Google didn't say where she sent the documents. Forwarding emails to her own employment lawyers would be exfiltrating company documents technically.
Your employer might not like you sharing their internal info with your own attorney (under attorney-client privilege), but if they fire you for it, they potentially expose themselves to significant legal risk. Maybe you are planning to file a complaint or lawsuit about discrimination or harassment, or considering reporting your employer to some regulatory agency, and firing you for sharing evidence with your own attorney could legally be retaliation and viewed poorly by the legal system.
Now, if you share internal info with someone else's lawyer, or if you ask your own lawyer to share that info with third parties (other than regulatory agencies), different story – I think your employer is on much firmer legal grounds in those cases.
And they didn't say they fired her for exfiltrating documents. That's how most people will interpret what they said. But they left room to say it wasn't material.
...but you really have no idea.
You’re just speculating, in a way that conforms with how you’d like to interpret these events.
Which, to be fair, is what we’re all doing, with basically no information on what actually happened.
At this point, it’s all just the he-said-she-said from the Google PR machine.
I think in this case, there’s little reason for someone without bias to accept Google’s versions of events.
Maybe you’re right; if you’re not, maybe she’ll sue. Maybe not.
What is clear though is that what you think is likely, is probably not particularly indicative of what actually happened because, flat out, you have no idea.
None of us really do at this point.
To be fair, if she were preparing a wrongful termination suit, publicly commenting would be an unforced error.
Your NDAs probably don't say you can cooperate with law enforcement investigations either. But it's very unlikely a court would say you can't.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this “script” was trying to pull documents from manager or HR only sources and that they were related to Gebru’s employment—hence the need for a script to do a search. Which would imply she was looking for ‘dirt’ outside of her normal access and responsibilities.
That scenario would explain a lot of what’s going on here.
Google Apps Script can do things Gmail search can't. Like regex.
Lawyers I know say don't rely on discovery if you can help it.
You think Google doesn't monitor printing?