Leak shows Google lied when it claimed it wasn't near launching its censored Chinese search tool

When Google employees discovered last August to their horror that the company had been secretly working on a censored search engine ("Project Dragonfly) for use in China, the company assured them that this was only an early-stage prototype and nowhere near launching.

But now a leaked transcript of a July 18 presentation by search chief Ben Gomes has the executive congratulating the Project Dragonfly team and predicting launch in six to nine months, and holding out the possibility of a launch in as little as three months.

On September 23, Gomes lied to a BBC reporter and said that Dragonfly was just a plan on the drawing board, saying "all weve done is some exploration" and "we dont have any plans to launch something."

This lie apparently prompted angry googlers to leak the transcript of Gomes's remarks to The Intercept. Gomes refused to comment to the Intercept and when they called him, he twice claimed that the connection was so bad that he couldn't understand their questions.

This week, Google announced that it was taking itself out of the running for a $10B Pentagon IT project after an uprising by its engineering staff.

Project Dragonfly has also cost Google key engineers and has been the source of mass discontent inside the company, especially when news broke that the censored tool was designed to personally identify searchers who looked up banned topics like "student protests" and "democracy" and to deliver these identities to China's security establishment.

And so the opportunity there is all of you will know this, but its clearly the biggest opportunity to serve more people that we have.