NEW: Senior Google scientist resigns over plan to launch censored search engine in China. "I view our intent to capitulate to censorship & surveillance demands in exchange for access to the Chinese market as a forfeiture of our values," he says: theintercept.com/2018/09/13/goo…
Jack Poulson is one of about five Google employees to resign over the "Dragonfly" censorship plan so far. He was a senior research scientist in Google’s research & machine intelligence dept. He learned about the secretive project after @theintercept revealed it in early August.
Poulson confronted his managers & afterward decided to resign. His last day at the company was Aug 31. He told me in an interview this week that he felt he had an “ethical responsibility to resign in protest of the forfeiture of our public human rights commitments."
One of Poulson's jobs was to help improve Google's search systems, specifically in an area called “international query analysis." It is possible his work could have been integrated into the censored Chinese search engine without his knowledge or consent.
He told me he was concerned not just about the censorship itself, but also the ramifications of hosting customer data on the Chinese mainland, where it would be accessible to Chinese security agencies that target political activists & journalists.
In his resignation letter, Poulson told his bosses: “Due to my conviction that dissent is fundamental to functioning democracies, I am forced to resign in order to avoid contributing to, or profiting from, the erosion of protection for dissidents.”
He added: “There is an all-too-real possibility that other nations will attempt to leverage our actions in China in order to demand our compliance with their security demands.”
Google has still not issued any public comment addressing concerns about Dragonfly & it did not respond to questions about Poulson's resignation. I have not received a single response from @Google_Comms - not even a "no comment" - through six weeks of reporting on the issue.
Poulson was frustrated by the company's public silence. “There are serious worldwide repercussions," he said. "What are Google’s ethical red lines? We already wrote some down, but now we seem to be crossing those. I'd like to see statements about what Google’s commitments are.”
Read the full story here: theintercept.com/2018/09/13/goo…
Another tidbit: Google is cracking down on leaks & tightened rules around how staff can view regular "all hands" meetings at which Google bosses answer questions. The change was prompted last month after a reporter live-tweeted a meeting at which Dragonfly was discussed. 1/2
The meetings are held at Google HQ in California. Employees working remotely can now no longer view a live stream of the meetings on their own computers — they can only watch them inside a designated secure room at a Google office overseen by managers, sources say. 2/2
It took a lot of courage for Jack Poulson to speak publicly about this. He was reluctant at first but decided he wanted to stand up for what he believed in. Much respect to him. theintercept.com/2018/09/13/goo…
