Bezos, Other Amazon Execs Used Signal - a Problem for FTC Investigators (seattletimes.com) 93
Pursuing an unfair business practices case against Amazon, America's Federal Trade Commission has now "accused" Amazon of using Signal, reports the Seattle Times:
The newspaper notes that the app "can be set to automatically delete messages, to hide information related to the FTC's ongoing antitrust investigation into the company." In a court filing this week, the FTC moved to "compel" Amazon to share more information about its policies and instructions related to using the Signal app... The FTC accused Amazon executives of manually turning on the feature to delete messages in Signal even after the company learned that the FTC was investigating and had told Amazon to keep documents, emails and other messages.
Many of Amazon's senior leaders used Signal, according to the FTC, including former CEO and current chair Jeff Bezos, CEO Andy Jassy, and general counsel David Zapolsky, as well as Jeff Wilke, former head of Amazon's worldwide consumer business, and Dave Clark, former worldwide operations chief. "Amazon is a company that tightly controls what its employees put into writing," FTC attorneys said in a court filing Thursday. "But Amazon's senior leadership also used another channel for internal communications and avoided the need to talk carefully by destroying the records of their messages...."
In the court filing Thursday, the FTC asked Amazon to provide two troves of documents related to its use of Signal: Amazon's document preservation notices and its instructions about the use of "ephemeral messaging applications, including Signal." The FTC said Amazon waited for more than a year after it learned of the investigation to instruct its employees to preserve Signal messages. "It is highly likely that relevant information has been destroyed as a result of Amazon's actions and inactions," the FTC wrote in court records.
The newspaper notes that the app "can be set to automatically delete messages, to hide information related to the FTC's ongoing antitrust investigation into the company." In a court filing this week, the FTC moved to "compel" Amazon to share more information about its policies and instructions related to using the Signal app... The FTC accused Amazon executives of manually turning on the feature to delete messages in Signal even after the company learned that the FTC was investigating and had told Amazon to keep documents, emails and other messages.
Many of Amazon's senior leaders used Signal, according to the FTC, including former CEO and current chair Jeff Bezos, CEO Andy Jassy, and general counsel David Zapolsky, as well as Jeff Wilke, former head of Amazon's worldwide consumer business, and Dave Clark, former worldwide operations chief. "Amazon is a company that tightly controls what its employees put into writing," FTC attorneys said in a court filing Thursday. "But Amazon's senior leadership also used another channel for internal communications and avoided the need to talk carefully by destroying the records of their messages...."
In the court filing Thursday, the FTC asked Amazon to provide two troves of documents related to its use of Signal: Amazon's document preservation notices and its instructions about the use of "ephemeral messaging applications, including Signal." The FTC said Amazon waited for more than a year after it learned of the investigation to instruct its employees to preserve Signal messages. "It is highly likely that relevant information has been destroyed as a result of Amazon's actions and inactions," the FTC wrote in court records.
requirement (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:requirement (Score:5, Insightful)
the key part from FTA seems to be "The FTC accused Amazon executives of manually turning on the feature to delete messages in Signal even after the company learned that the FTC was investigating and had told Amazon to keep documents, emails and other messages".
In this case, it really appears that they purposely switched to an ephemeral message service *after* FTC told them to keep all messages.
Re:requirement (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, the reality is that Amazon will receive yet another very expensively embroidered letter that asks them not to do it again. Amazon will then use the letter to get yet another tax refund. Amazon will then commit the same crimes again. All the while Bezos will be launching another one of his penis rockets into the sky, laughing as his subjects pay for it all.
Re:requirement (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: requirement (Score:1)
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What model are they relying on to determine economic depletion, and why should I think their solutions will just lead to more problems that will result in more hassles and price increases for me, the little guy? Why should I trust my government to do anything right, given how personal and socially-determined their policy-making is, based on my personal experience with a state agency? What if there are better ways to address their core concerns than punishment and enforcement and telling people they can't ta
Re: requirement (Score:1)
Re: requirement (Score:5, Interesting)
You should trust the government more than you trust Amazon. The government is accountable to the people. Amazon is only accountable to its shareholders.
Your "I'm only asking questions" shtick is a little tired.
Re: requirement (Score:2)
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"The government is accountable to the people."
So why can't we the people ask for better results than these endless cycles of punishment and evasion through politics and bribery? Why not empower people instead with a strong basic income, instead of making a lot of work for lawyers to run up huge bills with?
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The government is accountable to the people.
Which people? Not the rank and file citizens for sure. That being said, it is rational to trust Amazon even less.
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The worst Amazon can do is to deliver your packages to random places
At least until Amazon starts delivering packages with drones armed with fully automatic weapons.
