timelets

“On January 28, 1996, Ren Zhengfei held Huawei’s first “mass-resignation ceremony.” Each head of a regional sales office was told to prepare two reports: a work summary and a written resignation. “I will only sign one of the reports,” Ren said.

Huawei had started out in rural markets, and many of its early sales managers were provincial in their experience and network of contacts. As Ren sought to go national and international, he decided to make the entire sales staff resign and reapply for their jobs. “The mountain goat must outrun the lion to not be eaten,” he had told them ahead of the event. “All departments and sections must optimize and eat the lazy goats, the goats that do not learn or progress, and the goats with no sense of responsibility.”

They were following the strategy that Mao had used to win the Chinese Civil War of “encircling the cities with the countryside.”[9] They’d won over villages and towns in the beginning, building their strength to take on the big cities.

Ren told his followers that demotions built character and that the demoted would only be stronger when they worked their way up again.... “Even Deng Xiaoping could go down and up three times. Why can’t you go down and up three times?”

-- Eva Dou. “House of Huawei.”

Henley and Clark implemented this program of ephemeral and encrypted communications for the express purpose of destroying evidence of illegal or unethical practices to avoid discovery in actual or potential litigation. The Wickr application uses robust encryption which prevents the information from being viewed by anyone except the intended recipient, but more importantly, programs messages to self-destruct in a matter of seconds to no longer than six days. Consequently, Uber employees cannot be compelled to produce records of their chat conversations because no record is retained.
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By storing this data on non-attributable devices, Uber believed it would avoid detection and never be subject to legal discovery. This is because a standard preservation of evidence order typically focused on Uber work laptops, Uber networks, and Uber mobile devices. Non- attributable devices were deemed as not reasonably subsumed by any such preservation order and the team could, and did, "legally" (not so) dispose of any evidence or documentation held on these devices in the intervening period before knowledge of the devices' existence could be uncovered.
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Clark said that Uber needed to "shroud these work products in attorney-client privilege." Accordingly, Clark instructed Jacobs himself and others to address all emails on sensitive intelligence collection to him and ensure the emails were marked as "ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL," to mark any work product as "DRAFT" regardless of its actual status, and, on every communication, to specifically ask a question or request legal advice on some issue-even if no legal advice was needed or warranted. Likewise, he advised that Jacobs and others that they should communicate almost exclusively via phone, video teleconference ("Zoom"), or via the Wickr app, in that order of preference based on the record and audit trail each communications medium creates. Clark explained that the intent was to prevent disclosure of such communications if Jacobs was ever put on legal hold or his communications were ever subject to a preservation of evidence order.