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    The Uber campaign: how ex-Obama aides helped sell firm to world

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    The Uber campaign: how ex-Obama aides helped sell firm to worldUber sought access to leaders, officials and diplomats through David Plouffe and Jim Messina, leak shows

    Uber broke laws, duped police and built secret lobbying operation, leak reveals
    It was a Sunday afternoon in early November 2015 when David Plouffe emailed his fellow former Barack Obama campaigner Matthew Barzun, typing “Mr ambassador” in the subject line.Plouffe was working for Uber, and Barzun had been rewarded for his fundraising efforts for the US president with the plum job of American ambassador to the UK.“Hope you and your family are well. I will be in London Dec 9 and 10. Any chance you could host the event you kindly suggested with influencers one of those days? Uber, Trump, Clinton etc lots to discuss … David.”Barzun obliged. “What fun!” the ambassador pinged back. Few people turned down Plouffe when he called in favours. It was just one example of how Uber leveraged Plouffe’s reputation and his access to the Obama network to promote its agenda across Europe and the Middle East, according to documents in the leaked Uber files.The embassy staff organised an event in December built around Plouffe giving a talk on the gig economy, and they invited the business minister Anna Soubry, the shadow business minister Kevin Brennan, influential MPs, government officials, journalists and business people. More

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      Capitol rioter caught after FBI finds recording of him boasting to Uber driver

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      Capitol rioter caught after FBI finds recording of him boasting to Uber driverA 15-month long investigation resulted in Jerry Braun’s arrest on 12 April; he’s been charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct On 6 January 2021, Jerry Braun hailed an Uber in Washington DC and got in the car, nursing a bleeding eye wound. The Uber driver noticed and asked, “So, has it been violent all day?”“Well it started around, right when I got there. I tore down the barricades,” Braun bragged.The conversation, captured on video by the driver’s recording device installed on the dashboard, triggered a 15-month long investigation by the FBI. Earlier this month, on 12 April, Braun was finally arrested by federal authorities and charged with violent entry or disorderly conduct, obstruction during civil disorder, and entering and remaining on restricted grounds, according to an affidavit by Lucas Bauers, FBI special agent.January 6 ‘was a coup organized by the president’, says Jamie RaskinRead moreBraun boasted openly to the Uber driver about his involvement in the deadly riots, which resulted in the deaths of five people. When he explained he’d torn down the barricades, the driver asked, “You did? Why?”“Well, because, so we could get to the Capitol,” Braun replied.The driver asked, “Well, how’d that work out for ya?”“Well, it looks like, uh, Biden’s gonna be our president,” said Braun.The Uber driver’s tip to the authorities identified Braun as “Jerry Last Name Unknown”, according to court documents. The car dropped him off at a Holiday Inn in Arlington, Virginia; authorities searched the booking records to discover that Braun had checked in as “JD Braun” on 5 January and checked out two days later. He had listed his phone number and an address in South El Monte, California.Authorities then compared the Uber image of Braun with a California Department of Motor Vehicles photo of him. With a positive match, they began to pore over images and video footage taken on the day of the riot, searching for Braun.“Agents reviewed several images on the webpage, including one of the digital images that depicts an individual with a white beard, wearing a black face mask covering his nose and chin, black sunglasses, a black beanie hat, black gloves, and a dark colored jacket with a hood,” said the affidavit.“The individual’s white beard is coming out from underneath the black mask, and a backpack shoulder strap is seen over the individual’s left shoulder,” it added.Authorities also noticed a pocket holding a pen and paper with graphics “near the individual’s left shoulder”. Upon enlarging the image, they found the following text: “23-359-4”, “Ask For JD”, and a website, shotgunshock.com – the website of a South El Monte-based store that sells motorcycle air-suspension systems.Officials accessed the Google cached version of the site and found an email address, shotgunshock@yahoo.com – which turned out to be the same address associated with Braun’s Uber account – and a phone number that was registered with the AT&T Corporation under “Jerry Braun”, according to court documents.The affidavit included screenshots of video footage that showed Braun “physically struggling with law-enforcement officers using a barricade”. At one point, Braun is also seen with a wooden plank in his hands. “The officer body camera videos show Braun in possession of the wood plank, controlling the wood plank and maneuvering the wood plank towards law enforcement officers in an aggressive manner,” the affidavit said.“In one instance … Braun extends the wood plank and physically strikes an individual who is wearing a helmet with the text ‘PRESS’ displayed across the front (the photographer) and appears to be taking photographs with a camera,” it added.“Braun and the photographer appear to exchange words. Braun then strikes the photographer with his left hand, and subsequently strikes the photographer once more with the wood plank.”On 8 November, authorities executed a search warrant in Braun’s California residence and found clothing he appeared to wear at the riot. They also seized Braun’s cellphone, which included a selfie of his eye wound as well as text message exchanges in which Braun wrote, “Occupied the capitol”, and “Hand to hand combat”, in reference to videos he took at the riot.When authorities asked Braun if he had anything to say during the search, Braun replied, “Guilty.” Authorities then asked him what he was guilty of, to which he said, “Everything.”More than 800 people have been charged for their involvement in the riot, of which more than 250 have so far pled guilty.TopicsUS Capitol attackWashington DCUS politicsUberDonald TrumpJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

