The only time I ever triggered fraud detection system on my card I got a text message from bank that was "Your card is blocked due to suspicious usage, please call 'number'". And the number was also some random unlisted one.
Only reason I didn't just ignore the thing is I did make a purchase on new website a half an hour before.
Called my local bank and they confirmed this was legit, I almost went off on a full rant about how bad their protocol is for this.
One of my former banks handled this pretty well. They called you and would say something like “there is an issue, but since you should never trust a direct phone call pretending to be your bank, please look up our number on our website and call us”.
It’s kinda nice because while doing this, they also educate their customers to never trust such a call and to rely on official information to contact them.
My credit union does the same but with "call the number on the back of your card". I suppose they have a lot of practice getting it right, given that their idea of a suspicious transaction is any transaction out of state.
Banks are filled with stupid levels of bureaucracy internally, but PNC takes that up to 10. Their IT employees seem like dried husks of something that once was human.
I am assuming card-present transactions? Because I order things from all over, not just locally.
I do appreciate the fraud protection but authorizing my ATM card for non-US withdrawals is overly specific and extremely annoying and time-consuming. Plans change? Expect to spend 15-20 minutes on the phone to say “yes, I will be in Portugal for one extra day”.
Mine did the opposite for a while. In the event of an issue, they'd call, tell you that they were putting you on hold for a teller, and the first thing the teller did was identify the bank and ask for personal information to verify the account.
I always made a point of telling them that they had called me, that I had no proof of who they were, and that I was going to call back from the published number.
It's also a great filter for the scammers. The people who are non-gullible or medium-gullible will follow. The truly gullible will say "What is the web address?" To which they respond "citibank-support.blogspot.com"
I've had the version of that where I called my bank's listed number to confirm the incoming "call us on this number" voicemail was legit, and they said NO, the call is not a legit number of theirs, the account looks fine, I was right to check, and they agreed it seemed like a scam call.
A few days later I found out the call really was from the bank, and the bank had blocked my account, in a way that took a long time to unblock (don't get me started...). As ever, I found out the hard way, when I needed to use the account for something in real-time and it wasn't available.
But the call was from a different department than general customer support, the department's number wasn't known to customer service, and the account status change wasn't visible to customer service either.
So the bank's own customer service thought it was a scam call!
Name and shame whoever did that. The last time that a bank tried to pull such shit at me I wrote about it all over the Internet and to this day it comes up when you search for that bank (either my post or others complaining/warning others of the same problem).
After trying both several time I since stayed with google due to cloudflare always returning really bad IPs for anything involving CDN. Having users complain stuff take age to load because you got matched to an IP on opposite side of planet is a bit problematic especially when it rarely happen on other dns providers. Maybe there is a way to fix this but I admit I went for the easier option of going back to good old 8.8.8.8
I've also changed to 9.9.9.9 and 8.8.8.8 after using 1.1.1.1 for several years because connectivity here is not very good, and being connected to the wrong data center means RTT in excess of 300 ms. Makes the web very sluggish.
Does that setup fall back to 8.8.8.8 if 9.9.9.9 fails to resolve?
Quad9 has a very aggressive blocking policy (my site with user-uploaded content was banned without even reporting the malicious content; if you're a big brand name it seems to be fine to have user-uploaded content though) which this would be a possible workaround for, but it may not take an nxdomain response as a resolver failure
Yeah pretty much. In a perfect world you would pair it with another service I guess but usually you use the official backup IP because it's not supposed to break at same time.
Time to disable the free trial for a month halfway into their trial and see how it goes. This is probably why most trials now request you to reach sales first (well, on top of obviously ensuring they have a way to send an offer).
draw.io probably . It's pretty good for a free tool. If you lost the xml I think it even work to import directly an exported picture (I guess they append the data into it too).
Another video today from Der8auer showed him reproduce the issue on his model. He showed a 22A load and 150°C point on a single wire. The problem seem to be much worse somehow, clearly no balancing between the wire on the founder edition.
