspiracies swirling around it long after he’s dead and his body is strewn all over the ocean somewhere.
You're implying that France is going to become a terrorist state? Because suspicious accidents do not sound like rule of law.
Counter-point. France has already kidnapped another social media CEO and forced him to give up the encryption keys. The moral difference between France (historically or currently) and a 3rd wold warlord is very thin. Also, look at the accusations. CP and political extremism are the classic go-tos when a government doesn't really have a reason to put pressure on someone but they really want to anyway. France has a very questionable history of honoring rule of law in politics. Putting political enemies in prison on questionable charges has a long history there.
"I can't see any difference between a country that has busted two companies that were known for hosting child porn, and a random cartel kingpin" isn't the flex you think it is
We are also talking about a country who wants to ban anonymous VPNs in the name of protecting the children and ask everyone to give their ID card to register account on Instagram, TikTok, etc.
OpenDNS is censored in France... so imagine
People were surprised when the US started just droning boats in the Caribbean and wiping out survivors, but then the government explained that it was law enforcement and not terrorism or piracy, so everyone stopped worrying about it.
Seriously, every powerful state engages in state terrorism from time to time because they can, and the embarrassment of discovery is weighed against the benefit of eliminating a problem. France is no exception : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
Killing foreigners outside of the own country has always been deemed acceptable by governments that are (or were until recently) considered to generally follow rule of law as well as the majority of their citizen. It also doesn't necessarily contradicts rule of law.
It's just that the West has avoided to do that to each other because they were all essentially allied until recently and because the political implications were deemed too severe.
I don't think however France has anything to win by doing it or has any interest whatsoever and I doubt there's a legal framework the French government can or want to exploit to conduct something like that legally (like calling something an emergency situation or a terrorist group, for example).
No difference in a strike like that and the strikes against fishing boats near Venezuela trump has ordered
> You're implying that France is going to become a terrorist state? Because suspicious accidents do not sound like rule of law.
Why not? After all, that's in vogue today. Trump is ignoring all the international agreements and rules, so why should others follow them?
Become? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
The second Donald Trump threatened to invade a nation allied with France is the second anyone who works with Trump became a legitimate military target.
Like a cruel child dismembering a spider one limb at a time France and other nations around the world will meticulously destroy whatever resources people like Musk have and the influence it gives him over their countries.
If Musk displays a sufficient level of resistance to these actions the French will simply assassinate him.
You got that backwards. Greenpeace for all its faults is still viewed as a group against which military force is a no-no. Sinking that ship cost France far more than anything they inflicted on Greenpeace. If anything, that event is evidence that going after Musk is a terrible idea.
PS Yes, Greenpeace is a bunch of scientifically-illiterate fools who have caused far more damage than they prevented. Doesn't matter because what France did was still clearly against the law.
I knew someone who was involved in an investigation (the company and person was the victim not the target of the investigation), their work laptop got placed into a legal hold, the investigators had access to all of their files and they weren't allowed delete to anything (even junk emails) for several years.
You don't get to say no to these things.
If you're a database administrator or similar working at X in France, are you going to going to go to jail to protect Musk from police with an appropriate warrant for access to company data? I doubt it.
I had the same thought - not just about raids, but about raiding a satellite office. This sounds like theater begging for headlines like this one.
They do what they can. They obviously can't raid the American office.
It sounds better in the news when you do a raid. These things are generally not done for any purpose other than to communicate a message and score political points.
These days many tech company offices have a "panic button" for raids that will erase data. Uber is perhaps the most notorious example.
>notorious
What happened to due process? Every major firm should have a "dawn raid" policy to comply while preserving rights.
Specific to the Uber case(s), if it were illegal, then why didn't Uber get criminal charges or fines?
At best there's an argument that it was "obstructing justice," but logging people off, encrypting, and deleting local copies isn't necessarily illegal.
> if it were illegal, then why didn't Uber get criminal charges or fines?
They had a sweet deal with Macron. Prosecution became hard to continue once he got involved.
Maybe.
Or they had a weak case. Prosecutors even drop winnable cases because they don't want to lose.
Macron's involvement with Uber is public information at this point.
[1]: https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2022/07/10/uber-files-...
[2]: https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/le-rapport-d-enquete-...
Thanks for the articles. I'm not disputing that Macron got lobbied for favors.
That said, the articles don't really address the discussion topic whether they committed illegal obstruction DURING raids.
