Comment by busrf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by busrf | Hacker News Reader

Here's a tweet with more details about her conditions and how that ties in to her resignation:

https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334341991795142667

> Apparently my manager’s manager sent an email my direct reports saying she accepted my resignation. I hadn’t resigned—I had asked for simple conditions first and said I would respond when I’m back from vacation. But I guess she decided for me :) that’s the lawyer speak.

> I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date. Then she sent an email to my direct reports saying she has accepted my resignation. So that is google for you folks. You saw it happen right here.

In the email she posted, it seems that they "accelerated the timeline" for her termination because "certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager", i.e. a separate email from her conditions email.

It seems like she was ready to leave if they didn't meet her conditions, and that this would have been a reasonable outcome for her. However, it bothers me that they wouldn't even come to the table about the non-condition email.

Like OK, "inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager". That's some weak shit. It had better be something pretty fucking severe for them to fire her immediately and not, I don't know, do some planning around transitioning her projects? Work out what to do with the team she herself managed? Be given the grace of leaving on a good note that an engineer of her caliber deserves?

She's a leader of their ethical AI group. What happens to that group and all of their research and direction now? Who do they hire to replace her? This isn't the same level of impact as firing a cog in the wheel IC who gets too uppity with organizing.

This stinks like a convenient excuse to shoo an AI ethics researcher asking some inconvenient questions out the door.

To me, it stinks like a convenient excuse to remove someone who was difficult to work with. Only last week she slandered her bosses on Twitter, which is a public forum.

Matthew Garrett, a senior security researcher at Google, is very critical about Google on his Twitter all the time. As he has pointed out, he's still very employed.

https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1334382463498391557

Neither of us are on her team at Google. (I'm certainly not and I doubt you are.) We have no idea how easy it is to work with her.

Certainly if I were working with an AI ethics researcher I would expect them to ask difficult and uncomfortable questions. I think that's part of the job description.

Because he was provinding real value. Her job was mostly a PR play by google, and she went contrary to that by actually slandering google all the time and stiring tensions...

Google historically tolerates generic criticism of the firm or its actions. Gebru routinely makes slanderous and offensive allegations against specific individuals, not Google as a whole.

That said, Garrett makes clear his ideological sympathies on Twitter. Undoubtably comments like this one don't endear him to his management chain:

When @computerfemme was fired, the VP of security at Google Cloud sent out an email to the security organisation containing one absolutely false statement and one misleading statement, both of which portrayed her acts in a more negative light.

Pretty serious stuff. He doesn't elaborate on what those claims were. The woman in question was fired from the security team for violating IT security policies: in her words, "All I did was make a popup to share the labor notice Google has to share with its workers", something that Google seems to have recurrent problems with staff doing. In other words she was rewriting the contents of web pages to meet her own political objectives.

If I were the VP of Security at Google I would have serious concerns at that point about insider threats from sympathisers on the security team. You can't be publicly slamming your own VP as dishonest for firing someone who subverted IT policies if you actually work in security.

Let us pretend together that you are the VP of security at Google. I’d suggest you take a stroll through Matthew’s twitter page for the past year or so and mark down everything you find seriously concerning and in your view making him incapable of performing his job. You might find quite a bit, and you might think “I can’t believe the real VP of security at Google hasn’t fired him yet!”

And yet, somehow, he’s not enough of an “insider threat” to be dismissed.

Well did he email his management with a list of demands they weren't willing to meet, saying that he'd resign if the demands weren't met? Because that appears to be what Gebru has done.

Also, did he publicly attack his colleagues on Twitter for their race? “Bunch of privileged white guys” is not something you want to read from someone who you have to work with every day, she should have been fired immediately for that alone.

> The woman in question was fired from the security team for violating IT security policies: in her words, "All I did was make a popup to share the labor notice Google has to share with its workers", something that Google seems to have recurrent problems with staff doing. In other words she was rewriting the contents of web pages to meet her own political objectives.

