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Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

1. Lying about why an employee fired in an easily verified way is a huge unforced error. We can probably assume Google is not that incompetent.

2. She hasn't denied the accusations.

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Exfiltration could just mean forwarding emails to herself or her lawyer.

Any lawyer would tell her not to comment on the accusations. Especially before she was fired.

And any lawyer would also tell Google not to blatantly lie about easily verifiable facts around the firing.

It would be misleading to call forwarding emails to herself or her lawyer exfiltration. But it wouldn't be lying.

It wouldn't be either misleading or lying, if her or her lawyer want personal copies of the emails they can apply to a court. They have no right to unilaterally decide to take personal copies of internal communications.

Legal counsel is a common exception to NDAs. Different jurisdictions have different specific rules. Are you familiar with California's rules?

Except you can't do that. The problem is Google has no idea that this is where the documents/e-mails went. All they can see is that a large number of documents and e-mails were sent outside of Google. I can't imagine Google would say, well it's okay if you take the law into your own hands. Any lawyer should be able to send a note telling Google to preserve the files for potential litigation. And given that she seems to have people sympathetic to her cause, it's unlikely that Google would be able to make all documents and e-mails she thinks are supportive of her case disappear.

Now, I can see if she wanted to take a few key e-mails out because any lawsuit needs some evidence or it might be quashed in summary judgement. So maybe that's what she thought she was doing, but it sounds like she grabbed a lot more than that. I would also really be wary of this because people can get death threats when e-mail that they thought was company internal are leaked out. I wouldn't be surprised that a bunch of e-mails will make it into a lawsuit with the people's names on them. Anyone knows that lawsuits can easily take an e-mail out of context to make it say something that is changed by the context around it. Even worse, company internal e-mails probably have a tremendous amount of internal company information.

There is no way that any company will just shrug and go, well if you sent it to yourself and your lawyer, then that it's okay that you might have sent out company secrets.

Legal counsel is a common exception to NDAs. Different jurisdictions have different specific rules. And most people would have tried to hide it. But saying you can't do that isn't true categorically.

She could have taken files that weren't material. But that's just speculation.

Google claimed the documents went to multiple external accounts. So they must know which accounts. So Mitchell could say who owned them. And they could verify.

Any lawyer will tell you to preserve evidence yourself if you can.

How would people sympathetic to her cause preserve evidence without violating Google's policies?

What might be disclosed during the trial is the same as if Google provided the files.

I'm not sure I understand your claim. Assuming she could get an exemption from an NDA, I don't think that means she can just grab all of the data she wants. Do you have some cases in mind where a whistle blower, or a worker was able to grab large volumes of data and send them to their counsel without repercussion? I think if she had taken a small number of targeted e-mails and documents and sent them to legal counsel, that might stand up. But it appears that she took thousands of e-mails and some number of documents (or maybe the e-mails contained attached documents). We'll have to wait for whatever lawsuit comes to find out if Google is exaggerating the total number of documents, and she only took a small handful. However, I would find it odd if an automated system would trip if she grabbed only a few tens of e-mails/documents. But maybe after the Uber incident, Google is a little more paranoid about when documents are taken off Google computers.

If emails are taken out of context, then Google is free to provide context.

An employee's working conditions are not company secrets. They have a legal right to discuss them.

The problem is that Google will be fine, but if a lawsuit takes an e-mail and uses it to say that this person is sexist/racist, or multiple people are sexist/racist, it could be bad for those people. Google will be able to provide context in a legal reply, but that doesn't mean that if the people are named with a quote, that they won't be mobbed. And this has happened with other lawsuits related to Google, where e-mail quotes in a legal document resulted in that person getting death threats.

I'm also not sure what you mean by employees are allowed to discuss working conditions. Are you assuming that the only e-mails/documents that she took are related to working conditions? There is no current evidence that is what she took. Or do you mean something else? Because the only public statement from Google alleges she took a large number of e-mails/documents from Google, not that she was fired for discussing working conditions. We'll have to wait for a lawsuit from her to find out further details though.

It doesn’t matter if it’s her lawyer. Any lawyer would have told her not to do this because it damages her case, and the emails are discoverable anyway in pretrial.

Also, I have to ask, why didn’t she just print them? Or take screen pics with her phone? Emailing things from work directly to external parties seems rather dumb for a computer expert.

Any lawyer I know would have told her don't rely on discovery if you can help it. Why do you think it damages her case?

Do you think Google doesn't monitor printing?

I can imagine a lawyer saying to send the documents directly and not send them to herself. It helps show she didn't distribute them to anyone else. CCing a paralegal would still make it multiple accounts.

She could of downloaded documents for an attorney or to search for the allegations Timnit was accused of. Google will of course phrase it as damningly as possible.

So once again, why assume Google has the moral high ground (in any way) in this firing or is being honest at all in it?

I'm not assuming Google has the moral high ground. I'm assuming that Google is not lying about an easily verifiable fact to the media especially when Meg is not disputing Google's events.

> She could of downloaded documents for an attorney or to search for the allegations Timnit was accused of

This would support Google's description of events as "exfiltrating a bunch of documents related to Gebru".

They also have a second source close to Meg that confirms she was running a script to exfiltrate a bunch of documents related to Gebru.

I’m curious why there needs to be a script involved and feel like we are missing a big part of the story here. You don’t need “a script” to search your email. And you don’t need to take the risk to “exfiltrate documents” if it’s just emails in your possession or if you’re just worried about being fired. And it doesn’t make sense that a computer expert would take the risk to do all this electronically where it is easily monitored.

Perhaps she made a dumb mistake but Dr Gebru and her colleague were both managers, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this script her colleague was running was not just backing up her emails but rather pulling management-only and HR docs related to Gebrus situation. Which would be a much more serious offense and explain a lot of what’s going on here.

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