Last Friday, the Northern District Court of California finally posted a long-awaited document, a letter written by the lawyer of an ex-Uber security employee. It was a doozy, a 37-page compendium of alleged criminal and unsavory activity witnessed by that employee, Ric Jacobs, while he worked at the company in 2016 and 2017. The letter came to light last week (after much legal tussling) as part of an ongoing lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car spinoff. Waymo alleges Anthony Levandowski, a former employee, made off with trade secrets when when he left to found his own company, then brought those secrets to Uber when it acquired the startup. It's bad news for Uber in this legal fight, but the damage may not stop there.

Waymo's lawsuit against Uber for allegedly stealing technology for self-driving cars hasn't gone to trial yet, because the judge received a letter from the Department of Justice suggesting Uber withheld crucial evidence. That letter, with some redactions, is now available for all to read and it's not good news for Uber. It was written by the attorney of a former employee, Richard Jacobs, and it contains claims that the company routinely tried to hack its competitors to gain an edge, used a team of spies to steal secrets or surveil political figures and even bugged meetings between transport regulators -- with some of this information delivered directly to former CEO Travis Kalanick. Alphabet's self-driving arm Waymo is making the case that Anthony Levandowski created the autonomous trucking company Otto as a scheme to steal its trade secrets and sell them to Uber. In the letter, it says that members of the Uber SSG team Jacobs worked on traveled to Pittsburgh after it acquired the company to instruct Otto employees on how to use burner phones and ephemeral communications apps to avoid discovery in an expected lawsuit. Jacobs has since testified that his attorney was mistaken about the allegations pertaining to Waymo, but now the case has been delayed until next year as a result of these claims unearthed during the ongoing criminal investigation.

A memo written by former Uber security analyst Ric Jacobs, which has become a primary piece of evidence in the company's legal battle with autonomous car development company Waymo, is expected to be made public Dec. 13. The 37-page letter from Jacobs was addressed to Uber's deputy general counsel Angela Padilla and details the company's "marketplace analytics" team that, according to Jacobs, existed for the sole purpose of stealing trade secrets from competitors. The revelation of the letter--which was raised by the United States Department of Justice after the agency collected the document earlier this year as part of its own criminal investigation into Uber--raised questions about whether Uber knowingly withheld evidence that was relevant to its dispute with the Google subsidiary company Waymo. The two firms have been locked in a dispute since February, when Waymo sued the ride hailing service for allegedly stealing proprietary information pertaining to Waymo's autonomous vehicle technology. The case revolves around former Waymo employee Anthony Levandowski who, prior to departing from the company to found his own that would eventually be acquired by Uber, downloaded 14,000 "highly confidential and proprietary design files" from Waymo servers.