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Unless that is the standard goal. No direct cloak room tit for tat, just elected officials create this branch with claws, let it churn independently, and collect "donations" as prophylactic to back off a bit.
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What is stopping them from killing or imprisoning you? Could you stop amazon I they tried? Do you trust the government enough to let them help you?
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That's a whole different question. Americans in particular seem to be experts at voting against their own best interests. It has to do with money and manipulation of politics by the powerful, I think.
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Who investigates the investigators?
Most federal agencies have an Inspector General who is responsible for internal investigations.
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How much does Bezos have to pay to get that guy on his side? Or will Trump just pardon him, regardless?
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Why does this make me think of the deep state, I wonder? Do you think I'm alone?
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Do you think Bezos has enough money and political friends to go over their head?
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"The reality is the FTC is an independent authority for that very reason."
Was Hoover's FBI an independent authority, too, and did that stop him from unfair prosecutions under the authority of law?
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What if the Feds are just snoops and Bezos just wants to have a private conversation for once and his money actually comes from stocks not exploitation of the workers so much? What if he just thought of picking up old boxes as new ones are delivered, to recycle boxes quickly and cheaply?
Don't use your work phone. Easy.
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FTC shouldn't exist in the first place, all of the things the Federal government does to hinder business is illegal, it should be the Federal government that receives letters from everyone, telling it to go to hell, not the other way around.
We already have mega-corps far larger than most actual monopolies that are Too Big To Fail from a profit/loss standpoint. The fuck makes you think that shit-uation is actually going to improve with NO oversight whatsoever?
Corruption shouldn’t exist either. Let me know how you intend on addressing it, because it happens every time no one gives a shit to prevent it.
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the key part from FTA seems to be "The FTC accused Amazon executives of manually turning on the feature to delete messages in Signal even after the company learned that the FTC was investigating and had told Amazon to keep documents, emails and other messages".
In this case, it really appears that they purposely switched to an ephemeral message service *after* FTC told them to keep all messages.
Thank you for that detail. At first I was going to say it’s quite a dangerous precedent to assume someone is “hiding” something simply by using a secure messaging service. But this kind of behavior tends to scream I’m hiding something.
I guess it’s a good sign. Amazon still fears being caught. We should grow concerned when they don’t even bother hiding their corruption. They’re already Too Big To Fail I’m sure.
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The overall concept / requirement to keep copies of internal communication (including relatively ephemeral stuff like instant messaging) is, imo, unreasonable. I've followed some trials relatively closely over the years and it seems like lawyers/investigators use contemporaneous statements for dumb "gotcha" purposes all the time and seemingly get away with it. i.e. they take stuff that's _clearly_ a joke and then confront people with it as if it's real just to put them on the defensive and just other inte
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The actual decisions would move to people in smoke filled rooms and private conversations off site. To some extent this is already true.
Corporate scrutiny just results in evolution of the corruption.
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but as previous poster says, basically, we all have a reasonable expectation of privacy for at least some portion of our days and lives. So Bezos can expect to have some too. The question is where is the line drawn?
What's almost more hilarious is that with literally all the technology in the world, arguably some of the best, he uses Signal? ha ha
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The actual decisions would move to people in smoke filled rooms.
The 2024 version of this is a room full of “tough” soy boys with man buns sucking down caramel lattes and blowing vape clouds.
Yeah. I know. Hits like a toddler in a boxing match.
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That is awfully funny actually. This site really needs emotes, like laughs. The moderation system is very...20th century.
Re:requirement (Score:5, Informative)
That's why there's document retention policies: to make employees aware exactly where the lines are drawn. Absent any other instructions, those policies tell you when you need to retain documents and when you can safely delete them. The company can make those policies anything they want them to be, for the most part.
The exceptions aren't hard to parse either. The biggie is that when the legal and compliance people tell you to retain certain types of documents, you have to follow those instructions regardless of what the document retention policies say. Legal and compliance are doing that because they know about an investigation or have been directly told as part of a legal proceeding to retain some types of documents relevant to the proceeding. The second biggie is when there's a regulatory or legal requirement to retain certain documents, eg. tax returns. Companies are expected to write their retention policies to comply with those requirements, but if they don't that doesn't excuse failure to follow those requirements. Mostly the employees who'd be affected by that know about the requirements as part of their education and/or training. So really none of it's as complicated or as fuzzy as you make it out to be. In this case the mere fact that they're using Signal rather than an internal channel that's already set up to follow document retention policies is a big red flag that they're trying to avoid keeping documents they know they ought to.
One good general rule is that if your superiors tell you they don't want a permanent record of something, you absolutely do want to have a permanent record of both that and the instructions from them. It'll save your hide when your bosses turn out to have been doing something like this and prosecutors are leaning on you.
