Google LLC has reluctantly become more open regarding its censored Chinese search engine, “Project Dragonfly,” but it turns out the company wanted to keep the project low-key for as long as it could.

According to a report by The Intercept published on Thursday, when the project was announced last year at the Google offices in Mountain View, California, some of the meeting attendees voiced their concerns about working on a search engine for a government that espouses intense surveillance and suppresses freedom of speech.

It was discussed that Google would blacklist certain search queries that the government didn’t like people knowing about, while search queries would also be tied to user’s phone numbers, the report said.

One of the leading engineers, a 14-year veteran at the company, had apparently expressed that this could potentially lead to the detention of some Chinese nationals. According to the report, Scott Beaumont, Google’s head of operations in China, dismissed these concerns.

“Beaumont and other executives then shut out members of the company’s security and privacy team from key meetings about the search engine,” the Intercept said, after interviewing four people involved with the project. They added that Beaumont “tried to sideline a privacy review of the plan that sought to address potential human rights abuses.”

The report also said Google bosses “worked to suppress employee criticism of the censored search engine” and would only communicate verbally about the project. Minutes weren’t allowed at meetings to prevent a paper trail, while only a couple hundred people in the 88,000-strong company knew about Project Dragonfly.

“They were determined to prevent leaks about Dragonfly from spreading through the company,” said a Google employee who still works at the company. “Their biggest fear was that internal opposition would slow our operations.”

Their fears became a reality, of course, in August when 1,400 employees at the company signed a letter questioning the ethics of such a search engine. Google was then forced to be more transparent about Dragonfly, which only resulted in more protests with perhaps stronger sentiments regarding the perceived immorality of the project.

Amnesty International got behind the disgruntled employees this week, writing, “If Google is happy to capitulate to the Chinese government’s draconian rules on censorship, what’s to stop it cooperating with other repressive governments who control the flow of information and keep tabs on their citizens?” Amnesty said it would help arrange protests outside Google offices in a number of countries.

The Intercept said the search engine would be designed in compliance with the strict censorship laws in China. This would mean blacklisting queries containing words such as “human rights,” “student protest” and “Nobel Prize.” Not only that, the design included a direct link to the searchers’ phone number and location.

When the Dragonfly story broke and there was a furor in the media and inside the company, according to the report, many of those working on the project were not surprised. Some said they had said it would come, but the management just brushed the issues aside.

“Every new product or service that Google develops must be reviewed by legal, privacy, and security teams, who try to identify any potential issues or problems ahead of the launch,” said The Intercept. “But with Dragonfly, the normal procedure was not followed.”

But at least one Google employee disagreed with the report. “This story does not represent my experience working on security & privacy for Dragonfly, which were positive and thoughtful,” Heather Adkins, director of security and privacy at Google, wrote in a tweet.

The matter isn’t about to go away. Yesterday a number of Google employees created a “strike fund” in protest against the project. That fund has already raised more than $200,000.

Image: David DeHetre/Flickr