Tesla has been criticised by an Australian federal court judge for seeking a “draconian” order for an arrest warrant against a man who allegedly posted confidential internal documents from the electric car maker on social media sites in defiance of a court order.
Keith “Keef” Leech was ordered by the court on 8 January to delete all records he held of any documents obtained from the Tesla whistleblower Lukasz Krupski related to Tesla cars.
Krupski last year leaked data from the company claiming the technology behind Tesla’s self-driving cars is not safe enough to allow the cars to be driven on public roads. The leaked material included customer complaints about Tesla’s braking and self-driving software.
Leech allegedly obtained a copy of the leaked documents, uploaded them to cloud services, and posted links to the documents on social media.
The court order said Leech was restricted from publishing any other Tesla technical reports, customer complaints, vehicle repair documents, meeting notes, and product testing, analysis and design documentation.
However, in an interlocutory hearing on Friday, Tesla sought an arrest warrant to be issued against Leech after he allegedly again posted links to the documents on the social media site Threads, Meta’s answer to X.
Justice Jonathan Beach said while Tesla had a prima facie case against Leech for contempt of court, it was unrealistic to seek an urgent contempt of court case against him.
“I’m not sure you’re entitled to an arrest warrant,” Beach said. “What you are asking for is unrealistic.”
Counsel acting for Tesla said the company was “gravely concerned” Leech would continue to defy the order.
Beach said the company had obvious remedies, including requesting that Meta and Google and the other platforms continue to remove the posts of the documents.
Tesla’s counsel said the company had approached Meta seeking to have Leech’s account removed, but had found the company would only remove individual posts rather than the account itself.
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Tesla’s counsel said the company had to “in effect play whack-a-mole” as new posts could appear on a number of different social media platforms in the meantime.
Beach questioned what authority he had to take the “draconian step” of issuing an arrest warrant for Leech, and said the regular process for a contempt of court criminal proceedings should be followed.
The injunction was extended for a further 28 days.
German newspaper Handelsblatt published the “Tesla Files” based on 100GB and more than 23,000 documents of internal data Krupski shared. The name is similar to the “Twitter files” reporting resulting from internal Twitter documents being leaked to reporters friendly with Twitter’s new owner, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, in 2022.
The newspaper reported the Tesla Files documents included Musk’s social security number.
Meta declined to comment on the matter.