Googlers threatened online after fired engineer identifies them
In court filings, ex-employee only revealed names of those critical of him, redacted sympathizers
Google employees whose comments in internal communications were filed in court by a fired engineer have received online threats — but engineer James Damore redacted the names of Googlers sympathetic to his cause.
That’s according to a judge in Damore’s lawsuit against the Mountain View tech giant.
Google sacked Damore last year after he wrote an internal memo arguing that biology may explain the relative scarcity of women in tech. He sued the firm in January, seeking class action certification and claiming Google discriminates against men, conservatives and white people, using “illegal hiring quotas.”
In his lawsuit, Damore has filed initial and amended complaints. To support his case, both contained numerous screenshots from internal Google forums, showing comments and messages concerning politics and diversity at Google, wrote Judge Brian Walsh in an order issued Friday that grants the company a protective order to prevent the identification of employees.
“In many cases, the screenshots reflect the full name of the message’s author, and some screenshots also show the author’s email address,” Walsh wrote in his Santa Clara County Superior Court ruling.
“In other cases, identifying information regarding the author has been redacted.” The cases in which Googers’ identities were redacted appear to share a similarity, according to the judge’s ruling.
Damore, Walsh wrote, “chose to redact the names of employees sympathetic to (his) cause.”
The judge’s ruling — granting Google a protective order to prevent such identifications of employees in the future — did not detail the threats allegedly made against Googlers. Walsh said Google sent Damore’s lawyer 13 screenshots of “threatening online comments about Google employees.”
A July 13 filing by Damore’s lawyer Harmeet Dhillon indicated that some of the purported online threats and harassment were made on the right-wing Breitbart news website, on Twitter, and on the far-right social media website Gab.
Although the purported threats against employees cannot be conclusively said to have resulted from Damore’s filings identifying the workers, Walsh noted “the increased volume” of reports to Google by employees identified in the filings who had “concerns about online harassment and threats.”
He ordered that from now on in the case, Damore’s side will redact from public court filings Googlers’ names and identifying information.
“While the identities and comments of Google employees on either side of this dispute may ultimately be relevant to the determination of issues in this case, and while the public has right of access to these proceedings, plaintiffs’ approach demonstrates that the parties can and should avoid publishing sensitive information sooner than necessary,” Walsh wrote.