Records of extraterritoriality. Options

[Paul]

[toturi]

What is Lowfyr going to do? Buy up Switzerland? The Swiss has the Corp Court and the Zurich Orbital calling it home. One has all of the AAAs backing it and the other has almost all the world's resources... :D

[noname_hero]

Saying a corporation can change records is a pointless argument. *Both* sides can do that, so courts (even corporate ones) have to set standards defining rules for what is admissible. And even the fast legal process can't prevent some scenarios resulting from "hidden" installations that'd try to gain extraterritoriality only *after* problems start:

"Our new heavy recon/strike UAV prototype, undergoing a test flight, was fired upon at 18:23:42, as recorded by both the robot and UCAS AWACS plane flying nearby. Attached are records of relevant test flight data, stored into Zurich-Orbital's protected databanks in real time, and verified records from AWACS's sensors and communications equipment.
The records also contain repeated verifications of the airspace's status. Note that at 18:20:17, when the UAV first detected a radar lock-on, at 18:20:18, when it switched into lock-while-scan mode, and at 18:23:00, during the last periodic check before the incident, civilian authority confirmed the whole area UCAS territory. The area became a property of Mitsuhama at 18:23:02 and was recognized as a corporate enclave at 18:23:38. The robot, following a pre-programmed path, began to leave the then-corporate airspace at 18:23:16; it began to return fire at 18:23:44, i.e. 2 seconds after it was fired upon. The change of area's status was registered into air traffic control's database at 18:23:51, i.e. 9 seconds after the robot was fired upon.
We intend to seek compensations for damage to the UAV prototype, compensation for the financial loss resulting from such interruption of the research program and compensation for the ordnance the robot expended while it defended itself."

Or:

"The footage sure showed Renraku's employees using what I'd call heavy firepower. It will get worse. Now we can see Dr. Mortensen and two more unidentified men leaving the building. Here they come - four hellhounds. You can hear explosions in the background - assault cannons, I'm told. The runners had a sniper somewhere, so the hounds... It is already over, that was damn good shooting. Still, you can see one of the runners is dead and Dr. Mortensen lost his left arm. Even now he remains in a DocWagon intensive care. Notice the time - 22:46. I remind you, the whole place was recognized as a corporate enclave at 22:48 - 2 minutes *after* this."

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

[Kagetenshi]

About as much as a soldier from the '40s knows about modern military operations.

~J

[Paul]

[Pinel]

I just hate it when so-called "real work" keeps me away from a good discussion...

Crimsondude, even today police officers can obtain warrants outside of working hours, and foreign diplomats can talk to a senior official in the host country on a 24/7 basis (and vice versa). For the really iffy stuff, even ambassadors can expect to be pulled out of bed in the wee hours and summoned to the nearest Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, whether they had time to shave or not. Is it unreasonnable to assume that the reps of extra-territorial megacorps can obtain similar or better access, especially when you factor in the Matrix, expert systems, VR and telepresence ?

As was pointed out by many, shifting or acquiring extra-territoriality for an existing site depends on a lot of variables: where the facility is, what the relationship is between the megacorp and the national government (the plot line in Tsimshian comes to mind), and especially the reason why the facility wasn't declared in the first place. In some cases, having runners merely expose an undeclared corp facility could bring so much trouble to its owner that it could be a mission objective in itself. And sometimes declaring an enclave after the fact might be so dangerous that the stereotypical red button will be used and the entire facility will turn into fist-sized bits.

[Edward]

If your going to transfer your propriety data and key personnel out anyway (and the data probably has an off site backup so you don’t even need to transfer it out) then what is to be gained by claming extraterritoriality. If you claim extraterritoriality everybody knows you have something you want to hide. If you just relocate immediately and eliminate evidence at the old location everybody knows somebody s hiding something big.

If you’re going to move the facility anyway what to you gain by declaring extraterritoriality? The price of the general-purpose hardware located on site?

Edward

[BitBasher]

[Paul]

I completely disagree. (I'm sure thats obvious. :) )

A primary reason would be operational security. By "hiding" a facility deep in beneath several shells, and layers allows you to claim at least some distance from the project itself-which is useful in the case of plausible deniability. It also is extremely useful for the operation if it is covert-something that is supposed to be off the books, and not a Corporate X product. ("We would never experiment on Metahumans, especially not on homeless Ork women. We're Corp X and we care.")

