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Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

wsj.com

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Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#331

Post by shadowgovt »

gameman144 wrote: post #185
jeremyjh wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just let the plaintiff or prosecuter decide what evidence they would have liked to find and instruct the jury to assume it was found. This would never happen again anywhere.

This seems like some insane government overreach, though. Like, make the penalties for destroying evidence super steep and criminally liable sure, but it seems pretty wild that you could be convicted of a crime without evidence. In that case, the government has an incentive to destroy evidence and its paper trail.

How would the government go about destroying evidence in a defendant's possession?

(If you mean "Has the government failed to meet its burden of disclosure regarding evidence in its possession:" yes, it occasionally happens. The significant incentive against it is that it's immediate grounds for a mistrial and incredibly embarrassing to a prosecutor's office that has it happen on their watch).

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#332

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pessimizer wrote: post #320
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Funny how Google can ignore the privacy of internet users' conversations but when it comes to their employees' conversations, Google does not want to share those with the Government. According to the Government's memo supporting sanctions, Google is deleting conversations within 24h despite being under litigation holds. It's kind of weird that we've turned formerly ephemeral things into "evidence" just because they…

> If it was a few decades ago, the kind of things happening in these chats would have happened in person or on the telephone with nobody necessarily recording it. Or on paper, maybe by memo. And they would have destroyed the paper evidence just the same, and claimed helplessness in the face of so much paper that had to be kept, and that the suspicion of their motives amounts to being convicted before trial. Same sort…

> Or on paper, maybe by memo.

You're not getting out of the problem that the distinction is essentially arbitrary. You could record everything you say in private. Every single frame that appears on any screen in the company was in some piece of memory at some point in time. What principled distinction are you proposing between what is and isn't a crime to not actively retain?

If the feds essentially want to wiretap you, why should that happen at your expense instead of theirs? Even in cases when you're innocent?

> This is literally what evidence is. It's something that you carefully collect and store to review later in connection with something else. You don't have to "store" the knife you stabbed somebody with or the gun you shot someone with (you've already got enough use out of them) but if somebody destroys them, they're destroying evidence.

There is a distinction between physical objects and information. If you have a knife, destroying it isn't an ordinary thing to do. Meanwhile we have serious concerns about TLC solid state drives which make them unsuitable for many purposes because you can only erase and rewrite them about a thousand times.

Computers inherently operate by rearranging bits. Writing something new coincides with erasing what was there before. Keeping everything forever isn't feasible. So where's the line?

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#333

Post by jefftk »

jeremyjh wrote: post #169
shadowgovt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a horse in this race (anymore), but in the abstract I would love if government aligned incentives so that it was more painful for companies to toss records that should have been retained than to retain records that are damaging to them in hindsight, which they were legally allowed at some point to toss. For precisely the reason you indicated.

Just let the plaintiff or prosecuter decide what evidence they would have liked to find and instruct the jury to assume it was found. This would never happen again anywhere.

The issue here is that companies are not generally required to retain a records indefinitely, and if something was deleted as part of a standard retention policy (instead of specifically because of its contents) the normal "assume the worst" policy doesn't apply. Which is, I think, why lawyers are excited about a default of having a short retention period.

On the other hand, litigation generally comes with needing to put your deletion policy on hold, and it sounds like that didn't happen here?

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#334

Post by CatWChainsaw »

crabkin wrote: post #283
CatWChainsaw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised you're getting downvoted given the amount of snark in other comments. Or is the directness the part we're not supposed to be saying out loud?

the people who can downvote on this site all have remarkably similar political/ethical positions, or it is my impression at least that is the case. really makes you think huh

As far as I know, you can downvote when you have 500 karma. But it is interesting that the people with that amount seem to run in the bootstraps go brrrr crowd, eh?

