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“However, the Dragonfly teams were instructed that they were not permitted to discuss the issue directly with Brin or other members of Google’s senior leadershi

“However, the Dragonfly teams were instructed that they were not permitted to discuss the issue directly with Brin or other members of Google’s senior leadership team, including Pichai, co-founder Larry Page, and legal chief Kent Walker.” If that’s accurate, I cannot possibly understand why Beaumont is still employed at Google unless the senior leadership team decided intentionally to limit their exposure to the project so they could claim plausible deniability in the case it blew up like it has. Obviously I’m not on the inside of this story, but from the outside, it’s getting increasingly shameful by the week.

mirimir 8y ago
I worked for several years as a data analyst for plaintiffs' firms. I've attended numerous depositions, of both technical people and management. I can't go into specifics, so I'll just say that the apparent compartmentalization was extremely impressive.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
"Please don't bring your concerns to the sort of people who get called to testify under oath before Congress" seems like a very plausible decision for a business to make. Kent Walker is who they send to testify, Sundar Pichai, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin are the people Congress would like to compel to testify. Presumably the less concerns they're personally aware of, the less they have to answer for. It's plausible to me that Sergey Brin, who has been fairly peripheral to Google's business side for a long time, may have been kept in the dark since he was the one most against returning to China (and he claimed he didn't know about it at the TGIF). But there's no way the executive team in general wasn't on board with what Beaumont was doing.
- chopin 8y ago
  I would think that "keep me in dark of doing this questionable thing" wouldn't absolve anyone in leadership.
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  > It's plausible to me that Sergey Brin, who has been fairly peripheral to Google's business side for a long time, may have been kept in the dark compartmentalizing the org structure so that it removes the manager from liability and shifts the blame to a fall-guy is a common theme in organized crime. It is also illegal.
  - speedplane 8y ago
    > compartmentalizing the org structure so that it removes the manager from liability and shifts the blame to a fall-guy is a common theme in organized crime. It is also illegal. There is nothing necessarily "illegal" about an org compartmentalizing information. What is illegal is fraud... one person in an org saying one thing, while others in the same org know that the thing is not true. The other problem with overly compartmentalizing information is not related to legal liability at all: if managers don't know what's going on, good or bad, they can't be trusted by shareholders, which can kill the stock price. Shareholders generally prefer known challenges than unknown ones.
shard972 8y ago
Well if Beaumont is still there tomorrow we know our answer.
paganel 8y ago
> If that’s accurate, I cannot possibly understand why Beaumont is still employed at Google Because he's a sociopath that brings them money. I'm not throwing words out of nothing, you have to be a sociopath in order to take a similar decision only for financial gain, knowing full well that innocent people are going to support the dire consequences (prison time or worse).

mirimir 8y ago

I worked for several years as a data analyst for plaintiffs' firms. I've attended numerous depositions, of both technical people and management. I can't go into specifics, so I'll just say that the apparent compartmentalization was extremely impressive.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

"Please don't bring your concerns to the sort of people who get called to testify under oath before Congress" seems like a very plausible decision for a business to make. Kent Walker is who they send to testify, Sundar Pichai, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin are the people Congress would like to compel to testify. Presumably the less concerns they're personally aware of, the less they have to answer for. It's plausible to me that Sergey Brin, who has been fairly peripheral to Google's business side for a long time, may have been kept in the dark since he was the one most against returning to China (and he claimed he didn't know about it at the TGIF). But there's no way the executive team in general wasn't on board with what Beaumont was doing.

chopin 8y ago
I would think that "keep me in dark of doing this questionable thing" wouldn't absolve anyone in leadership.
DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
> It's plausible to me that Sergey Brin, who has been fairly peripheral to Google's business side for a long time, may have been kept in the dark compartmentalizing the org structure so that it removes the manager from liability and shifts the blame to a fall-guy is a common theme in organized crime. It is also illegal.
- speedplane 8y ago
  > compartmentalizing the org structure so that it removes the manager from liability and shifts the blame to a fall-guy is a common theme in organized crime. It is also illegal. There is nothing necessarily "illegal" about an org compartmentalizing information. What is illegal is fraud... one person in an org saying one thing, while others in the same org know that the thing is not true. The other problem with overly compartmentalizing information is not related to legal liability at all: if managers don't know what's going on, good or bad, they can't be trusted by shareholders, which can kill the stock price. Shareholders generally prefer known challenges than unknown ones.

shard972 8y ago

Well if Beaumont is still there tomorrow we know our answer.

paganel 8y ago

> If that’s accurate, I cannot possibly understand why Beaumont is still employed at Google Because he's a sociopath that brings them money. I'm not throwing words out of nothing, you have to be a sociopath in order to take a similar decision only for financial gain, knowing full well that innocent people are going to support the dire consequences (prison time or worse).