Inside Google's Plan to Launch a Censored Search Engine in China

Earlier this month, the Intercept broke the news that Google was building a secret program called Dragonfly, a censored search engine the company was potentially hoping to bring to China. Unlike the Google search that's used in the rest of the world, this search engine would block websites that are banned by the Chinese government and would not answer certain questions that the Chinese government has blacklisted. To learn more about Dragonfly, I recently spoke with Ryan Gallagher, a U.K.-based investigative journalist who reports on digital security and state surveillance issues for the Intercept. In our conversation, part of this week's episode of Slate's technology podcast If Then, we discussed why Google wants so desperately to enter China, why many of its employees oppose the plan, and how even a co-founder of the company may have been kept in the dark as Dragonfly was developed. Gallagher detailed how Google CEO Sundar Pichai has had several highly secretive meetings with the Chinese government about bringing Google to China over the past year--and the timeline of Google's plans to deploy the project once Beijing gave the green light.