In order to achieve this in 206x, where the Matrix makes a plethora of information available almost instantly you need to hide in plain sight sometimes. "No secret research facility here-just us accountants. Really."

By not labeling the facility as extraterritorial you reduce its apparent value. After all why would anyone store anything of value in area they didn't completely control right? It's alot like laying a gun on the table and saying it's really a cigarette lighter, or a prop. "It's not really that." Or distracting people from looking at the gun int he first place. Sleight of hand, and deception on a much larger scale.

As for why they would claim extraterritorality after their cover was blown-well soem data can obviously be moved, and even continously backed up. Some may not. Some valueable thinsg may not be able to be moved so easily. "Sorry Mr. Johnson Wuxing doesn't ship Steroid addicted cybered Dzo-na-Qua's overnight. Can we intrest you in third class freight?"

[Paul]

[BitBasher]

Obviously I was talking about the ones that are! ;)

...and if theres anything that modern day computers tells us, it's that security through obfuscation SUCKS, and is good for neither security nor obfuscation. ALl it takes is a bored decker or a curious person to track down that ownership data. The Matrix is a dangerous thing.

[Sargasso]

Why all the focus on being high tech? If a corp gets caught with their pants down, they can always pin it on a patsy.

[Kagetenshi]

[Edward]

Sargasso. That is why I think they would not claim extraterritoriality. It makes it that much hard to pin on a patsy. Of cause you could claim. We just discovered a recently acquired division was up to no good. We are moving in to clean up the problem. Of cause that still isn’t as good as nobody ever suspecting you had any involvement at all (and a Decker would need to trace threw 20 different glacial systems in holding companies and actually find the apropreat records to work out the ownership records. Imposable if your not looking for it and insanely difficult if you do.

Edward

[BitBasher]

No, holding companies are legally declared, it's public info. That's the problem.

[Edward]

The level of declaration required for your holding companies varies with jurisdiction. Eg today people use holding companies in Singapore because Singapore dose not require ownership to be disclosed at all thus you would need hack the companies privet records of who owns them (they need to know who to answer to and where to send the profits).

You could register a company in your extraterritorial jurisdiction but everybody would suspect you of owning it but it shouldn’t be too hard to find a suitably pandering national government or 3.

Edward

[Kagetenshi]

Also, there are companies which are de jure subsidiaries, and then there are de facto subsidiaries.

~J

[Nath]

When it comes to extraterritoriality, you'd have to disclose proofs of ownership to benefit from it. If that wasn't the case, anybody could put a sign on his door claiming the place is owned by Ares and extraterritorial...

[Paul]

Which could be a real funny way to mess with someone... :)

[lokugh]

I was just rereading SoNA and came across the listing in the CAS section for ERLA, the CAS bureau that governs extraterritoriality. The CAS seems to be the only government with such a department, but I suspect msot have something, if less formal.

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

Indeed. Like it says, CAS is one of a few countries on Earth with such an independent agency devoted specifically to dealing with AA and AAA corps.

In the UCAS, for example, because the federal government is such a mind-numbingly shocking group of political fiefdoms, relations between the extraterritorial corps and the FedGov is likely to be spread across at least the Departments of the Treasury (specifically, the IRS), Business, Information (I assume, since I have no idea what the Hell it does), and probably State and Justice. Not to mention the fact that with the exceptions of a few federally chartered corporations and foreign (foreign foreign, as opposed to foreign domestic) corporations, corporations are chartered by the states, and otherwise register with the states in which it does business (this is glossing over a lot of things that are irrelevant for this discussion), and property taxes are assessed and collected at the local level of government.

And unless the UCAS FedGov somehow managed to preempt all local and state involvement (which is noty likely nor, AFAIK, canon) it's probably not going to change much.

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

[Kremlin KOA]

On the DocWagon thing, they WILL go up against corp sec, just not on corp ground... if you can drag your bleeding carcass to the street outside the facility, the HTR will gladly cart you away... SIN or no SIN, although I usually don't call them untill off extraterritorial land...

[BitBasher]