Authors Vijay Boyapati
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1/ Google is working on a new search engine code-named "Dragonfly" that will aid China's effort to censor information from its citizenry.
As a former Google engineer I wanted to share some information on what it's like to be inside Google as these decisions are made
2/ I previously shared that in 2006 I was an engineer who worked on Google News and was asked to write code to censor new results in China.
I've found some emails from 2006 that shed more light on the censorship requirements of the Chinese
3/ The emails I'm presenting came from a mailing list at Google where employees discussed topics on politics and economics. I have formatted the emails for readability and redacted the names of my colleagues, with whom I was debating. The topic was the 2008 Olympics in China.
4/ The striking fact that I had forgotten about until I rediscovered these emails was that China required Google to censor information both broadly (entire news sections were to be censored) and extremely expeditiously (Google needed to comply with requests within 15 minutes)
5/ It is very likely that the same censorship requirements will apply to the Dragonfly project that Google is currently working on and perhaps the requirements have become even more stringent given Google's new willingness to comply with the Chinese state.
As a former Google engineer I wanted to share some information on what it's like to be inside Google as these decisions are made
2/ I previously shared that in 2006 I was an engineer who worked on Google News and was asked to write code to censor new results in China.
I've found some emails from 2006 that shed more light on the censorship requirements of the Chinese
When I worked at Google, as an engineer on Google News, I was asked to write code to censor news articles in China (circa 2006). I refused and they took me off the project and put someone else on it.
— Vijay Boyapati (@real_vijay) September 16, 2018
Doesn't surprise me Google is back at it. "Don't be Evil" is a Google myth. https://t.co/VEenWbPxkW
3/ The emails I'm presenting came from a mailing list at Google where employees discussed topics on politics and economics. I have formatted the emails for readability and redacted the names of my colleagues, with whom I was debating. The topic was the 2008 Olympics in China.
4/ The striking fact that I had forgotten about until I rediscovered these emails was that China required Google to censor information both broadly (entire news sections were to be censored) and extremely expeditiously (Google needed to comply with requests within 15 minutes)
5/ It is very likely that the same censorship requirements will apply to the Dragonfly project that Google is currently working on and perhaps the requirements have become even more stringent given Google's new willingness to comply with the Chinese state.