> If the authorities had a warrant, why wouldn't they just take all the locked computers with them back for further investigation? Then they would have been able to have a judge order Uber to unlock the computers for forensics.

If I had to guess: Very little data is stored on site.

If all of your local office computing platform is basically a thin client, confiscating the local equipment with a warrant doesn't do much. You can take it away to a forensics lab and image its disks, but you're not going to get any usable data off it without a network connection into the corporate WAN, crypto keys, sending subpoenas to specific people for their login credentials, etc.

I know nothing about Uber's internal software architecture and network topology. But I would be very surprised if most of their day-to-day operational systems like ticketing, customer service, recruiting, finances, were not operated through TLS1.2 connections in a web browser to a set of intranet servers, located thousands of km away from where the branch offices are located.