Now let's say that instead you threw the keys to your unbreakable safe to your friend across the Atlantic Ocean. And you say that you didn't know that the people entering were cops. And your friend won't give the keys back. The evidence may exist, you cannot access it, neither can the police. The court has no jurisdiction over your friend and you have no authority to force your friend to give you the keys back.

At that point, whether you are in contempt or not depends on the answer to the question "did you know that the cops were entering to look for evidence before you threw the keys?" Whether the judge holds you in contempt or not is a function of the free choice of the judge and is not related to the answer to the first question (though whether or not the judge should hold you in contempt is a function of what the judge believes about what you believed).

If it were keys to a safe that existed outside of the warrant requirements (in another country in fact), then it would likely not be illegal. The regulators would unlikely be able to legally access that safe anyways without extra due process, so it’s mostly about protecting against unwarranted access.

The keys still exist and are accessible. What the kill switches does is make a fishing expedition harder. If the police knew of the existence of a specific document, or even all documents pertaining to certain terms, they could issue a targeted subpoena which Uber would have to comply with (at least in the US).

That metaphor doesn't seem directly applicable to cutting off cloud access.

If we're trying for a metaphor that would be a similar situation pre-digitization, the cloud servers containing business documents could be considered head office, and the office being raided would be the branch office. The branch office would continually be communicating with head office for their operations, and that communication would be shut down during the raid.

This isn't a great metaphor because the "head office" has become sort of stateless and ephemeral with digitization, but that's part of the interesting question the OP was posing, how does law enforcement collect evidence when that evidence is hosted on cloud servers in nebulous datacenters?

As long as no police has confiscated (in most countries this involves the police man touching it, I bet) the equipment you can break it or make it inaccessibility however you like. It's your stuff, after all.

>Not a lawyer, but let’s say the cops were searching my house. If I threw the keys to my unbreakable safe out the window, such that they could never be found, I doubt a judge would care for the distinction.

What if the safe was never in your house at all, but it was in a foreign country across an ocean? And when the cops showed up, you simply threw the keys across the ocean too?

If the cops know of something particular in the safe, then maybe the judge could find you in contempt for not producing that thing when ordered by the court, but otherwise, I don't see how they have any legal leg to stand on.

This is like not giving them the password to your phone which I thought was protected at least in the US. They’re both literally keys.

> I doubt a judge would care for the distinction.

If the judge receives a call from the ministry of justice, they will care a great deal about the distinction.

This theorycrafting is cute, but in reality you've mixed up corporate entities and yourself as a person in a criminal case.

And if a corporate entity finds a way to openly defy a national government, it tends to happen that those governments find a way to change the law (they're the ones making it, right? :P) for that defiance to become punishable by other parts of those governments which can sanction the corporation, prevent their operations within the country or even throw people in jail.