An interesting dimension to the Google-China saga is that inside the company there is a debate now raging among employees regarding leaks to the press. Here's my perspective:
Some argue the leaks are harmful to the internal culture of openness & will damage trust & stop leadership sharing info. Others argue the leaks represent a leadership failure & were in fact triggered by a lack of openness over Dragonfly.
As a reporter who has published a lot of the leaks, my view is that sources would simply not have talked to me if there were not a secrecy problem inside Google.
Things would have played out differently if Dragonfly had been shared across the workforce & not restricted to a few hundred of Google's 88,000 employees. People working on Dragonfly were ordered not to to discuss it with colleagues. That made some of them very uncomfortable.
Some felt they were effectively being asked to conceal wrongdoing from their friends & colleagues. They felt censoring information for the Chinese government went against Google's core values - "don't be evil," etc - & as such should be subject to wider scrutiny.
There were people who worked on Dragonfly who tried to raise concerns internally. One quit the company b/c of the project. Another was told if they were uncomfortable they could work on something else - but couldn't discuss Dragonfly with others.
Google tells employees to "speak up" if they see something wrong. In this case that did happen, but Dragonfly continued unabated & remained a secret project kept within a small group.
Google has traditionally claimed to have an open workplace culture where employees are encouraged to discuss problems & directly question leadership. That was not the case with Dragonfly.
So info about Dragonfly leaked. Now all 88,000 Google employees know about it & can discuss it. The huge reaction inside & outside the company - & the many concerns being raised by various groups - shows the disclosure served the public interest & vindicates the decision to leak.
But it doesn't end there. Following the initial revelations, the silence from Google leadership for two weeks & refusal of @Google_Comms to answer reporters' questions enflamed the situation & led to more Google staff wanting to speak out publicly.
And when leadership did finally address the issue, CEO Sundar Pichai misled staff. That is only likely to fuel more leaks, because people w/ knowledge of Dragonfly do not want to see their bosses lying to colleagues.
The leaks are a symptom, not the cause, of a larger issue. This is about an identity crisis at Google. It's a clash between openness & secrecy, between ideological principles & business decisions, between an old Google led by Brin & Page & Schmidt & a new Google led by Pichai.
This is about some Google employees, caught in the middle of the identity crisis, feeling that the situation has become so bad that the only way to address the company's systemic problems is to expose them publicly, forcing widespread discussion, transparency & change.
So those saying leaks are causing trust issues should look a bit deeper. That Dragonfly was kept secret from 99.65% of the Google workforce tells me there wasn't much trust between managers & rank & file in the first place. And leaks are not to blame for that.