Wasn't silk road selling way more than just drugs ? Like, pornography and gun, worldwide. When you facilitate both sex trafficking, organized crime and potentially terrorism you can't exactly be surprised you get hit with everything.
> Carnegie Mellon University's researchers did an analysis of Silk Road gathering data on a daily basis for eight months before it was shut down. Some of their findings include:
> “‘Weed’ (i.e., marijuana) is the most popular item on Silk Road” (p.8)
> “The quantities being sold are generally rather small (e.g., a few grams of marijuana)” (p.12)
> In Table 1, we take a closer look at the top 20 categories per number of item offered. “Weed” (i.e., mari- juana) is the most popular item on Silk Road, followed by “Drugs,” which encompass any sort of narcotics or prescription medicine the seller did not want further classified. Prescription drugs, and “Benzos,” colloquial term for benzodiazepines, which include prescription medicines like Valium and other drugs used for insom- nia and anxiety treatment, are also highly popular. The four most popular categories are all linked to drugs; nine of the top ten, and sixteen out of the top twenty are drug-related. In other words, Silk Road is mostly a drug store, even though it also caters some other products. Finally, among narcotics, even though such a classification is somewhat arbitrary, Silk Road appears to have more inventory in “soft drugs” (e.g., weed, cannabis, hash, seeds) than “hard drugs” (e.g., opiates); this presumably simply reflects market demand.
> Silk Road places relatively few restrictions on the types of goods sellers can offer. From the Silk Road sellers’ guide [5],
“Do not list anything who’s (sic) purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen items or info, stolen credit cards, counterfeit currency, personal info, assassinations, and weapons of any kind. Do not list anything related to pedophilia.”
> Conspicuously absent from the list of prohibited items are prescription drugs and narcotics, as well as adult pornography and fake identification documents (e.g., counterfeit driver’s licenses). Weapons and am- munition used to be allowed until March 4, 2012, when they were transferred to a sister site called The Armory [1], which operated with an infrastructure similar to that of Silk Road. Interestingly, the Armory closed in August 2012 reportedly due to a lack of business [6].
No, silk road did not sell weapons. There was legal content like pornography and other media on there, but Ulbricht was an idealist and excluded material with "intent to harm".
Notably, as Ullbricht predicted, the Silk Road was immediately replaced by sites which did not have such ideals, and openly sold weapons and illegal pornography.
plus in North America you don't really need a darknet market to get a gun illegally. US FedGov ain't gonna get to involved in illegal gun sales in Europe.
Interesting and surprising they really had rules, thanks for the clarification. I'm ashamed to say I opened this page and read it wrong the first time by skipping the first sentence.
It's crazy how downhill Gandi went in 2 years. Went from decently priced French registar to basically asking for 70€ a year for a mailbox and lately asked me for over 40€ to renew a dot dev domain. I ended up transferring all my domains due to this.
This is like the warning in emails about "not reading it if you aren't supposed to have received it" like yeah sure how do you know it's not for you then.
That's basically what happened when they tried (twice I think ?) to raid Uber offices in France, their boss pressed a kill switch and everything went down in seconds. It completely blocked the investigation.
Afterward Uber helped Macron campaign who then ordered National Financial Prosecutor's office to "stop bothering them" so I don't think anything new happened since.
Edit: Some sources in below replies for infos on both. Turn out I'm wrong for 2nd part it started earlier than his campaign.
Not a lawyer, but let’s say the cops were searching my house. If I threw the keys to my unbreakable safe out the window, such that they could never be found, I doubt a judge would care for the distinction. That the evidence exists but cannot be accessed is still going to find you in contempt.
Now let's say that instead you threw the keys to your unbreakable safe to your friend across the Atlantic Ocean. And you say that you didn't know that the people entering were cops. And your friend won't give the keys back. The evidence may exist, you cannot access it, neither can the police. The court has no jurisdiction over your friend and you have no authority to force your friend to give you the keys back.
