Sure, when it's summarized like that, it sounds bad, and it maybe bad. But compare that to this slightly expanded timeline summary from reading the actual filing[1]:
The laptop in question connected to Google only 3 times between March 2, 2015 and November 25, 2015, despite being configured to connect every 15 minutes. ~ 2 hours on Oct 22, ~2 hours on Nov 20, and "briefly" on Nov 25. (My interpretation? It was almost always off and not in use).
Windows was reinstalled on Nov 26th.
On Dec 3, searched were done on Google's internal search system for how to log in and setup access through SVN to the driving car project ("chauffer").
Tortoise SVN was downloaded and installed on Dec 11. It then "downloaded over 14,000 files from the SVN repository". (My interpretation? A SVN checkout of the entire repo was done).
A USB card reader was attached on Dec 14 for about 8 hours.
On Dec 18, the laptop was reinstalled with Goobuntu (Google's custom Ubuntu).
The machine stayed on and checking in to Google normally from the time of the install until Dec 21, when it received a "machine certificate", within a minute of which it was not seen again on Google's networks, despite being configured to connect every 15 minutes (My interpretation? It was off again).
The filing goes on to talk about some Google drive exports of documents that don't necessarily look good for Levandowski.
My purpose here isn't to convince anyone that he's innocent, just to point out that Google's allegations are worded in a way to cast the most suspicion while being technically true. Through the omission of the timeline it sounds like his actions were all taken at once, which looks a little more premeditated, when instead it was over a period of a couple weeks. It's entirely possibly that Levandowski purposefully obfuscated his actions by spreading them out temporally, so this isn't evidence he didn't do what is alleged, but I think it's important people have the facts before making judgments based on Waymo's lawyer's accounting, which is obviously as beneficial to Waymo as possible, as should be expected.
Thanks for writing this up. The court of public opinion IMO should adhere to "innocent until proven guilty," and summaries like yours are the only things that make that possible.
This is a civil suit, not a criminal one, so the standard of judgment at play is "preponderance of evidence", not "innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt".
The summary does seem to make it pretty clear which way the preponderance of evidence goes. That'd be an awful lot of coincidences to have all that stuff lining up in one particular way -- it just seems unlikely.
Sure, Google's interpretation is not particularly generous. But even the most charitable reading of the facts would find that Levandowski downloaded the files to an external disk, relatively close to when he left the company.
All of that is bad for Levandowski, but it's unclear if any of those files got used by Uber, which is where the case may very well fizzle out.
> But even the most charitable reading of the facts would find that Levandowski downloaded the files to an external disk
Actually, no. All they have is that a few days after an SVN sync, a USB card reader was attached for 8 hours. There is no evidence presented that he actually copied any files, much less the synced SVN files, to whatever was connected with the USB card reader. He could have plugged it in to copy his personal SSH keys to the machine and left it in until he left for the day for all we know.
There is separate information that he exported a single Google Drive file to a personal device on January 11, titled "Chauffer TL Weekly Updates - Q4 2015". There are further logs about other high level engineers that subsequently left that also exported Google Drive files to personal devices prior to leaving as well.
Can you show me where in the expert testimony this is? I haven't yet found this exact allegation myself. I've seen the media parrot this over and over again.
The expert testimony identified a specific model card reader attached to the computer a full three days later. It didn't say that a memory card was ever inserted into the card reader and mounted a logical volume. Nor did the expert testimony mention any files copied to an external drive. The have an expert testimony with specific details from logs about a card reader being inserted but no specific details about a storage device or files being copied? Does the lack of these details but specificity of other details not strike anyone else as odd?
The only copying of files that were specifically identified in the expert testimony was the copying of about a half dozen files to Google drive. That's it. I'm not saying that there isn't the possibility of wrongdoing, but the expert testimony certainly doesn't support the allegations enough to meet the criteria of "preponderance of evidence" for me at least. The testimony definitely doesn't meet the criteria of being a smoking gun, yet that is how it has been reported.
> Does the lack of these details but specificity of other details not strike anyone else as odd?
Not particularly. There's only so much they can log easily by tying into the system. Card reader insertions are easily tracked through OS level event logs in most operating systems, but generating a log entry for every file copy that happens is quite another level of granularity.
It's sort of like street level cameras. They may catch someone going into a a house or business, but unless you have prior knowledge that there is a camera inthe house or business that the state should have access to, omission of footage of what happened inside does not insinuate that something is being omitted on purpose.
> The only copying of files that were specifically identified in the expert testimony was the copying of about a half dozen files to Google drive.
Yep, and only one of them was by Levandowski. "Chauffer TL Weekly Updates - Q4 2015"
There's only so much that the expert testimony was able to establish. But what it did do was get the judge to authorize more discovery, so Google will apparently get a lot of data from Uber to search through to find their smoking gun, if it exists.
Yeah, I wouldn't expect logs for every file, but I would expect logs for the insertion of a card into the card reader and mounting a logical volume from that card. How big was the card/volume, if any? And if there even was one, was it even big enough to hold the entirety of that repo.
Also, while copying isn't auditable on windows, windows can audit object reads and writes. Were there any logs showing that the directory with the files were read while the card reader was inserted into the machine? It's off by default however. Does anyone know the default audit settings of a new google windows installation to know what folders it turns on logging for if any?
These are all issues and details I would expect to be mentioned in an expert's report if they weren't trying to be selective in the details they provided. Since this expert works for Google, omitting details in Google's favor wouldn't surprise me. I didn't see any statement in the expert's report where they had to make a statement under oath where they declare that they aren't omitting any other details that may be relevant to the court. Without such a declaration, it's possible to be truthful, but deceptive without perjuring yourself.
