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X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

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Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#391

Post by chrisjj »

niemandhier wrote: post #227
stickfigure wrote: post #120

Honest question: What does it mean to "raid" the offices of a tech company? It's not like they have file cabinets with paper records. Are they just seizing employee workstations? Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. Not much interesting in an office these days.

Gather evidence against employees, use that evidence to put them under pressure to testify against their employer or grant access to evidence. Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care. That was legal. Guess what, similar things would be legal in France. We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power. Western liberal democracies just rarely use it.…

> Gather evidence against employees

I'm sure they have much better and quieter ways to do that.

Whereas a raid is #1 choice for max volume...

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#392

Post by anigbrowl »

ramuel wrote: post #175
paxys wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you are a tech company or not, there's a lot of data on computers that are physically in the office.

Except when they have encryption, which should be the standard? I mean how much data would authorities actually retrieve when most stuff is located on X servers anyways? I have my doubts.

If you're a database administrator or similar working at X in France, are you going to going to go to jail to protect Musk from police with an appropriate warrant for access to company data? I doubt it.

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#393

Post by digiown »

ronsor wrote: post #161
stickfigure wrote: post #120

Honest question: What does it mean to "raid" the offices of a tech company? It's not like they have file cabinets with paper records. Are they just seizing employee workstations? Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. Not much interesting in an office these days.

These days many tech company offices have a "panic button" for raids that will erase data. Uber is perhaps the most notorious example.

Or they just connect to a mothership with keys on the machine. The authorities can have the keys, but alas, they're useless now, because there is some employee watching the surveillance cameras in the US, and he pressed a red button revoking all of them. What part of this is illegal?

Obviously, the government can just threaten to fine you any amount, close operations or whatever, but your company can just decide to stop operating there, like Google after Russia imposed an absurd fine.

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#395

Post by chrisjj »

anigbrowl wrote: post #383
stickfigure wrote: post #120

Honest question: What does it mean to "raid" the offices of a tech company? It's not like they have file cabinets with paper records. Are they just seizing employee workstations? Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. Not much interesting in an office these days.

They do have some physical records, but it would be mostly investigators producing a warrant and forcing staff to hand over administrative credentials to allow forensic data collection.

> forcing staff to hand over administrative credentials to allow forensic data collection.

What, thinking HQ wouldn't cancel them?

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#396

Post by chrisjj »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #192
ronsor wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days many tech company offices have a "panic button" for raids that will erase data. Uber is perhaps the most notorious example.

This is a perfect way for the legal head of the company in-country to visit some jails. They will explain that it was done remotely and whatnot but then the company will be closed in the country. Whether this matters for the mothership is another story.

> but then the company will be closed in the country. Whether this matters for the mothership is another story.

Elon would love it. So it won't happen.

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#397

Post by hunterpayne »

alex1138 wrote: post #257
tomlockwood wrote: post #215

Elon's in the files asking Epstein about "wild parties" and then doesn't seem to care about all this. Easy to draw a conclusion here.

Elon is literally in the files, talking about going to the island. It's documented

[flagged]

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#398

Post by Bender »

trcarney wrote: post #290
Bender wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion I think the reason they raided the offices for CSAM would be there are laws on the books for CSAM and not for social manipulation. If people could be jailed for manipulation there would be no social media platforms, lobbyists, political campaign groups or advertisements. People are already being manipulated by AI. On a related note given AI is just a tool and requires someone to tell it to make CSAM I t…

hold on, are you saying that you should be able to be jailed for manipulation? Where would that end? could i be jailed if i post a review for a restaurant if you feel it manipulated you? or anyone stating an opinion could be construed as manipulation. that is beyond a slippery slope, that is an authoritarian nightmare.

I believe the context I was proposing would be at the scale of world-wide manipulation. Rigging elections and such. There is a Netflix documentary called "The Great Hack" that gets into what I am discussing though from the perspective of social media algorithm. This only gets more effective when people are chatting with an AI bot that mimics a human and they think is their significant other that laughs at all their jokes and strokes their ego.

I think your interpretation would be more along the line of making 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid's Tale a reality.

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#399

Post by ChuckMcM »

chrisjj wrote: post #388
ChuckMcM wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly the media calls the lawful use of a warrant a 'raid' but that's another issue. The warrant will have detailed what it is they are looking for, French warrants (and legal system!) are quite a bit different than the US but in broad terms operate similarly. It suggests that an enforcement agency believes that there is evidence of a crime at the offices. As a former IT/operations guy I'd guess they want on-prem ser…

> I'd guess they want on-prem servers with things like email and shared storage For a net company in 2026? Fat chance.

Agreed its a stretch, my experience comes from Google when I worked there and they set up a Chinese office and they were very carefully trying to avoid anything on premises that could searched/exploited. It was a huge effort, one that wasn't done for the European and UK offices where the government was not an APT. So did X have the level of hygiene in France? Were there IT guys in the same vein as the folks that Elon recruited into DOGE? Was everyone in the office "loyal"?[1] I doubt X was paranoid "enough" in France not to have some leakage.

[1] This was also something Google did which was change access rights for people in the China office that were not 'vetted' (for some definition of vetted) feeling like they could be an exfiltration risk. Imagine a DGSE agent under cover as an X employee who carefully puts a bunch of stuff on a server in the office (doesn't trigger IT controls) and then lets the prosecutors know its ready and they serve the warrant.

Re: X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

#400

Post by [deleted] »

gf000 wrote: post #347
trcarney wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hold on, are you saying that you should be able to be jailed for manipulation? Where would that end? could i be jailed if i post a review for a restaurant if you feel it manipulated you? or anyone stating an opinion could be construed as manipulation. that is beyond a slippery slope, that is an authoritarian nightmare.

So you think writing a review is somehow on the same magnitude as social media platforms with 300 million-3 billion users? And how is that different from TV channels/media en large having laws to abide by? Slippery slope arguments are themselves slippery slopes..

[deleted]
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