Super Pumped _ The Battle for Uber - Mike Isaac Page 0,2
protect the established order. It didn’t matter that Uber was transformational, a way for people to catch a ride from a stranger with just a few taps on their iPhone. The new model pissed off the taxi and transit unions, and those people would flood the mayor’s office with angry phone calls and emails. Uber, meanwhile, would happily rake in the cash, and do so with a groundswell of public support from locals who loved the ease and simplicity of the service.
Kalanick was done waiting. It was time to go. He gave the word and Uber general managers on the ground in the Pacific Northwest got the message: Protect the drivers, trick the cops, and unleash Uber in Portland.
The next evening, Erich England was waiting in front of a historic venue, the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, along Portland’s storied Broadway strip. He was glaring down at his phone, refreshing his Uber app.
England was not a concertgoer: he was there to bust Uber. Posing as a fan of the symphony looking to catch a car home, the Portland Transportation code enforcement officer had opened the app hoping to find a driver seeking new rides.
After the phone call ended with Plouffe, Novick had sent out marching orders to his staff: Go catch the drivers. After an officer like England successfully hailed an Uber, he would write the driver thousands of dollars in civil and criminal penalties—lack of proper insurance, public safety violations, required permits—and threaten to impound the vehicle. Novick knew he might not be able to stop the company, but at least the City of Portland could slow them down a bit by scaring off their drivers. Local press showed up to document the action.
Uber was ready. Whenever it entered a new city, the company used the same, reliable approach. Someone from Uber headquarters would travel to a new city and hire a local “general manager”—usually a fired-up twentysomething, or perhaps someone with a scrappy, startup mentality. That manager would spend weeks flooding Craigslist with want ads for drivers, enticing them with sign-up bonuses and thousands of dollars in cash for hitting milestones. “Let drivers know they get $500 cash when they take their first ride on UberX,” the advertisements said. For the most part, the GMs placing these ads had little professional experience, but that wasn’t a problem for the company’s recruiters. Uber only expected that new field operations staff have ambition, the capacity to work twelve- to fourteen-hour days, and a willingness to evade the rules—even laws—when necessary.
England refreshed his app again. Finally, his request was accepted by a driver. The car was five minutes away.
Until it wasn’t. The driver had cancelled on him, and the car had driven past, according to the app. England never saw it go by.
What England didn’t know was that Uber’s general managers, engineers, and security professionals had developed a sophisticated system, perfected over months, designed to help every city strike team—including the one in Portland—identify would-be regulators, surveil them, and secretly prohibit them from ordering and catching Ubers by deploying a line of code in the app. The effect: Uber’s drivers would evade capture as they carried out their duties. Officers like England could not “see” the shady activity, and could never prove it was happening.
England and others in Portland had no idea what they were up against. They considered Uber a group of overzealous young techies, perhaps a bit too enthusiastic about the transformative effects their startup would have on transportation. The staff was presumptuous, even arrogant, but that could be chalked up to the relative youth of the team members.
Behind the scenes, Uber was hardly innocent. Recruiting ex-CIA, NSA, and FBI employees, the company had amassed a high-functioning corporate espionage force. Uber security personnel spied on government officials, looked deep into their digital lives, and at times followed them to their houses.
After zeroing in on problematic individuals, the company would deploy one of its most effective weapons: Greyball. Greyball was a snippet of code affixed to a user’s Uber account, a tag that identified that person as a threat to the company. It could be a police officer, a legislative aide or, in England’s case, a transportation official.
Having been Greyballed, England and his fellow officers were served up a fake version of the Uber app, populated with ghost cars. They had no chance of ever capturing the rogue drivers. They might not even know if drivers were operating at all.
For the next three years, Uber operated with impunity in Portland. It