Following a series of crises at Google, disparate worker organizing efforts within the company are coalescing, part of a growing workers’ movement in the tech industry.

BuzzFeed News; Getty

Google employees are demanding greater transparency from their employer and confronting management with their ethical concerns about a project named Dragonfly, a controversial censored search app for the Chinese market. Employees are circulating a list of demands for the company in a letter obtained by BuzzFeed News (posted in full, below), calling for an ethics review structure with rank-and-file employee representatives, the appointment of ombudspeople, and an ethical assessment of Google projects including Dragonfly and Maven, Google’s contract with the Pentagon to build AI-assisted drone technology. “Many of us believe that Dragonfly poses a threat to freedom of expression and political dissent globally, and violates our AI principles," two employees wrote in an email distributing the demand list. "But this is not about Dragonfly specifically," the email continues. "While we support and will join with concerned Googlers in resisting this effort, we need to be clear: Individual employees organizing against the latest dubious project cannot be our only safeguard against unethical decisions. This amounts to unsustainable ethics whack-a-mole, and assumes employees know about a project to begin with.” Dragonfly, which the majority of Google employees only learned about when the Intercept reported it earlier this month, marks the second time this year that leaked information about ongoing projects has prompted a backlash within the company’s rank and file. After Google’s contract with the Pentagon’s Project Maven became public in March, over 4,000 employees signed a petition asking the company to cancel it. A dozen engineers resigned in protest, and Google eventually promised not to renew the contract. Following that uproar, Google published AI ethics guidelines for the company. The letter about Dragonfly that's currently circulating inside the company, which has so far been signed by over a 1,400 Googlers, argues that those guidelines are not enough. "As a company and as individuals we have a responsibility to use this power to better the world, not to support social control, violence, and oppression," the letter reads. "What is clear is that Ethical Principles on paper are not enough to ensure ethical decision making. We need transparency, oversight, and accountability mechanisms sufficient to allow informed ethical choice and deliberation across the company." Dragonfly has reignited internal rancor at Google; this letter represents different activist groups within the company coalescing to form a single movement around transparency.

“People were like, ‘What? That’s not how we do things!’ It betrays this culture of openness and transparency they like to pretend we have.”

“People are like, ‘What the hell do we do now?’ This can’t keep happening,” said an anonymous Google developer. “We need something fundamental to change how they do business.”

A debate over ethics Dragonfly, which Google has been working on for a little over year, would be a search engine for Chinese users that would censor certain terms and sources from search results, including Wikipedia and some news articles, according to the Intercept. Google has already shown the Chinese government a version of the Android app, which could be launched within six to nine months, the report says. The debate over the ethics of building such a tool has lasted over two weeks and spanned over a thousand comments on internal posts, Google employees told BuzzFeed News. “The Dragonfly conversations are happening in the same spaces or lists where the Maven conversations happened; they’re being repurposed,” a second anonymous employee said. “There’s a lot of anger and passion.” Some of that frustration is coming from the fact that Dragonfly seems at odds with Google’s stated purpose. “Google’s mission statement literally says, ‘Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.’ Censorship directly contradicts making information accessible,” he said. “It’s like Google capitulating to an oppressive organization … First it was the military industrial complex, now it’s China.” A few days after the news broke, a Google employee who was born in Beijing and has been with the company over a decade took to an internal forum to warn his colleagues about the potential consequences of the project. In the post, which was shared anonymously with BuzzFeed News, he said that employees who think Google could fight censorship by building a presence in China are being naive.

The employee, who worked for Google in China in 2006, said that China uses technology to surveil and control its citizens, and argued that — given the immense popularity of Chinese search engine Baidu — Chinese companies that would entertain partnering with Google have potentially nefarious reasons.

“A few years ago, it was a place you felt proud to be working at. ... The series of incidents in the last few years have made it much harder to hold on to that feeling.”

“What do they gain by allowing us back in? You can be sure it is not about usability or benefiting to the people,” he wrote. “I am not that optimistic Google as a tech company somehow can facilitate political change in China.” Allison Day, a program manager at Google who’s been with the company for more than three years. said the news that Google was working on such a project didn’t shock her. “I can see the bottom line for any corporation is growth, and [China] represented a gigantic market,” she said. “The ‘Don’t be Evil’ slogan, you know… It’s not a farce. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. But it is a giant corporation, and its bottom line is to make money.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has repeatedly expressed an interest in the company making a return to China, which it pulled out of for political reasons in 2010. Pichai’s apparent decision to return, which was not addressed companywide before Thursday, has caused some employees to consider leaving the company altogether. “There are questions about how [Dragonfly] is implemented that could make it less concerning, or much more concerning,” the second anonymous Google employee said. “That will continue to be on my mind, and the mind of other Googlers deciding whether to stay.”

BuzzFeed News; Getty

Keeping Dragonfly secret Much of the current ire toward Google leadership over Dragonfly has just as much to do with the secrecy surrounding the project as with ethics of the project itself. As the second anonymous Google employee put it, “It seems like the lessons we thought had been learned from Maven were not learned in the way we thought.” Two Google employees who were working on Dragonfly were so disturbed by the secrecy that they quit the team over it. Shortly after the Dragonfly news broke, a Swiss-based engineer working on anti-abuse issues wrote in a post obtained by BuzzFeed News, “People who I’ve worked with closely might have noticed I transferred out of the Abuse/Identity team 2 weeks ago. This is in large part a reason why … I’ve had a meeting with my VP about the project before leaving. This was a short meeting for me, because my VP refused to provide any information without the basically agreeing to a verbal NDA ... That was enough for me to fuck off from that org.” In a second post also obtained by BuzzFeed News, that employee’s colleague announced that he was planning to leave Google altogether, in part because he had been asked to keep Dragonfly secret — not just from the public, but also from his coworkers. “The part that affected me the most was not the details of the project themselves, but the secrecy around it. Part of why I joined Google full-time was because of the open culture I had experienced during my internships,” this employee, whose post was shared anonymously, wrote. “But with DragonFly, all of this was gone.” Google has not responded to specific questions about Dragonfly from the Intercept, nor to Bloomberg, nor to BuzzFeed News, only saying in a statement, “We don’t comment on speculation about future plans.” Two weeks passed before today’s all-hands meeting offered employees a chance to ask questions. Prior to that, employees hadn’t “heard a peep,” according to the anonymous Google developer. Even more upsetting to some employees is the fact that the company has blocked off internal access to Dragonfly’s code. Managers also shut down access to certain documents pertaining to the project, according to the Intercept. (Google is famous for giving “engineers access to almost our entire code base on day one,” which makes the lockdown more alarming to them.) “They did the same thing with Maven, and that galvanized a ton of people. People were like ‘What? That’s not how we do things!’ It betrays this culture of openness and transparency they like to pretend we have,” the anonymous Google developer said. And following the leak, it’s become apparent that some Google employees were unaware that their work was being used for Dragonfly, or that the project even existed. “That’s a special kind of betrayal and exploitation of an employee,” he said. Erosion of trust Compared to their colleagues elsewhere in the tech industry, Google employees have unusually high expectations for transparency, in large part because the company tells them to expect it. “They talk and act like, ‘Once you’re at Google, you can look up the code anywhere in the code base and see for yourself.’ ‘We pride ourselves on having an open and transparent culture,’” said the anonymous Google developer. “There [are] definitely employees at the company who are very frustrated because that’s clearly not true.”

“Part of why I joined Google full-time was because of the open culture. ... But with DragonFly, all of this was gone.”