At that point, whether you are in contempt or not depends on the answer to the question "did you know that the cops were entering to look for evidence before you threw the keys?" Whether the judge holds you in contempt or not is a function of the free choice of the judge and is not related to the answer to the first question (though whether or not the judge should hold you in contempt is a function of what the judge believes about what you believed).
If it were keys to a safe that existed outside of the warrant requirements (in another country in fact), then it would likely not be illegal. The regulators would unlikely be able to legally access that safe anyways without extra due process, so it’s mostly about protecting against unwarranted access.
The keys still exist and are accessible. What the kill switches does is make a fishing expedition harder. If the police knew of the existence of a specific document, or even all documents pertaining to certain terms, they could issue a targeted subpoena which Uber would have to comply with (at least in the US).
That metaphor doesn't seem directly applicable to cutting off cloud access.
If we're trying for a metaphor that would be a similar situation pre-digitization, the cloud servers containing business documents could be considered head office, and the office being raided would be the branch office. The branch office would continually be communicating with head office for their operations, and that communication would be shut down during the raid.
This isn't a great metaphor because the "head office" has become sort of stateless and ephemeral with digitization, but that's part of the interesting question the OP was posing, how does law enforcement collect evidence when that evidence is hosted on cloud servers in nebulous datacenters?
By creating a law for seizing the IT system of a company. “Provide everything”, and if we later find that any other document existed back at that time, then it’s contempt of court.
In the US such a law would likely be declared unconstitutional by the fifth amendment due to being overly broad:
“””
United States v. Bridges, 344 F.3d 1010 (9th Cir. 2003)
There was probable cause to search the defendant’s office based on the information in the application that documented his efforts to provide illegal tax advice to various clients, including undercover agents. The search warrant in this case, however, was overly broad. It listed, among the items to be seized, “All records . . . documents . . . computer hardware and software . . .” Though this list was detailed, it was too expansive. There was simply no boundary to what could be seized. In addition, the warrant did not specify the crimes that were the subject of the search (nor did the warrant incorporate the application) so there was no limitation in that manner. Though the application was detailed, the warrant was not. All evidence should have been suppressed. (No discussion of Leon).
As long as no police has confiscated (in most countries this involves the police man touching it, I bet) the equipment you can break it or make it inaccessibility however you like. It's your stuff, after all.
>Not a lawyer, but let’s say the cops were searching my house. If I threw the keys to my unbreakable safe out the window, such that they could never be found, I doubt a judge would care for the distinction.
What if the safe was never in your house at all, but it was in a foreign country across an ocean? And when the cops showed up, you simply threw the keys across the ocean too?
If the cops know of something particular in the safe, then maybe the judge could find you in contempt for not producing that thing when ordered by the court, but otherwise, I don't see how they have any legal leg to stand on.
Your password is sort of protected. A judge can hold you in prison for contempt for refusing to provide a password but there is an 18 month jail limit, at least in federal court.[0]
This theorycrafting is cute, but in reality you've mixed up corporate entities and yourself as a person in a criminal case.
And if a corporate entity finds a way to openly defy a national government, it tends to happen that those governments find a way to change the law (they're the ones making it, right? :P) for that defiance to become punishable by other parts of those governments which can sanction the corporation, prevent their operations within the country or even throw people in jail.
One is, what does the law say? Did they violate it? Is it illegal for a foreign subsidiary to temporarily shut off access to a branch office? How would we like this to work? Policy arguments about law enforcement vs. due process and government overreach.
The other is, politics. If the local government is captured by a cartel of taxi medallion holders who don't like Uber, the government is going to find a way to screw Uber, regardless of whether Uber is complying with existing law. But then it's politics and Uber is a multi-billion dollar corporation, so they have the option to capture the government themselves.
Of course, that leaves the meta argument. Maybe deciding what should happen based on the second method is worse than the first, so how do we prevent that from being what happens?
