"No two whistleblowers are the same," Paul Lewis said, "but Mark is quite unlike most of them."
A lot of the time, the people who come forward to tell a story of dubious governmental or corporate behaviour are outsiders, operating far from the centres of power. MacGann, on the other hand, "had all the characteristics of a skilled networker".
"He has a contact book gleaned over four decades in the higher echelons of government relations and public policy," Paul said. "And he is not someone who was frequently questioning this behaviour when he was at Uber – he was complicit in the wrongdoing he was seeking to expose. That's not unheard of, but it is unusual."
Paul and MacGann first met in January, in a hired conference room at a hotel in the suburbs of Geneva. MacGann had two suitcases full of laptops, hard drives, iPhones and bundles of paper. He seemed nervous initially – "as is always the case at the start of these relationships" – and he had "some anxiety about how much this was going to change his life."
What followed was an intensive initial five-day trawl through the contents of those suitcases – and, for Paul, a deepening sense of the value of the data and the complexity of the source's position.
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Here's a brief reminder of some of the revelations so far, which range from secret lobbying, to blocking regulators' access to vital data, to a willingness to leverage violence against drivers for political gain.
Uber has said that it "will not make excuses for past behaviour" during the period of the leak but said that it has since been transformed under new leadership. You can read the company's full response here, and a statement here by former CEO Travis Kalanick – who said that Uber's expansion initiatives "were led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around the world and at all times under the direct oversight and with the full approval of Uber's robust legal, policy, and compliance groups".
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"For us, the principle question is always what is the public interest in the information being shared," Paul said. "Does it reveal wrongdoing? Is this the kind of thing the public deserves to know? We quickly drew the conclusion that this was an extraordinary opportunity to tell the inside story of the tactics that fuelled Uber's global expansion."
MacGann says he was motivated by his view that it was in the public interest for Uber to reckon with this history. "At the same time, he was transparent about his grievances with the company, and it became clear that working there had been a traumatic experience for him." Last night's story reveals that as protests (pictured above) grew, MacGann faced physical threats as a result of his role as a public face of Uber's attempt to disrupt existing taxi businesses – and he only recently reached an out-of-court settlement with the company over his remuneration.
Crucial, too, is a point MacGann acknowledges in the story: "I should have shown more common sense and pushed harder to stop the craziness." Paul remembers taking a walk with him on the shores of Lake Geneva. "We were having a breather from this very intense period. And unprompted, he said: 'I realise that you're going to find evidence of my own involvement in questionable activities. And I know you have to publish that.'"
Complicating though MacGann's involvement was, it also helped to establish his credibility – and, as he says in the story, "there's no statute of limitations on doing the right thing".
The data he made available speaks for itself. "We normally see a freedom of information request that might reveal that a call took place between a minister and a lobbyist," Paul said. "Or there's a declaration in a transparency register. But you never get to see what is actually said in those conversations. To have data that allowed us to effectively be a fly on the wall – that was unique."
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