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      Engineer who stole trade secrets from Google among those pardoned by Trump

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterIn his final hours of office, Donald Trump pardoned a former Google engineer who was convicted of stealing trade secrets from the company before taking up a new role with competitor Uber.Anthony Levandowski, 40, had been sentenced in August 2020 to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to inappropriately downloading trade secrets from Google’s self-driving car operation Waymo, where he was an engineer.The surprise pardon was remarkable for its star-studded list of supporters and its justification. “Mr Levandowski [pleaded] guilty to a single criminal count arising from civil litigation,” read the White House announcement. “Notably, his sentencing judge called him a ‘brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs’.”The single guilty count was the result of a plea bargain; the engineer was originally charged with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets. And the sentencing judge, William Alsup, described Levandowski’s theft as “the biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen” and refused the engineer’s request for home confinement, saying, it would give “a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets. Prison time is the answer to that.”Levandowski had not yet begun his prison sentence due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A hearing on the timing of his prison sentence had been scheduled for 9 February.Levandowski was a leader in the race to develop self-driving cars. He made a name for himself in the autonomous vehicle space after building a driverless motorcycle in a contest organized by the Pentagon’s research arm, Darpa, in 2004.Levandowski went on to found his own startup, 510 systems, which was acquired by Google in 2011. At Google, he helped to develop driverless cars until 2016. Upon leaving the company and while negotiating a new role at Uber, he later admitted, he downloaded more than 14,000 Google files to his personal laptop.Whether any secrets from those files made their way into Uber’s self-driving technology became the center of a bitter legal battle between the two tech giants that resulted in a $245m settlement for Google’s self-driving spin-off, Waymo, and criminal prosecution for Levandowski.The White House cited the support of 13 individuals in its pardon statement, including the billionaire Facebook board member Peter Thiel and several members of his coterie: Trae Stephens and Blake Masters, who have both worked for Thiel’s various investment firms, and Ryan Petersen, James Proud and Palmer Luckey, who have all received investments for startups from Thiel.Thiel donated to Trump’s 2016 campaign, spoke at his nominating convention, and gave a press conference in which he argued that the then-candidate’s calls for a ban on immigration by Muslims should not be taken “literally”. In 2016, as Thiel was growing more engaged with the pro-Trump far right, Thiel met with a prominent white nationalist, BuzzFeed News reported. As Trump’s presidency floundered, Thiel distanced himself from his former support.Luckey is best known as the founder of Oculus, the virtual reality headset startup that was acquired by Facebook for $2bn in 2014. His politics came under scrutiny during the 2016 campaign when it was revealed that he was funding a group dedicated to “shitposting” and anti-Hillary Clinton memes, and he was pushed out of Facebook in 2017. In July, his new startup, Anduril Industries, won a five-year contract with US Customs and Border Protection to provide AI technology for a border surveillance.Other supporters of the pardon include the former Disney executive Michael Ovitz and three of Levandowski’s attorneys.Levandowski was one of 143 people to be granted clemency by Trump on his last day in office. The former president has pardoned 70 people and commuted the sentences of a further 73 people. The recipients include Trump’s former senior adviser Steve Bannon, rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black, the Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and scores of others.The White House said Levandowski had “paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good”.Since his legal troubles began, Levandowski has founded a new self-driving car company and established a church focused on “the realization, acceptance and worship of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software”. The website for the Way of the Future Church appears to have become defunct at some point in March or April 2020.Reuters contributed to this report. More

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      Uber bought itself a law. Here's why that's dangerous for struggling drivers like me | Cherri Murphy

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      Last week, Uber bought itself a law.Along with Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash and Postmates, app companies spent more than $200m – the most spent on any ballot campaign in US history – to bankroll Proposition 22 in California. With its passage, the law will now exempt drivers like me from basic protections afforded to most other workers in the state.And in the aftermath of their bought-and-paid-for victory, these companies are promising to roll out this model nationwide, foretelling a grim future for gig workers across the US.But let’s be absolutely clear: Prop 22 is a dangerous law. Voters in California, inundated with ads promising drivers a “living wage”, flexibility and greater benefits, believed they were ensuring drivers a better future in the middle of a pandemic and recession.But voters were hoodwinked. Drivers are now neither employees, guaranteed rights and benefits such as healthcare, nor true independent contractors, since we can’t set our own rates, choose our own clients, or build wealth on the apps.Instead, Prop 22 promises substandard healthcare, a death sentence to many in the middle of a pandemic. We’re promised a sub-minimum wage in the middle of a recession that an independent study showed would be as low as $5.64 an hour – not the eventual $15 state minimum. We’re given no family leave, no paid sick days and no access to state unemployment compensation. Most importantly, while we’re already prevented from unionizing under federal law, the measure also makes it nearly impossible for California to pass laws protecting drivers who organize collectively, a fundamental right that companies undermine to silence worker power. More