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Mr. Gicinto recalled that relations were strained, and both men seemed uncomfortable sharing leadership.
Still, his work grew rapidly. The group, which had grown to include dozens of employees, wanted to follow up with Uber’s overseas competitors, whether they were taxi drivers or executives of Chinese ride-hailing company Didi. But they also needed to protect their own executives from surveillance and fend off web scraping operations that use automated systems to gather information about Uber’s pricing and driver supply.
It was an overwhelming task. To keep up, the team gave some projects to intelligence firms that sent contractors to infiltrate driver protests. Other work was done at home, as Uber built its own scraping system to collect massive amounts of competitor data. It is legal to scrape public data, but the law limits the use of such data for commercial purposes.
The team rushed to recruit more staff, and Mr. Gicinto recruited people he knew from his time at the CIA: when did an agent, Ed Russo, and Jake Nocon, a former agent of the Marine Crime Investigation Service, meet Mr. Gicinto? They worked with the Joint Counterterrorism Task Force in San Diego.
When Didi’s CEO Jean Liu visited the Bay Area, Uber followed suit. And when Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber at the time, went to Beijing, the employees tried to fire Didi’s surveillance teams and transferred Mr. Kalanick’s phones to other hotels so his location would ping to a place where he wasn’t.
“For us, every part of that was a game of helping our executives run their meetings without revealing who they were talking to,” said Mr Henley, who heads Uber’s global threat operations. “And it was super fun, wasn’t it? It was a game of cat and mouse going back and forth.”
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