Amid claims of spy unit, does Uber stand a chance in trade secrets trial?
The Justice Department reportedly is investigating whether Uber stole trade secrets from its competitors. The allegations come from Richard Jacobs, Uber's former manager of global intelligence.
Jacobs claims Uber has a secret internal unit for gathering intelligence on rivals, hiding evidence, and influencing lawsuits. This was revealed in a letter by Jacobs' lawyer, which surfaced as part of a lawsuit accusing the ride-hailing giant of swiping technology from Waymo, the self-driving car division of Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
A federal judge delayed the trial Tuesday, accusing Uber's lawyers of withholding the letter as evidence.
In a statement, Uber told "CBS This Morning," "None of the testimony … changes the merits of the case. Jacobs himself said on the stand … that he was not aware of any Waymo trade secrets being stolen."
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CBS news contributor and Wired editor-in-chief Nick Thompson joined "CBS This Morning" to discuss the lawsuit between the two tech companies and how the letter's revelations may affect Uber's chances in court.
Waymo's multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Uber, filed back in February, centers on former Waymo employee Anthony Levandowski.
"One of the top engineers who helped design Google's self-driving cars [Levandowski] left, downloaded all of Google's proprietary technology on LIDAR – the little thing on the top of the car that sprays lasers that's like really technologically complex," Thompson said. "Shortly thereafter created a new company that was quickly acquired by Uber. So Google really thinks that he took all of their technology and brought it to Uber, so that's why they brought the case."
Thompson said that while Levandowski's behavior may seem "nefarious," there's still no "smoking gun" or direct piece of Google technology in Uber's self-driving cars.
"It actually looks really dark behavior but Uber has a pretty good chance of winning the case — until this bombshell yesterday," Thompson said.
Jacobs' letter detailed the operations of the secret division at Uber, called Marketplace Analytics, which was allegedly set up to steal trade secrets from its rivals overseas. The letter revealed on how team members secretly communicated on a separate computer system and hired ex-CIA agents to perform surveillance.
"All these computers that were off the Uber system ... and only the dummies would use the regular Uber computers, so that could explain why all this information could have been taken from Google and not discovered in the trial," Thompson explained.
He outlined a few of the points Uber may cite in its defense.
"They say this guy Jacobs, well, he kind of walked back on some of the letter. It was written by his lawyer, [Jacobs] only reviewed it for 20 minutes on the holiday, so maybe the letter has some exaggerations in it. Not only that, a lot of companies have systems for sending messages that get deleted. There's lots of reasons why you might want to have computers off the main network," Thompson said.
Though the verdict in the lawsuit remains to be seen, the evidence presented in court has already dealt another blow to Uber's public image — which has already been damaged by reports of an abusive corporate culture, shady business practices, and a massive hack of customer data,
"This is about the 100th black eye for Uber," Thompson said. "I think what it's going to do is it's going to change the perception of Uber and the judge is saying 'Wait a second. How can I trust you? If you have this letter and it has this information about this detailed spying organization and you didn't give it to me, this letter was written last spring and we've been working on this. How could anybody trust anything you say?"