Waymo claims Uber stole its self-driving car technology. This drawing is from a Google autonomous vehicle patent from September 2014.
GoogleFrom burner phones to secret servers to disappearing message apps — the details filling a 37-page letter released to the public Friday sound more like something out of the Bourne movie series than the inner-workings of Uber.
This letter was written by the attorney for Richard Jacobs, a former Uber employee who worked as the ride-hailing company’s manager of global intelligence. What’s now known as the “Jacobs letter” has become the center of the Waymo v. Uber lawsuit.
Even without the letter, the lawsuit conjures up a spy movie. It plots two multibillion-dollar companies against each other over the alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. Waymo, the autonomous vehicle unit of Google’s parent company Alphabet, claims Uber’s former star engineer stole 14,000 “highly confidential” files to develop its own technology. Uber says these claims are “baseless.”
This lawsuit comes as Uber has been wracked by scandals over the past year that led to the crumbling of its executive leadership and five separate federal inquiries into the company. If Uber is found to have pilfered the files in the lawsuit, it may be forced to halt its autonomous vehicle program and hand nearly $2 billion over to Waymo.
The case was set to go to trial earlier this month but was delayed until February because of the revelation of the Jacobs letter. Judge William Alsup, who is presiding over the lawsuit in District Court for the Northern District of California, learned of the letter in late November from the US Department of Justice, which is carrying out a separate criminal investigation into Uber.
“We’re going to have to put the trial off, because if it is true — if even half of what’s in that letter is true, it would be a huge injustice to force Waymo to go to trial and not be able to prove the things that are said in that letter,” Alsup said.
So, what’s in the letter?
Before now, only a select few people had seen the full Jacobs letter. It’s complete with salacious allegations that range from “illegal intelligence gathering” to using specific devices to hide the creation and destruction of corporate records. Even though it’s filled with redactions, it still gives a glimpse into Uber’s alleged tactics to obtain trade secrets and destroy evidence.
“These tactics were employed clandestinely through a distributed architecture of anonymous servers, telecommunications architecture, and non-attributable hardware and software,” the letter reads.
It goes on to allege that Uber employees educated the company’s autonomous vehicle team in Pittsburgh “on using ephemeral communications, non-attributable devices, and false attorney-client privilege designations with the specific intent of preventing the discovery of devices, documents, and communications in anticipated litigation.”
Much of what’s in the letter doesn’t relate to the Waymo v. Uber lawsuit. It goes through Jacobs’ work history, which included counter-narcotics operations in Colombia and two consecutive battlefield assignments in Iraq. It also outlines Uber’s counter intelligence team formed in March 2017 to identify “aggressive operations targeting Uber and to strike back at competitors.” Additionally, Jacobs alleges that Uber used “non-attributable” hardware to store information it collected from politicians, regulators, law enforcement, taxi companies and labor unions.
Uber has said that Jacobs was out to extort the company with his letter. The company paid him $4.5 million, among other costs, in a settlement agreement in August to avoid litigation. The claims in Jacobs’ letter haven’t yet been proven, but Judge Alsup seems to believe they’re plausible enough to give Waymo a chance to investigate the allegations related to the lawsuit.
Separately, a court-ordered Special Master report examining whether Uber should’ve handed over the Jacobs letter sooner came out on Friday. It concluded that because of Jacobs’ allegations regarding the theft of Waymo’s trade secrets, Uber should have disclosed the letter months ago.
“While we haven’t substantiated all the claims in this letter — and, importantly, any related to Waymo — our new leadership has made clear that going forward we will compete honestly and fairly, on the strength of our ideas and technology,” an Uber spokesman said in a statement.
Waymo didn’t immediately return request for comment.
This story is developing.
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