A looming strike over Project Dragonfly is putting new pressure on Google

Googlers protesting corporate harassment policies earlier this month in New York City.

Officially, Google’s preferred description for Project Dragonfly is “exploratory.” “This is an exploratory project and no decision has been made about whether we could or would launch,” the company said today, in the wake of a significant new report on its plans for a censored search engine in China.

”Exploratory” is a word that conjures the earliest stages of development — of the conquistador, standing at the shore of a new land, surveying rough its shape and character. But according to Thursday’s report by The Intercept’s ace Dragonfly chronicler Ryan Gallagher, Google’s explorations had already reached the final stages of development by the time word of the project leaked.

And as Gallagher describes it, that was the result of a...

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