No, what I'm saying is that governments aren't compilers you mess around with at will when you're as big as Netflix. The fact that something might be illegal is a changeable state by that very government if they decide a corporation has been jerking them around too much. Something being legal right now is a temporary state.
Did you miss all the screaming of US corporations in relation to EU Acts like DMA? Those changes are exactly what happens when you start to think that law and people behind it are separate.
You are aware of the fact that tax evasion means these companies are freeloading on the tax money the rest of us (including: you) are paying? Especially in the case of uber which is essentially using public infrastructure to make their money having them pay taxes should be normal.
I agree that customer data needs to be protected, but it is bold to assume that is the case at all with these powerful corporate entities: if they lie to the state when filing taxes what makes you believe they are ernest when it comes to the protection of their users privacy?
Maybe it is a weird ideology I am holding here, but the more powerful an entity is, the more transparent it should become — nowaday we got this completely reversed with poor people being naked in front of the state and big corps literally fooling everyone.
Edit: some also seem to think the state is the behemoth that jumps on the poor little companies here. To that I just have to think about the account of the German public prosecutor Bäumler-Hösl (of wirecard fame) where she told about a raid on a bank where she and 4 collegues were opposed by 130 (!) company lawyers.
In general this is not what they do. What they do is read the tax code carefully and structure their operations in such a way as to minimize taxes, e.g. because tax is paid on "profits" (revenues minus expenses) so they shift more expenses into jurisdictions with high tax rates etc., causing "profits" to go down in those jurisdictions and up somewhere else.
Then they don't pay any taxes in the jurisdictions with higher tax rates and politicians go on TV and complain about the companies following the laws that the politicians enacted. Because if they actually fixed the laws, the taxes would be paid based on the extent to which the company does business in that jurisdiction, and then companies could only avoid taxes by not doing business there (costing the country jobs) or, for taxes associated with local sales, by raising prices there. Neither of which the politicians actually want to do, so instead they pass laws that allow companies to avoid taxes and then complain about it when the companies do it.
Thinking the systems that a company has are so sensitive that the company is basically above the law is the insane thing.
It is just a company--a group of people granted certain rights. They have databases...fancy filing cabinets. Just because the company is famous shouldn't preclude their filing cabinets from being searched (presuming legal processes are used and not abused).
> They have databases...fancy filing cabinets. Just because the company is famous shouldn't preclude their filing cabinets from being searched (presuming legal processes are used and not abused).
That analogy doesn't work, because the "filing cabinets" are actually sitting somewhere else, possibly in another country/continent. It's not obvious that authorities in one country has authority over documents stored in another country.
I think it is not crazy to think that if the contents are used from some country then intentional obstruction of justice stuff like kill switches or dropping VPN connections should be treated as intentional obstruction of justice. AKA reality of use matters more than "location" of data.
I and many others think the government should have 0 business in my filing cabinet. That difference in world view might be what makes this topic more complex than you seem to think.
[Not parent poster] So even the most heinous act of violence become unprosecutable when the suspects/accomplices have moved all remaining evidence into a magically inviolable filing cabinet?
No? Then the world is a lot more complex than property rights trumping everything else.
I think it’s very hard to say, and it just gets harder the more I think about it (like many things tend to).
On one hand, if the condemning evidence can’t be provided by someone other than me, should the case be prosecutable?
On the other hand, any sentient human can come up with examples of cases where it might be reasonable to search my belongings for evidence; multiple independent witnesses point to me being guilty of murder and investigations have otherwise stalled. Or anything of the sort.
What if all the independent witnesses are not independent? What if I’m not the guy, but just a lookalike? What if I’m being set up by the authorities?
The easy thing to do here is to say well okay SOMETIMES it’s okay to search one’s belongings but not for like any silly reason or anything like it has to be a real serious one. Then it’s just a matter of where to draw the lines, and who should get to decide.