To summarize, I'm separating
(1) Uber's creative operating activities (e.g., UberPop in France)
(2) from anti-raid tactics.
It looks like #1 had some fines (non-material) and arrests of Uber France executives.
However, I don't see a clear case established that Uber committed obstruction in #2. Uber had other raids in Quebec, India, the Netherlands,... with kill switches allegedly deployed 12+ times. I don't think there were ever consequences other than a compliance fine of 750 EUROS to their legal counsel in the Netherlands for "non-compliance with an official order". I doubt that's related to actions the day of the raid, but could be wrong.
It is aggressive compliance. The legality would be determined by the courts as usual.
> aggressive compliance
Put this up there with nonsensical phrases like "violent agreement."
;-)
violent agreement is when you're debating something with someone, and you end up yelling at each other because you think you disagree on something, but then you realize that you (violently, as in "are yelling at each other") agree on whatever it is. Agressive compliance is when the corporate drone over-zealously follows stupid/pointless rules when they could just look the other way, to the point of it being aggressively compliant (with stupid corporate mumbo jumbo).
Who knows.
I don't see aggressive compliance defined anywhere. Violent agreement has definitions, but it feels like it's best defined as a consulting buzzword.
This is a perfect way for the legal head of the company in-country to visit some jails.
They will explain that it was done remotely and whatnot but then the company will be closed in the country. Whether this matters for the mothership is another story.
It's not illegal to head a subsidiary of a company that did bad things, but I'm sure he will be intensely questioned. If he did something illegal, he may be punished.
> but then the company will be closed in the country. Whether this matters for the mothership is another story.
Elon would love it. So it won't happen.
Of course they will not lock the data but hide it, and put some redacted or otherwise innocent files in their place.
That sounds awfully difficult to do perfectly without personally signing up for extra jail time for premeditated violation of local laws. Like in that scenario, any reference to the unsanitized file or a single employee breaking omertà is proof that your executives and IT staff conspired to violate the law in a way which is likely to ensure they want to prosecute as maximally as possible. Law enforcement around the world hates the idea that you don’t respect their authority, and when it slots into existing geopolitics you’d be a very tempting scapegoat.
Elon probably isn’t paying them enough to be the lightning rod for the current cross-Atlantic tension.
These days you can probably ask an LLM to redact the files for you, so expect more of it.
True, but that’s going to be a noisy process until there are a few theoretical breakthroughs. I personally would not leave myself legally on the hook hoping that Grok faked something hermetically.
Nobody does that. It is either cooperation with law enforcement or remote lock (and then there are consequences for the in-country legal entity, probably not personally for the head but certainly for its existence).
This was a common action during the Russian invasion of Ukraine for companies that supported Ukraine and closed their operations in Russia.
It wasn't erasing as far I know, but locking all computers.
Covered here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-bosses-tol...
Or they just connect to a mothership with keys on the machine. The authorities can have the keys, but alas, they're useless now, because there is some employee watching the surveillance cameras in the US, and he pressed a red button revoking all of them. What part of this is illegal?
Obviously, the government can just threaten to fine you any amount, close operations or whatever, but your company can just decide to stop operating there, like Google after Russia imposed an absurd fine.
You know police are not all technically clueless, I hope. The French have plenty of experience dealing with terrorism, cybercrime, and other modern problems as well as the more historical experience of being conquered and occupied, I don't think it's beyond them to game out scenarios like this and preempt such measures.
As France discovered the hard way in WW2, you can put all sorts of rock-solid security around the front door only to be surprised when your opponent comes in by window.
It's sad to see this degree of incentives perverted, over adhering to local laws.
How do you know this?
From HN, of course! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32057651
> Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that.
This would be done in parallel for key sources.
There is a lot of information on physical devices that is helpful, though. Even discovering additional apps and services used on the devices can lead to more discovery via those cloud services, if relevant.
Physical devices have a lot of additional information, though: Files people are actively working on, saved snippets and screenshots of important conversations, and synced data that might be easier to get offline than through legal means against the providers.
In outright criminal cases it's not uncommon for individuals to keep extra information on their laptop, phone, or a USB drive hidden in their office as an insurance policy.
This is yet another good reason to keep your work and personal devices separate, as hard as that can be at times. If there's a lawsuit you don't want your personal laptop and phone to disappear for a while.
Sure it might be on the device, but they would need a password to decrypt the laptop's storage to get any of the data. There's also the possibility of the MDM software making it impossible to decrypt if given a remote signal. Even if you image the drive, you can't image the secure enclave so if it is wiped it's impossible to retrieve.
