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.
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.
1: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3515476-Declaration-...