This paragraph that you just wrote is one of those claims that are wrong and/or misleading

How? That quote comes from the person who was fired. She explained what she did because she's proud of it: she injected some code into a web page about unions and organising telling Googlers they had a right to organise.

The Google security team is frankly deeply worrying at this point, and I say that as someone who used to work there on security related topics (but consumer account security, not internal). A small number of them have privileged access to mandatory Chrome extensions that are used for various security objectives, yet they seem to have no qualms about abusing them to advance their own political agendas. Moreover they don't recognise that this is a problem.

Controlling Chrome extensions that can inject JS into arbitrary websites equals root at google.com because everything they do is admin'd via web UIs.

What if you're a law firm who advises companies faced with union action? Is it safe for you to use GSuite or whatever it's called today? My guess is no, because the people who ultimately control Google's IT infrastructure are (a) willing to break the most basic of IT security rules and then boast about it publicly, and (b) many of them are politically extreme by the standards of most of the world.

Most astoundingly of all, I don't believe this is the first time Google has fired people for injecting JS into websites using internal security mechanisms to advance political agendas. In any normal company there'd be a mile of controls, processes and guard dogs surrounding any mechanism that could do this by now as it's been abused before. Apparently Google Security do not have their act together on this.

> "All I did was make a popup to share the labor notice Google has to share with its workers"

Does not mean rewriting the content of webpages, or having "root at google.com". It's better if you'd stop such speculation.

The reality is much more pedestrian than what you describe: the person that was retaliated against only wrote simple, inert, strings of plain text.

That text was not injected anywhere, and there was no arbitrary code involved.

In fact, everything was safe, and went through the usual security controls.

The only "danger" in having that, is that people can read it.

Ultimately, it's laughable how you think that informing other coworkers about the NLRB is some kind of politically extreme agenda. It's clear that you have an axe to grind

It went through the usual security controls yet she was immediately fired for doing it? Really? Do you understand how that sounds?

Please do explain how someone makes a message appear in your browser when you visit a particular website, without having access to a highly privileged browser extension? That can at minimum monitor the URLs you're visiting?

I honestly really hope you aren't on the Google security team, because you seem to be missing the issue here. Someone who had a high level of access was fired for violating basic trust, apparently with the collaboration of her coworkers. What other things could this person have done to advance her political goals by subverting her access for things it wasn't meant for? Outsiders can't know. All they can see is that the company doesn't have a grip on its own workforce. That is not confidence inspiring.

> it went through the usual security controls yet she was immediately fired for doing it? Really? Do you understand how that sounds?

Yes, that's crazy... And that's exactly why people have been angry at the retaliation

> Please do explain...

To get more details, the appropriate thing to do is to draft a post that explains how these things are accomplished at Google and get it approved for publication by the legal review team. I've never done it and, while I don't exclude that I might do it, it probably won't happen soon.

Argh, being fired for this isn't crazy. What kind of "security control" allows changes to security systems that aren't for the purposes of improving security? Whatever controls you're talking about are clearly not controls of the sort a normal auditor would recognise.

Slandered, how? https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331757629996109824?s... seems to be the complaint. This seems plausible given her work to push towards less biased data/algorithms got squashed and she resigned.

The white men, where she used both their skin colour and gender in a derogatory manner, were accused of trying to shutdown minorities. I would be very surprised if those men did anything with an intent to squash minorities. They were most likely making business decisions to further Google's intent.

Email claims she was told to stop publishing a paper with basically zero reason/conversation matching the tweet.

Hiring has apparently failed to meet goals with zero consequences suggesting a lack of concern with minorities.

I don't think someone misinterpreting disregard for ethical ai research as disregard for minorities is slanderous, heck it might be charitable as the later is known.

"Who do they hire to replace her?". That is an excellent question, and a good time to remember that Identity Politics != Ethics. Most big ethical questions in AI have nothing to do with race or gender, instead affect us all. Some say AI is an existential risk for Humanity at large.

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