this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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Nah it's illegal to deliberately destroy data to impede investigations. You don't need to have an open investigation for that to be the case.
It remains legal to get rid of old files to free up space or if you genuinely believe they aren't necessary, though, so you need to prove intent.
If there's a subpeona or something, their destruction is itself a crime, but under this law, its the intent to defraud the courts that's illegal, and that intent is always illegal.
The law exists specifically for this situation. Purging important business documents preemptively is clearly not OK.
Citation: https://legalclarity.org/18-u-s-c-1519-destruction-alteration-or-falsification-of-records/
Just to add, if it's found that evidence was destroyed, beyond potential seperate charges for the destruction itself, a judge would also typically give an averse inference instruction to the jury. That means the jury should assume that the destroyed evidence would have been damning to whomever destroyed it.
What that tells me is, assuming google acted rationally in the destruction, either they think they have a reasonable chance that they can beat the evidence destruction charges, or that the evidence is so damning that the reality of the situation is considerably worse than whatever adverse inferences might be drawn.
(I am not a lawyer, so please take my interpretation with a large grain of salt.)
No that seems likely.
Evidence that would damn them here being in a court record makes it admissible elsewhere for a crime that isn't even prosecuted yet.
They're cutting off their foot to save their leg, here, since this isn't particularly secretive, seeing how we know about it.
Do you happen to know when the last time was that a rich company was prosecuted for this?
It seems a lot like the perjury laws: there to scare poor people into telling the truth because of almost non-existant prosecution of it.
And if it is a fine and not jail time (white collar crimes are almost never jail time) the fine would have to be much larger than the penalties they would not have to pay because of the crime, otherwise it is simply a net win for the company
Companies don't get jail time.
Sure, technically an individual could, but generally the actual destruction is an employee doing what they're told to do. They're somewhat complicit but the real problem is the c-suite people.
I unfortunately don't know when this last happened or any specific details on what the penalty would be, but I feel fairly confident that this law falls under the "cost of doing business" part of illegal corporate activity. I wish it didn't.