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Are you completely oblivious of the Big Brother implications of this regulatory power to dictate record retention policies to private citizens? Won't this just lead a Trump FTC to investigate Taylor Swift for possibly illegal in-kind campaign contributions?
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The overall concept / requirement to keep copies of internal communication (including relatively ephemeral stuff like instant messaging) is, imo, unreasonable. I've followed some trials relatively closely over the years and it seems like lawyers/investigators use contemporaneous statements for dumb "gotcha" purposes all the time and seemingly get away with it. i.e. they take stuff that's _clearly_ a joke and then confront people with it as if it's real
There are two issues here. First, one only needs to avoid destroying it it's obviously evidence. I don't think they even need to keep it--a letter could get lost--but they cannot destroy it. The second matter, interpreting jokes as though they were evidence (and bringing up any other BS that's not relevant to the case or is not strictly true), is a problem that I suspect is endemic to any adversarial justice system. It's shameful.
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Michael Cohen and Trump used Signal, apparently, to hide their devious deeds. (It came out in court about that.) Sooooo... yeah, I guess only crooked evil people use it???
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They do once the know they are under investigation and instructed to keep all relevant documents ,
Re:requirement (Score:4, Insightful)
Thats the thing though. With financial communications there IS a compliance requirement. The problem is we dont know if those signal messages involved financial communications.
I worked at a Telco and one of our big sales points was an app designed for people in financial markets that needed to be able to demonstrate communications logs for audits and the like. Its totally a thing.
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Oh you sweet summer child. Rules are for little people.
Re:requirement creep (Score:2)
Well of course (Score:1)
Well of course he did ... he's an asshole.
Why didn't they just wiretap? (Score:1)
Lazy Feds, amirite?
Re: Why didn't they just wiretap? (Score:2)
Re: Why didn't they just wiretap? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if they did, they would still be in the type of situation that is central to the plot of the book Cryptonomicon. How do you use information without revealing that you have the information. Because _if_ you are able to monitor Signal, and this is not public knowledge - the moment you use that information in a way which reveals you have access, then people will stop using Signal and you lose the advantage.
If the US are able to monitor Signal, then they would not waste that advantage on something as mundane as FTC looking into Amazon.
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Can you imagine a kind of free America where both would just go free and Karens would have literal AI filter bubbles so they just don't see what they don't like?
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They only apply Enron standards to protesters and rioters, not corporate execs.
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Only for little people and people not on the approved thinking list.
Use the old fashioned way (Score:1)
Preservation of documents (Score:2)
If Amazon had been "told to keep documents, emails and other messages" then deleting such messages is obstruction of justice at the very least. I guess the FTC anticipated [ftc.gov] that this might happen.
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Counterpoint: "you are required to document your criminal conspiracy and maintain those documents for seven years" has obvious 5th amendment problems.
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The 5th amendment says you can't be compelled to be a witness against yourself. That has a very narrow meaning: You can't be compelled to testify in court against yourself. It doesn't cover destruction of evidence. It also applies only to criminal cases. I'm not sure if the FTC is considering criminal or just civil penalties in this case.
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felony obstruction (Score:2)
Re:felony obstruction (Score:4, Interesting)
In 2021 the SEC started going around fining banks for insufficient record-keeping. In 2020 everyone switched to home office, and as part of that ad-hoc transition, every single bank had employees replacing face to face communication with whatsapp chats or whatever they had available. Which is illegal. There is an old 20th century rule that financial institutions must record official communications for the regulator, written at a time when "official communications" meant printed announcements from the boss to the whole company, and the SEC has reinterpreted that to mean "every single message between two coworkers has to happen on the bank's inhouse platform which has recording" (except verbal in-person communication in a smoke-filled room, because the point isn't for this to make sense, it's to advance the bureaucracy).
So since 2021, the SEC has been going around fining banks because they did not have secure recorded home-office-friendly communication platforms ready to go as soon as the 2020 lockdowns started. Recently they ran out of banks and started fining random family offices and hedge funds, which have actually pushed back (because unlike banks, hedge funds can have a more adversarial relationship with the regulator without being destroyed). From this article, I am getting that the FTC has joined in on the grift.
By and large, these complaints by the agencies do not allege any wrongdoing beyond the failed recordkeeping. They are just process crimes against an increasingly intrusive bureaucracy which wants more and more material to go on fishing expeditions with. Bureaucrats going around fining people for using whatsapp are not improving the world in any way, they are not stopping real white collar crime, they are just going for the laziest and easiest way to book a fine and an enforcement action. It's a very salient example of the bureaucracy growing to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy, and imo it should be burned with fire.