I like the more absolute stance I made earlier; the government shouldn’t have any business in my personal belongings. Some crimes will go unpunished and that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
For companies that deliberately obstruct justice work? Have the board and a healthy amount of executives serve 20 years in a high security prison, seize the assets and investigate their investors' due dilligence process. Gather proof with infiltrated workers.
Tech leaders need to learn that criminal conspiracy is not part of a good business plan. If they start using mafia tactics, so can Justice.
The problem is deeper than that. When a physical space is raided, its scope is obvious. Digital spaces don't have that characteristic. There can always be hidden indexes.
Yeah it's hard to see how any French official would have authority to conduct searches 10 meters beyond French borders, let alone over all of Uber's computers located in dozens of other countries.
Hard to see how a company can imagine it can do business in a country and not follow that country’s record keeping laws and be subject to criminal and civil statutes in that country.
If you do business in France, you are accountable in France. Your problem to provide the asked documents if it's the law to provide them. That you are using computers elsewhere to store stuff should not be any relevant.
You shouldn't really be able to have it both ways, should you?
Uber's files and computers located in French territory are of course accountable to French authorities, but that's simply not the case for those located in other jurisdictions…
Unless there is some international law or treaty mandating that?
Authorities might not be able to seize computers and files in another country, although I think interpol can get involved in tax fraud or tax evasion matters.
Preventing access to your accounts during an audit is quite fishy, especially for an onsite audit without warning which, in France, is supposed to happen only if the authorities have doubts that you could make some evidences disappear. During an audit, the CEO is supposed to provide the documents, the inspectors are not supposed to access your files themselves I think.
(So blocking access for security reasons is bullshit, to answer someone else, the right thing to do is to have all the pieces in order for when an audit happens anyway)
Unless it’s legally mandatory in such a way that superior authorities can’t overrule it, then it doesn’t seem to matter? (such as the President, appellate courts, etc…)
Clearly in this case Uber got a superior authority to do so, and in any future case that will still be a likely possibility.
It's not a matter of what's located in France. It's a matter of what documentation about your company requires you to keep. Regardless of where the computers you use are physically located if you can't produce the required documents you get to be fined, be shut down, and/or go to prison. No company gets to play the game of "we're doing business in Uzbekistan but our accounting servers are in Sealand so we don't have to file any taxes or provide any other records." Not only is the idea absurd, anyone who thinks that is congenitally stupid or stupid by choice.
Attempted insults only decrease the credibility of the writer… anyways I didn’t claim Uber is supplying less than the legally required amount of paperwork?
Nor is it likely.
All the accounting, insurance, banking, regulatory, etc… paperwork legally necessary for even a large company in France can easily fit in a set of binders that fit in a single bookcase.
So it’s literally possible for all of it to be ready and available for inspection before anyone even touches a keyboard. And in fact that was the case for every company in France pre 1960s.
If a company is doing business here, the actual location of file is irrelevant.
Also when the government is really motivated, he can arrested the founders or executives directly (Pavel Durov). Which is what they should do to Netflix execs if they are doing business illegally.
>Also when the government is really motivated, he can arrested the founders or executives directly (Pavel Durov). Which is what they should do to Netflix execs if they are doing business illegally.
You're in favor of holding executives hostage to demand access to data? If they actually did something illegal, they can be arrested/tried for that, but arresting executives as a means to coerce companies into doing stuff is a total perversion of the rule of law.
> You're in favor of holding executives hostage to demand access to data? If they actually did something illegal, they can be arrested/tried for that, but arresting executives as a means to coerce companies into doing stuff is a total perversion of the rule of law.
Turns out that witholding data as a company executive is outright illegal, so yeah, we're in favor of it and they can get arrested and charged for for it.
>Turns out that witholding data as a company executive is outright illegal, so yeah, we're in favor of it and they can get arrested and charged for for it.