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#335

Post by choppaface »

jefftk wrote: post #158
lesuorac wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DOJ alleges that a) is factual [1]. Perhaps not in your training but I've also never seen the slides in the pdf before. [1]: https://regmedia.co.uk/2022/03/22/memo_in_support-to-sanctio...

Good point; I was trying to talk about the standard company wide training on communication and privilege. Even though I worked in a relatively legally tricky area, the only training I got on privilege was company-level, and I was assuming (incorrectly apparently) that that was how it worked throughout the company.

The response here further supplements the argument that Googlers (and ex-Googlers apparently) care more about winning the debate they can see (even if they’re fundamentally wrong as evidence showed here) instead of trying to imagine a life after Search.

As a taxpayer and Google shareholder, I definitely want technical talent diverted into making real products versus playing epistemic games with the DOJ or finding new creative ways to subvert discovery. We wasted enough fighting Microsoft, we don’t need to do it again just because Googlers think they’re better.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#336

Post by pverghese »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #298
pverghese wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. How the hell is this a thing. I can understand if they did this post litigation being filed then it would be a problem. How is a company supposed to anticipate when and where the government is going to file charges and keep records for them w…

If you and I have a private dispute, you sue, and I tell your lawyers I shredded everything related to the case because I routinely shred my papers at the end of each month, even if that's true, I'm probably going to settle for more than had I maintained records. (Assuming I wasn't blatantly lying.) The shred-it-all approach has its upsides. But it also comes with liability.

After you sue, if you shred then you are in trouble. How do you anticipate what documents you need and when a legal suit is going to be filed by an unrelated party

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#337

Post by themitigating »

klyrs wrote: post #83
themitigating wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we are talking about a specific company and their actions.

So was I. My crime is not seeing Google's ethical lapses in isolation?

Yes?

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#338

Post by uoaei »

vorpalhex wrote: post #281
uoaei wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in that definition do you propose governance comes in? Do you think culture is governable? To me, culture lies outside the scope of governance entirely -- it's literally just what people do to express themselves and the ways they like to spend their time. > Societal values Notice it doesn't say economic or material values.

Was their practice of direct democracy an important part of ancient Greek culture? (Yes! And it's Republic forms were also part of their culture!) Does the age of monarchy still have impacts on the UK? My imported gin still says "By Order of Her Majesty" on it. "God save the Queen" (or now King) is, intrinsically, part of UK culture. > values, beliefs, and practices That includes practices of law keeping, beliefs in…

That's politics, not culture. Culture is not just "the way people are".

We can't just pretend words mean what we want them to mean. Language as a means of communion requires more from us.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#339

Post by raldi »

telotortium wrote: post #326
raldi wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was working there when this happened, and I definitely remember thinking, "Well, no point in writing a detailed email full of information that will be useful in the future, because in 30 days it'll be gone anyway." Even more frustrating was finding myself in a situation where I remembered an old email that would be enormously helpful, either because of the information in it, or because I could reuse the bulk of som…

I always added all emails to me or cc me to the Indef label, which stops the email autodeletion.

I tried that for a while, but eventually got a message from someone nose-bleedingly high up along the lines of, “If you’re reading this, you’re one of a very small number of employees who has marked more than X% of their mail as retain-indefinitely.” It was obvious they were reluctant to go on record telling us to knock it off, but that was the clear implication.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#340

Post by telotortium »

raldi wrote: post #339
telotortium wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always added all emails to me or cc me to the Indef label, which stops the email autodeletion.

I tried that for a while, but eventually got a message from someone nose-bleedingly high up along the lines of, “If you’re reading this, you’re one of a very small number of employees who has marked more than X% of their mail as retain-indefinitely.” It was obvious they were reluctant to go on record telling us to knock it off, but that was the clear implication.

Huh, TIL. When did this happen? I left in January 2022. Also, perhaps the amount of mailing lists I was subscribed to (the messages of which I didn't retain unless they mentioned me) outweighed the messages that mentioned me. I could see running into an issue if you retained literally every message in your inbox.
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