This is not that special nor should it be unexpected. Uber's real problem here is that they were so careless about their operations. Like the rape victim health records incident. They sent their own VP over to go get these records? They should be using deniable intermediaries.

I feel it is rather naive to think that large companies don't have intelligence agents or other such things. The amounts it costs to spy and subvert people is just too small. The KGB was able to flip FBI and other agents for very small sums of money. So how much easier must it be for, say, Oracle, to flip a Google engineer? Or to simply support someone's career and get one of their people hired on an into relevant projects?

Some large companies certainly have Internal Affairs orgs that can go undercover to find out corruption in their org. (I've seen this happen in the case of overseas subsidiaries fudging numbers to steal from corp.) It's bizarre to think they wouldn't spend a small amount of money to obtain info worth thousands of times more.

I mean how much would you really bet that Oracle or Microsoft have never, ever, engaged in anything undercover?