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Bureaucrats going around fining people for using whatsapp are not improving the world in any way, they are not stopping real white collar crime, they are just going for the laziest and easiest way to book a fine and an enforcement action. It's a very salient example of the bureaucracy growing to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy, and imo it should be burned with fire.
This is merely another symptom of a declining America. Once someone won the race for power, it became all downhill. I wonder who the mystery puppet master is and I wonder why they are so unimaginative and boring.
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Not for the people with right political connection. Bezos's WaPo did great work against OrangeManBad. He'll get a slap on the wrist.
Meanwhile... (Score:4, Interesting)
Who needs Signal when business conversations over the phone or in person remain private and unrecorded? I've never understood this split between the digital and analog world with respect to what we're required to capture.
As an aside, the skeptic in me can't help but think that these legacy forms of communication are the real reason for the drive to get people back into offices.
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Why aren't they required to be recorded and made available? It seems like all business related correspondence and conversations should be on record, and it's not like it is difficult to do these days. A simple call recording app or option enabled on the corporate IP phones.
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Because in the citizenship there are still some liberals who don't want to live in a surveillance state. All three of them believe that you don't lose your human right to privacy as soon as you found a business or take on a job. But they will die of old age and then we can all agree to conduct future communication exclusively through our personal, backdoored Apple Pro headsets,
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There are already rules for corporate record keeping, particularly financial, right? The corporation can't throw away financial records for X years, must keep employee records for Y years etc.
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Yeah, and there's been a big expansion in the de-facto requirements over the last 3 years, which I find pretty bad (https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23305920&cid=64432236). IMO there needs to be a balance between "record official, criminal orders distributed by the boss" and "don't keep every single word by every employee for the purpose of untargeted, large-scale fishing expeditions". When people are en-masse getting in trouble for using signal, the pendulum has swung too far in one direction.
T
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I don't think it's an issue for very large corporations like Amazon to be required to keep detailed records for all decision making, for example. When they get that large, they are very powerful and the potential for market manipulation is high.
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Get serious. This is like the mentality that every email ever written should be on the record, or every text, and conversation should be recorded.... just because it's possible. If Bezos has a business thought, it's not owed to anyone. Doubtless, business records are required to be kept, that's not in question. Where is the line drawn between public and private?
My feelings aside regarding the second
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Decision making at large corporations needs to be documented anyway, for legal reasons. At least in Europe it does, because if later it turns out that a decision is questioned on say anti-competitiveness grounds, or because it lead to illegal discrimination, failure to be able to show that proper diligence was employed can be a big issue.
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Rights to privacy do not imply wrongdoing.
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If you say "I can't remember" then it's unlikely to help your case. In the face of prima facie wrong-doing, saying you don't remember and didn't bother to document it will increase the chances of you losing.
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Whether it helps or hurts your case, is just speculation on your part.
Ok. You tell me and everyone. Does Bezos (or anyone) have an expectation of privacy?
If [ $YOURANSWER == "no" ] then
you advocate for the panopticon
else
Where is the line drawn?
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"don't keep every single word by every employee for the purpose of untargeted, large-scale fishing expeditions".
When was the last time that happened?
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Who said that it has happened? You are quoting a hypothetical extreme, toward which the pendulum has swung. For example, the SEC has been making rounds fining almost every US bank for the heinous crime of low-level employees using whatsapp. Because it is easier for regulators to get a victory and an enforcement action suing people for procedural crimes instead of actually going after insider trading. It accomplishes nothing beside employing a ton more bureaucrats on both sides.
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If the government is going after them in a "fishing expedition", then they have expensive lawyers who should complain about it to a judge. That's why we have a judge.
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Yes, I am sure that they will complain to the judge, but that does not stop us from debating it in a public forum as well. Yes, they have expensive lawyers, but that does not mean that a society where you need to spend a ton on expensive lawyers to appease the army of dead-weight bureaucrats is a good thing. It's still a pathology, and we should strive to eliminate all of them.
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Re:Meanwhile... (Score:4, Interesting)
Who needs Signal when business conversations over the phone or in person remain private and unrecorded?
Conversations over the phone are recorded. The NSA has access to them, and I suspect the FTC can use the same process to get them. This is still Patriot Act stuff, over 20 years after 9/11, with no proof that recording everyone's conversations has even prevented a single terror attack. With the latest FISA renewal [nbcnews.com], a warrant isn't even needed for Americans on international calls.
P.S. I don't follow this closely, so I would appreciate being corrected.
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"I've never understood this split between the digital and analog world with respect to what we're required to capture."
You capture the conversation because you distrust your co-conspirators more than you fear the state.