Over the previous few years, Uber has schemed to spice up its self-driving efforts by spying on rivals, poaching employees, and buying their software program, in keeping with newly launched courtroom paperwork. Although competitor intelligence work is commonplace amongst giant corporations, the main points are hardly ever made public.
Within the long-running Waymo v. Uber lawsuit, Uber stands accused of stealing and utilizing commerce secrets and techniques from Alphabet’s self-driving automotive division to spice up its personal, youthful program. New paperwork filed in federal courtroom this week give attention to the actions of Uber’s Strategic Providers Group (SSG), an eight-person group inside the firm’s Menace Operation division, devoted to accumulating intelligence on rivals. A former ThreatOps worker has claimed that SSG frequently engaged in fraud and theft, and employed third-party distributors to acquire unauthorized information or data.
Uber denies these allegations, arguing that they had been a part of that worker’s try and extort cash from the corporate amidst the Waymo lawsuit. However it made SSG employees accessible for deposition by Waymo in December. These depositions element the group’s actions, together with video surveillance of rivals’ vehicles, speaking with suppliers, plans to amass self-driving software program by scraping web sites, and a visit to Las Vegas for the CES trade show.
The group’s efforts included launching a venture known as Zoo to study extra about Uber’s self-driving rivals, every of which bought its personal code title. “SSG’s 2017 analysis will give attention to Giraffe, Turtle, Zebra and Turtle/Chimp in addition to rivals from Asia,” mentioned a planning doc SSG employees wrote in December 2016, which a lawyer for Waymo learn into the courtroom report.
Giraffe was Uber’s code-name for Google and Waymo, courtroom data point out. Turtle/Chimp might seek advice from Common Motors and both Lyft (with which it desires to construct a self-driving automotive community) or Cruise, the startup GM purchased in 2016. Zebra—whose purpose is quoted as being to “reinvent fully the auto”—may be Zoox, a stealthy Silicon Valley startup that’s constructing a robotic taxi from the bottom up.
“Giraffe leads the opposite 30-plus corporations within the race to subject totally autonomous autos,” admitted the report. “For 2017, SSG’s precedence effort might be Giraffe.” SSG was by which automakers Waymo was working with, what know-how wants it was outsourcing, and who its suppliers had been, the data reveal. SSG was additionally tasked with “[tracking] social media accounts, e.g., LinkedIn, Fb, Twitter, et cetera, with a view to map the private networks of key personnel” at Waymo.
The group’s prime goal was the stuff that makes Waymo’s vehicles so sensible: their secret supply code. “Success in [the] autonomous car race finally hinges on the supply code,” learn one other SSG doc. “All of the supply code needed for fulfillment will be compressed to [around] 75 megabytes.” As compared, an hour-long Netflix obtain is about 200 megabytes.
SSG began its search by inspecting GitHub, an internet site the place software program builders publish all types of open supply software program. “We might [be] in search of context that will be… inadvertently dropped out of there by an engineer [but] we’ve by no means run throughout something that I might contemplate protected information,” Matt Henley, Uber’s director of ThreatOps, mentioned in a deposition.
The subsequent plan, courtroom data present, concerned sending SSG employees to CES in January 2017—autonomous driving is a major topic at the enormous technology trade show in Las Vegas. Group members attended technical displays to see if they may glean any details about different corporations’ supply code that will assist Uber’s Superior Expertise Group construct its personal robocars. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t work both, most likely as a result of most corporations keep away from revealing key technical information in public lectures.
“So when it comes to the primary priorities for assortment and organizations, it’s your testimony that Uber obtained no data at CES 2017?… It was a failure?” a Waymo lawyer requested SSG member Edward Russo throughout his deposition. “You could possibly characterize it that manner,” Russo replied.
SSG didn’t depart Las Vegas fully empty handed, the depositions point out. A South Korean firm known as Jungsang instructed one member of the SSG staff that it was working with Waymo on laser-ranging lidar programs.
On February 14, 2017, SSG introduced this intel into a gathering with Anthony Levandowski and Lior Ron, ex-Google engineers and co-founders of the self-driving truck startup Otto that Uber had purchased the earlier summer time. Levandowski had been made head of Uber’s self-driving program. He thought the knowledge was “rubbish and never of curiosity,” SSG staff member Nick Gicinto mentioned in his deposition.
As a substitute of ready for data to drop into Uber’s lap, Levandowski and Ron urged that the intelligence group take a extra proactive strategy, in keeping with the brand new materials filed in courtroom. Ron famous that provide chain members are “good sources of perception right into a competitor’s plans, intentions and capabilities.” A report from the February assembly mentioned, “To succeed, our [intelligence] assortment plan have to be each broad and deep. It have to be broad sufficient to develop streams of reporting on at the very least six completely different rivals… [and] deep sufficient to amass in a well timed method significant technical information.”
The depositions describe a brand new precedence checklist for SSG, together with exterior distributors, to develop new sources of knowledge, debrief engineers who had left their packages to work at Uber, and “map the human terrain round every of the important thing personalities” at Waymo.
Shortly after the February assembly, Waymo filed its lawsuit towards Uber, accusing Levandowski of taking 9,700 megabytes of confidential technical self-driving automotive information with him when he left Google, utilizing it to start out Otto, after which bringing it to Uber.
In April, mentioned Gicinto, Russo and one other SSG team-member, Jake Nocon, flew to Phoenix to hold out surveillance of Waymo’s experimental self-driving vehicles. For about 4 days, they adopted and videotaped the vehicles driving on public streets. Henley will need to have joined them, as he testified to a dialog in a automotive with Nocon, the place Nocon requested him if there was something to the Waymo lawsuit. “I answered one thing alongside the strains, I believe they’re simply making an attempt to screw with us,” mentioned Henley. “There could also be one thing with Anthony [Levandowski]. And I mentioned, I hope this audio doesn’t depart the automotive.” However Nocon had unintentionally left the audio recording on, and Waymo discovered it throughout authorized discovery for the trial.
The lawsuit, after all, brought about greater than idle hypothesis amongst Uber staffers. Levandowski and Ron’s plans to strategy suppliers and conduct every day background analysis on rivals had been by no means carried out, in keeping with a number of SSG depositions. Nick Gicinto testified that he was not conscious of Uber ever hiring exterior distributors to dig up data on Waymo.
Uber finally fired Levandowski in Could 2017 for not cooperating with its investigation into the lawsuit. Gicinto mentioned in his deposition that the brand new head of the autonomous driving program, Eric Meyhofer, shortly requested Ron to stop all surveillance of Uber’s rivals. SSG had additionally filmed different autos, together with these run by an unnamed firm in San Francisco, as late as Could.
Waymo argues that Uber’s specific curiosity within the efficiency of its self-driving vehicles final 12 months proves Uber’s sick intent. A lawyer for Uber says that “gathering public data on rivals is a typical (and authorized) enterprise follow,” and that Waymo is making “unwarranted inferences primarily based on irrelevant innuendo.”
The trial is because of start on February 5, at which level, the jury will get to make its personal judgment.