Except in this case it's not the executive that has the data. The data is sitting on some cloud server somewhere, and the executive no longer has access because the CISO got wind of the raid and locked his account. If you're holding the executive, you're not holding the executive because he's refusing to cooperate with a warrant, you're holding the executive as a hostage so HQ would turn over the document.
> You're in favor of holding executives hostage to demand access to data?
This is a very emotional way of saying "you're in favour of enforcing contempt of court rulings against people who try to obstruct the judicial process".
This situation already happened with X/Twitter when the Brazilian Supreme Court attempted to compel Elon & co to disclose the social media accounts of alleged rioters. Unfortunately, it seems few people learn from even recent history.
> Afterward Uber helped Macron campaign who then ordered National Financial Prosecutor's office to "stop bothering them" so I don't think anything new happened since.
Why should it be illegal? Isn't it akin to "right to remain silent"? Why the need to present any information to police unless it is asked by court. Assuming that they didn't delete the data, just moved it to somewhere safe where it couldn't directly be taken away.
We had a raid in one of my previous company due to copyright violation due to a user uploaded content. Authorities came in to take in all the codebase, reports and even employee devices. Basically once given court permission, police would try to collect all the unrelated things which could be taken in the permission, so that they could extort you later.
Denying access to data that could still be specifically subpoenaed isn't destruction of evidence, it's a normal security measure. They still have the warrant to search everything in the office, but not the right to use those computers to access uber's entire worldwide infrastructure.
I have no idea what french law says about it but I think it's morally fine and don't care that uber did it.
I think this is an example of law lagging technology. A warrant gives the police the right to inspect and seize contents of a safe inside a house. Similarly, the law should be updated so that a warrant gives the police the right to inspect and seize contents of local computers. Local computers surely have valid certificates that allow the computers to connect to the mothership, right?
Does a search warrant for your house give the police the right to search your car, if they found your car keys in your house? What about your neighbour's or your employer's car - perhaps on the other side of the world - if you happened to have those keys? To compel you not to tell your employer to change the locks, so the seized keys won't work?
These seem like closer real-world analogies for what exactly a warrant to search someone's computer should entitle the police to do.
Your analogy doesn’t work. Your neighbor is not you.
$COMPANY is $COMPANY all around the world and if $COMPANY wants to do business in $COUNTRY (which is not an obligation, they choose to), then yes, they have to entirely cooperate with $COUNTRY.
If they don’t want to, they can still do business elsewhere.
This is the thing which is not the case. The subsidiary in the US is nearly always a different company than the one(s) in Europe. They'll have different management and different lawyers etc. Sometimes they even have different owners, e.g. because one of them is a joint venture with some other company, or a franchise. And they have to be different, because different countries have different laws and those laws often conflict with each other. So the subsidiary in the US follows US law and the one in France follows the law in France.
You could try to make it otherwise, but it's pretty obvious what would happen then. Companies couldn't formally operate in multiple countries because their laws are incompatible, so instead there would be a straw front company in any given country that nominally isn't owned by the conglomerate, but is effectively just reselling their product/service in that country for an additional margin that only pays the salary of local management. To prevent this you would have to ban companies from having foreign suppliers, which is not very practical.
And since countries know that's what would happen, they allow foreign subsidiaries to be regarded as separate entities even if they have shared ownership, instead of demanding the charade.
In absolute, I agree with you. But personally if I had to chose between tax evasion (permitted by those schemes) and having less multinational companies because it’d be more difficult… well, my country was doing pretty okay before multinationals and is not doing okay since every taxes are evaded.
Well Netflix is nice and all but I prefer social security and teachers in school.
Basically flat since the end of WWII, significantly lower before the war. At the height of the New Deal, less than half of what it is now. And that's in the face of significant growth in real GDP per capita. Probably not a dissimilar story in most other Western countries.
The problem isn't in the amount of taxes being collected, it's in where the money is going.
I don't think a warrant to search an office should let them use the keys they find there on a company truck five miles away, either. Despite being the same company. (If it's in the parking lot then it's a maybe.)