> Sure it might be on the device, but they would need a password to decrypt the laptop's storage to get any of the data.
In these situations, refusing to provide those keys or passwords is an offense.
The employees who just want to do their job and collect a paycheck aren’t going to prison to protect their employer by refusing to give the password to their laptop.
The teams that do this know how to isolate devices to avoid remote kill switches. If someone did throw a remote kill switch, that’s destruction of evidence and a serious crime by itself. Again, the IT guy isn’t going to risk prison to wipe company secrets.
I read somewhere that Musk (or maybe Theil) companies have processes in place to quickly offload data from a location to other jurisdictions (and destroy the local data) when they detect a raid happening. Don't know how true it is though. The only insight I have into their operations was the amazing speed by which people are badged in and out of his various gigafactories. It "appears" that they developed custom badging systems when people drive into gigafactories to cut the time needed to begin work. If they are doing that kind of stuff then there has got to be something in place for a raid. (This is second hand so take with a grain of salt)
EDIT: It seems from other comments that it may have been Uber I was reading about. The badging system I have personally observed outside the Gigafactories. Apologies for the mixup.
That is very much illegal in the US
It wouldn't be the first time a Musk company knowingly does something illegal.
I think as far as Musk is concerned, laws only apply in the "don't get caught" sense.
Everyone defines their own moral code and trusts that more than the laws of the land. Don't tell me you've never gone over the speed limit, or broken one of the hundreds of crazy laws people break in everyday life out of ignorance.
The speed limit is not a law the same way "don't murder" is a law. And "don't destroy evidence of a crime" is a lot closer to "don't murder", legally speaking.
give any country a gift / investment of 100B USD
-> crimes ? what crimes ?
They do have some physical records, but it would be mostly investigators producing a warrant and forcing staff to hand over administrative credentials to allow forensic data collection.
> forcing staff to hand over administrative credentials to allow forensic data collection.
What, thinking HQ wouldn't cancel them?
I'm sure an intelligent person such as yourself can think of ways around that possibility.
Nope. But I'm sure a more intelligent person such as yourself can tell me! :)
Usually they steal all electronic devices.
> Are they just seizing employee workstations?
Yes.
Why don't you think they have file cabinets and paper records?
Gather evidence.
I assume that they have opened a formal investigation and are now going to the office to collect/perloin evidence before it's destroyed.
Most FAANG companies have training specifically for this. I assume X doesn't anymore, because they are cool and edgy, and staff training is for the woke.
If that training involves destroying evidence or withholding evidence from the prosecution, you are going to jail if you follow it.
What a strange assumption. The training is "summon the lawyers immediately", "ensure they're accompanied at all times while on company premises", etc.
That can start with self deleting messages if you are under court order, and has happens before:
“Google intended to subvert the discovery process, and that Chat evidence was ‘lost with the intent to prevent its use in litigation’ and ‘with the intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation.’”
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.37...
VW is another case where similar things happens:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-12/vw-offici...
The thing is: Companies don’t got to jail, employees do.
Right, but you are confusing a _conspiracy_ with staff training.
I didn't work anywhere near the level, or anything thats dicey where I needed to have a "oh shit delete everything the Feds are here" plan. Which is a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice (I'm not sure what the common law/legal code name for that is)
The stuff I worked on was legal and in the spirit of the law, along with a paper trail (that I also still have) proving that.
[dead]
A raid with a warrant skips all that.
>withholding evidence from the prosecution, you are going to jail if you follow.
Prosecution must present a valid search warrant for *specific* information. They don't get a carte blanche, so uber way is correct. lock computers and lets the courts to decide.
In common law/4th amendment, kinda. Once you have a warrant, then the word reasonable comes into play. Its reasonable to assume that the data you want is on the devices of certain people. if incidental data/evidence is also procured that was reasonably likely to contain said data, then its fair game
In the civil code, its quite possibly different. The french have had ~ 3 constitutions in the last 80 years. The also dont have the concept of case history. who knows what the law actually is.
The training is very much the opposite.
mine had a scene where some bro tried to organise the resistance. A voice over told us that he was arrested for blocking a legal investigation and was liable for being fired due to reputational damage.
X's training might be like you described, but everywhere else that is vaguely beholden to law and order would be opposite.
Why is this the most upvoted question? Obsessing over pedantry rather than the main thrust of what's being discussed