That month, Fong-Jones made another
calculated exception to her usual policy of
keeping dissent within the Google family.
She and 14 other current employees spoke to
wired about the “dirty war” that was being
waged inside Google over the issue of diver-
sity. Most news coverage of Damore’s case
amplified its claims that Google was crack-
ing down on conservatives. But the employ-
ees argued that something else was going
on. HR had become “weaponized,” they said;
Googlers on both sides of the battle lines had
become adept at working the refs—baiting
colleagues into saying things that might vio-
late the company’s code of conduct, then
going to human resources to report them.
But Googlers on the right were going fur-
ther, broadcasting snippets of the company’s
uncensored brawls to the world, and setting
up their colleagues for harassment.
Google’s HR department, for its part, was
feeling inundated with policy violations
across the spectrum. And according to Fong-
Jones and her colleagues, the department
was too focused on trying to appear even-
handed. Employees had been reprimanded
and even fired for criticizing Damore’s memo
using terms like “white privilege” and “white
boy.” “Promoting harmful stereotypes based
on race or gender is prohibited,” Google said
in a statement about one such termination.
Soon after speaking to wired, Fong-Jones
helped prepare a statement explaining to
colleagues about why she and the others
had gone to the press. She asked cowork-
ers to sign a petition for a safer workplace,
demanding better moderation of mailing
lists and rules against doxing coworkers. It
received 2,600 signatures. But it wasn’t the
only employee petition that would make
waves that winter.VI.
BY FEBRUARY, WORD ABOUT MAVEN
began to swirl outside the teams of engi-
neers who had first alerted Fong-Jones to
the project. So she decided to post about
Maven on her internal Google+ page, shar-
ing grave concerns that Google might be
helping the US government carry out drone
strikes, according to a copy of the post pro-
vided to wired by another Google engineer.
Shortly afterward, the group of engineers
posted an internal statement of their own,
explaining that they had been told to buildFong-Jones contactedsecurity herself.Let’s catch the leaker,she said.learned about Maven from a group of concerned engineers who had been tapped
to lay some of the groundwork for it. They asked her to keep quiet until January
while they tried to convince management to change course. Fong-Jones agreed
and focused her attention on another fire that was quietly burning inside Google.
V.
JUST BEFORE 8 AM ON MONDAY, JANUARY 8, 2018, PRAETORIAN PR, A SAN
Francisco firm founded by a Republican political consultant, sent an email invit-
ing reporters to a “major press conference” with James Damore and his law-
yer, Harmeet Dhillon, who serves as the California Republican Party’s national
committee member and who “often takes on controversial, high-profile cases.”
“You won’t want to miss it,” the email promised.
Damore sat next to Dhillon as she told a smattering of tech reporters and local
news affiliates that her client had filed a class-action lawsuit against Google,
alleging discrimination against white people, Asians, men, and conservatives,
or any combination thereof. “We don’t normally file 100-page, 200-page com-
plaints,” Dhillon explained, thumbing through a heavy printout of the complaint
laid out in front of her. “I didn’t think people were going to believe the outlandish
nonsense, so we actually attached screenshots throughout.”
When Damore had filed a set of documents stating an intent to sue Google in
December 2017, the documents named Kevin Cernekee as a fellow plaintiff, but
that complaint never materialized. In the lawsuit unveiled by Dhillon that day,
Cernekee’s name made no appearance. The complaint quoted from Google’s
warning letter to him and included details about his interactions with execu-
tives and HR as evidence that Google had discriminated against conservatives,
but Cernekee’s identity remained mostly invisible to the outside world. At least
169 other Google employees were not so lucky: The screenshots included in the
lawsuit revealed dozens of email addresses, profile pictures, and snippets of dis-
cussion. Most had been culled from Google’s internal social networks, includ-
ing an anonymous message board about mental health and a mailing list for
gender-nonbinary employees.
Another round of harassment quickly began. Threats poured in, calling
for employees critical of Damore to be shot in the head, poisoned, blown up,
stalked, doxed, sodomized with a cattle prod, and thrown off a building. As
before, many of the employees who got singled out were queer and trans peo-
ple of color. On forums like 4chan, employee names exposed in the lawsuit were
linked to their social media accounts. The personal information of at least three
employees was dug up and posted online. Another employee was the subject
of a derogatory thread on an online forum called Kiwi Farms, which New York
magazine has called the web’s biggest stalker community.