David Barksdale: Google Engineer Fired for Stalking Minors

by Jordan Yerman | September 14, 2010 at 12:19 pm

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Google SRE David Barksdale Quietly Fired after Stalking, Spying Evidence Appears

A Google site reliability engineer (SRE) named David Barksdale was fired after evidence emerged of repeated violations of user privacy. Barksdale had been hacking the Google Chat, Voice and Gmail accounts of at least four minors, whom he had met at a summer tech conference.

When a kid would block David Barksdale from instant messaging, Barksdale could simply unblock himself: he had unfettered access to the system's inner workings. Also, a SRE remotely accessing logs at odd hours would not seem unusual, and that level of engineer is not exactly micromanaged.

What motivated Barksdale to snoop on these teens is not entirely clear. Our source said Barksdale's harassment did not appear to be sexual in nature, although his online communication with the minors (such as inviting underage kids to attend to the movies with him) demonstrated extraordinarily questionable judgment on Barksdale's part.

Unsurprisingly, Google has been tight-lipped on the issue. While every web service will have employees with top-level access to accounts and content, few companies have the scope and reach of Google, which has made inroads into all aspects of communication save for the postal system.

When users complain about the security risks of entrusting one company with access to everything you do online, this is precisely the sort of situation they're talking about.

Gawker, which has been following this story, spoke with a former Google SRE who is unrelated to this case:

"If you're an SRE, for instance, on Gmail, you will have access to mailboxes because you may have to look into the databases," the ex-Google engineer explained to us by phone. "You'll need access to the storage mechanisms," he explained, pointing out that in order to determine the cause of a technical issue with Gmail, an SRE might have to access emails stored on Google's servers to see if data is corrupted.

Update: NowPublic received an email from Jay Nancarrow at Google:

The following statement may be attributed to Bill Coughran, Senior Vice

President, Engineering, Google:

“We dismissed David Barksdale for breaking Google’s strict internal

privacy policies. We carefully control the number of employees who have

access to our systems, and we regularly upgrade our security controls--for

example, we are significantly increasing the amount of time we spend

auditing our logs to ensure those controls are effective. That said, a

limited number of people will always need to access these systems if we are

to operate them properly--which is why we take any breach so seriously.”