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In an open letter published Tuesday morning, Google employees have asked their employer to cancel the project code-named Dragonfly, which means a censorship version of the search engine for the Chinese market. In addition, employees asked the company not to respond to whistleblowers who would disclose details of secret internal projects if they were in the public interest.
Envoy by Google employeesWe are among thousands of employees who have raised our voices for months. International human rights organizations and investigative journalists have also sounded the alarm by insisting on grave human rights concerns and repeatedly calling Google to cancel the project. So far, the response of our leaders has not been satisfactory.
Our opposition Dragonfly does not concern China: we oppose technologies that help the powerful to oppress the most vulnerable, wherever they are. The Chinese government is certainly not the only one wanting to tease the freedom of expression and use surveillance to suppress dissent. Dragonfly in China would create a dangerous precedent for an unstable political moment, preventing Google from denying other countries similar concessions.
The decision of our company comes as the Chinese government openly tends its surveillance powers and its tools of control of the population. Many of them rely on state-of-the-art technologies and combine online activity, personal recordings and mass surveillance to track and profile citizens. Reports already show who bears the costs, including Uighurs, women's rights advocates and students. Providing the Chinese government with fast access to user data, in accordance with Chinese law, would make Google complicit in oppression and human rights violations.
Dragonfly would also allow censorship and misinformation led by the government, and destabilize the truth on which popular liberation and dissent lie. Given the Chinese government's repression of dissenting voices, such controls would probably be used to silence marginalized people and promote information that is in the interest of the government.
Many of us have accepted a job at Google by keeping the company's values in mind, including its earlier position on Chinese censorship and surveillance, and understanding that Google was a company that places its values above its profits. After a year of disappointments, especially with the Maven project, Dragonfly and Google's support for the abusers, we no longer think it's the case. That's why we take a stand.
We join Amnesty International to demand that Google cancel Dragonfly. We also demand that leaders commit to transparency, clear communication and real accountability. Google is too powerful not to be held responsible. We deserve to know what we are building and we deserve to have our say in these important decisions.
Google is under pressure
Google has described the search application, known as Project Dragonfly, as an experiment that was not close to launch. But as details have been leaked since August, current and former employees, human rights activists and US lawmakers have criticized Google for not opting more severely for the Chinese government's policy that politically sensitive results be blocked. .
The human rights group Amnesty International also launched a public comment on Tuesday calling Google to cancel Dragonfly. The organization said it would encourage Google workers to sign on by targeting them on LinkedIn and demonstrating in front of Google offices.
About 1,400 of Google's 10,000 workers have been urging the company to improve the monitoring of suspicious companies, including Dragonfly.
Google has long sought to strengthen its presence in China, the largest Internet market in the world. The company needs government authorization to compete with the country's major local Internet services.
Employees who signed their open letter on Tuesday said they have seen little progress and expect more colleagues to publicly support the cancellation of Dragonfly.
The letter expresses concern that the Chinese government is tracking dissidents with search data and deleting the truth through content restrictions.
A spokesman for Google said the company did not comment again on the letter of employees, but recalled what the company had already said: We have been investing for many years to help Chinese users, since the development of Android , via mobile applications such as Google Translate as well as our development tools. But our research work has been just an exploration and we do not intend to launch a research product in China.
Source: open letter, Reuters
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