"wrote specialised software designed to export confidential and trade secret information from Tesla's manufacturing operating system"
I bet this 'specialised software' was 'cp -R'. No wait, this is Tesla, could well be 'robocopy /e'.
Apple, Google and Microsoft have been whacked with a US court order by Tesla that forces them to preserve copies of an ex-employee's deleted emails and cloud storage accounts. Tesla alleges that former Gigafactory process technician Martin "Marty" Tripp "exported confidential and trade secret information" from the struggling …
I'm sure these three get court orders to preserve evidence on a daily basis, given that they control the three biggest computing platforms in the world, and people tend to use the cloud storage that comes with their computing platform. And therefore all three have a process in place to deal with these types of court orders - which is why Apple told them "use the courts" when approached directly, as they should.
Yep. "Come back with a warrant" is the stock response for any organisation that holds personal data when they get a request like this. A competent legal team engaged in a genuine case would have quietly obtained a legal injunction to prevent permanent deletion of the records in question, and forward it to the relevant cloud providers. They could then apply for a warrant for disclosure of those documents at their leisure.
The fact that they're publicly broadcasting this to the world reveals Tesla's action for what it is: an attempt to put the frighteners on their former employee for revealing what was going on... and on anyone else still in the company who might have been thinking of doing the same.
Business laptops/desktops tend to have USB disabled completely, USB drives disabled (i.e. keyboards etc still work), or USB drives set to read only.
When you are allowed to write to USB, they typically enforce encryption, which can then only be read back on the same organisations laptops/desktops. i.e. Can't be used to transfer to a 3rd party.