Wonder when he had his "are we the baddies" moment.

The context was Gaza though, so I mean neutrally surveillance can mean lots of things: security cameras at a convenience store, a security contract for the government or another corporation. What this person was protesting was supporting Isreal and it's war/control over Gaza. The article sort of misses the point and the headlines really kills it.

Funny, but it's more complicated than reductive

I still think that better late than never

It takes a lot of courage to throw away your job, potentially career and livelihood, for your principles.

I'm sure your noble sacrifice for the cause dwarfs his.

Nobody was worried when it was happening in the town over

Nobody was worried when it was their neighbor

Everybody lied to themselves when it was their friend

And by the time it came to them there was nothing left but panic and dread.

World according to google.

Abetting a genocide? A-OK.

Speaking out against aiding a genocide? FORBIDDEN

Wild how much "don't be evil" Was holding them back, innit?

That's why they had to fire him.

Getting fired is what makes this a story worth writing about. It was intentional.

I find genocide to be worse than "breaking corporate code of conduct".

Usually engineers, while not always the most socially in tune people, aren’t total dumbasses. He also said (very publicly) that he refuses to do the work they are telling him to do so he’s explicitly telling them to fire him.

I have exactly 1 trick to get away with letting out your righteous anger at executives: become such a visible figure in collective action that there is no way the company could ever fire you without it being illegal retaliation. The trick is to become that visible while having plausible deniability about organizing

You don't engage in that kind of direct action without being fully aware of the consequences. An engineer at Google is not that idiotic

They were probably trying to get the other engineers to follow their lead. It doesn't seem like that happened.

I bet if they yelled something less controversial like "We want more money!" wouldn't have ended in firing. Perhaps in disciplining instead.

I actually don't understand their sentiment.

This isn't the only surveillance Google is enabling. You could MAYBE argue genocide but... let's just say it isn't just facebook that supports brutal regimes.

I've worked for.... questionable companies in the past. I still argue that you more or less can't do Research without getting blood on your hands because... blood money spends well and experiments/development without a defined product is expensive.

But... unless you are a complete moron, you understand that. Don't get me wrong, there are a LOT of graduate students out there who never question WHY there are government grants and why their advisor is talking to Major Johnson and so forth (Val Kilmer's Real Genius is probably the most accurate grad school movie ever made...). But you eventually figure it out. ESPECIALLY if you are working for a company and have to have a defined/target product. I know Google/Alphabet is notorious for the cutthroat/backstabbing among employees but you aren't going to be isolated as to why you are working on a graph search algorithm or how to conceal a camera in a device.

So I don't know if this engineer was just ridiculously ignorant or if they were hoping to "go viral" or what. But you don't wake up one day and realize you are the baddies. You more or less realize that your first day of work and spend time deciding if that will lead to alcoholism or activism.