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Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe

#161

Post by chollida1 »

_bin_ wrote: post #149
Forgeties79 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just have a hard time believing that any of us could get away with that.

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 indiv…

These two issues are very far apart.

Ross could argue he forgot his password to unlock the data in a single users case.

In the corporate case it would be hard for Uber to argue that the entire company now has no access to any of the subpoenaed data.

Re: Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe

#162

Post by chmod775 »

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #92
_ink_ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go: https://logbuch-netzpolitik.de/lnp500-zombiecalypse-im-grune... (it's in German, tho)

that's fine! I can handle translating an individual page (or interview) if I've high confidence it's the right/relevant one, just parsing search results is harder cross-language (for me, anyway). thanks much!

Here's a direct link to the transcript if you haven't found it yet: https://logbuch-netzpolitik.de/lnp500-zombiecalypse-im-grune...

Re: Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe

#163

Post by immibis »

I_am_tiberius wrote: post #141
sensanaty wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't companies pay taxes? Especially since income is taxed already and your average Joe gets screwed way more than the poor downtrodden billion dollar companies.

Because a company just invests the money. You can't take out money from a company as an owner without taxing it anyway (because you anyway have to pay capital gains tax / personal income tax). My point was that I don't see a point in having corporate income tax (that's just an additional tax that prevents companies from investing in the business and employees).

"Invests the money" means it sits in their bank account until they've convinced enough politicians that the money should be taxed as it comes into the company, not when it goes out, and then they issue a massive dividend.

Re: Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe

#164

Post by sidewndr46 »

dh2022 wrote: post #129
_bin_ wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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?

Re: Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe

#165

Post by jraph »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #154
wang_li wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is this relevant to Uber's files and computers located in other jurisdictions?

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?

Re: Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe

#166

Post by Etheryte »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #132

As a non-European, it seems like these raids happen regularly to large companies' offices in Europe (mostly US companies). Maybe some Europeans can chime in and answer something that's been bothering me: Does this happen to smaller companies, too? Is it a serious problem to getting work done, not knowing if regulators are going to shut you down and rifle through your filing cabinets?

Getting raided can happen to companies of any size, Mullvad comes to mind as an example of a company that's small, European and got raided, but it is incredibly rare. It's hard to overstate how exceptional it is, you need to either be on the police radar with a serious issue, or breaking the tax law considerably, or etc. I think the main reason you see this happen to a lot of American companies is that they expand to Europe, but try to do business the same way they did back home. Both the legal landscape and the moral landscape wrt it are very different in Europe, and trying to willingly evade taxes for example is tended to with a very heavy hand. If I'm not mistaken, that's what's happened to Netflix here: they already got caught evading taxes once, and now there's a suspicion that they're doing it again/still.

Re: Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe

#167

Post by sidewndr46 »

_bin_ wrote: post #138
dh2022 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 sei…

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.

Re: Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe

#168

Post by pjerem »

dmurray wrote: post #136
dh2022 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

Re: Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe

#169

Post by throwawaymobule »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #121
stuaxo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds so illegal, it's crazy there aren't consequences for that. EDIT: Article on the kills switch https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-bosses-tol...

If you are a little person in the USA, I believe that would be spoliation of evidence.

Even if you do it before you could have known you were being served a warrant?

IIRC, they did it in the US too.

Re: Netflix Europe offices raided in tax fraud probe

#170

Post by lacy_tinpot »

immibis wrote: post #157
phendrenad2 wrote: post #132

As a non-European, it seems like these raids happen regularly to large companies' offices in Europe (mostly US companies). Maybe some Europeans can chime in and answer something that's been bothering me: Does this happen to smaller companies, too? Is it a serious problem to getting work done, not knowing if regulators are going to shut you down and rifle through your filing cabinets?

Large multinational companies are accustomed to openly breaking the law and getting away with it in the USA; when they try to do the same in Europe they are very surprised when the law actually comes after them. They also raid anyone else they don't like, such as people who run Tor exit nodes... but random small businesses are not in that group.

Maybe this explains why the US is out ahead in GDP, income, and is doing much better pre and post covid than Europe.

It's not so much breaking laws, but unnecessary restrictions and harassment by Europeans states.

The US is business friendly. It's industry friendly. We don't needlessly harass the business of sovereign individuals, and the state apparatus isn't being used as an excuse as to exert power or influence over the population. Not to the same paternalistic extent of Europe.

In Europe the liberal state apparatus that replaced the monarchies are acting an awful lot like the monarchies.

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