Not necessarily. Depending on how the org's set up, the system may be permissioned to access too much stuff. I think justice systems should lean less on a general warrant - too much of a fishing expedition - and instead focus on subpoenas specifically related to their area of investigation. E.g. if they seize the CEO's computer on accounting or tax concerns, I sincerely doubt they showed a judge probable cause to seize, I don't know, new product designs. As such they should not be able to access them.
The point you're making is valid, but also exposes a common theme in litigation against big tech. It's pretty common to hear something like "company XYZ used data ABC to train a model about their users and is court ordered to delete it". It's unlikely that anyone in the justice system has even the slightest clue how to ascertain if this actually happened and certainly no way to prove it has been deleted. The court gives the order, the company says they have complied, & everyone pretends to go back to the way things were before hand.
let me just extrapolate this out a bit for you. I live in the US (yes I visited France once long ago, it was nice). I use Uber. My phone is an Android phone running Uber's app.
Can a French prosecutor use Uber's systems to deliver a malicious payload to my phone to gather evidence? If so, is Uber required to assist them in this task?
Wasn't half of the concern with the arrest of Ross Ulbricht figuring when they could get him with his computer unlocked, without time to lock/wipe it? They'd have a pretty hard time proving destruction of evidence if 1. they didn't know for sure evidence was on that specific computer and 2. it was destroyed rather than just that the decryption key was removed from memory.
Regardless, the government violating an individual's rights doesn't mean we should yell at uber, it means we should yell at the government.
Yeah that doesn’t really shift my opinion lol If I activated a kill switch to wipe my local computers when the FBI entered my house I can’t even imagine the hell I’d reap, let alone that my data would be safe because it’s scattered on servers in other countries.
Also we can claim whatever we want but that doesn’t mean it’ll protect us in court.
It's definitely interference/obstruction at least of the raid itself yeah, but looking at the text and not being a lawyer I have a feeling it may be extremely hard to prosecute for something more substantial than a fine low enough for a french exec have it a as a guaranteed expense (bn€ in tax fraud vs a few k€ in fine). The law does also mention prison but it's not the kind of stuff that ever end up being applied for fiscal related cases.
> I have a feeling it may be extremely hard to prosecute for something more substantial than a fine low enough for a french exec have it a as a guaranteed expense
I know nothing about French law, but this whole thing gives me “organised crime” vibes. In many jurisdictions the punishment dramatically increases when a crime is commited as an organised group whose purpose is to commit said crime. As i said i know nothing about French law so i don’t know if the same concept is present there, let alone if the letter of the law would fit the situation.
But yeah i agree with you they won’t care unless they are sitting in a cell with the chance of sitting a lot more in a cell.
Because the government already has a warrant to obtain this evidence(they can't raid the office otherwise) and you as the company pushing this button are failing to turn over that evidence.
You have a right to not help them, but you can’t actively destroy evidence. Do you think it would be fine to begin burning documents once the police comes to you office?
Presumably the French police aren't randomly deciding on a Tuesday for no reason to check the company for proof of them being tax cheats without some court somewhere requesting it, but even if they were, we're talking about a company here, not a person. A person has the right to remain silent, it doesn't make sense for a company to have that same right.
And the 2nd half just reads like pure corruption to me, they paid off some politician (who just so happens to wield the most power in the whole country) to pressure him to get them to stop their investigation into their illegal acts? In what universe could that 2nd sentence be construed as anything other than slimy, corrupt behavior?
> And the 2nd half just reads like pure corruption to me
Why did you conclude that?
There were some user uploaded pirated content in our platform. As far as I know, some media company won approval by some judge for a raid to discover the extent of piracy. It's just in the police rulebook to get everything during the raid where there could be pirated content, including employees laptops.
Called my local bank and they confirmed this was legit, I almost went off on a full rant about how bad their protocol is for this.