One activist, an engineer named Liz Fong-Jones, called attention to Project Maven in an internal blog post, according to other workers who saw it, and the circle of concern grew. Many of the engineers feared that the technology would be used to single out targets for killing. A growing number of workers concluded that the program was not in keeping with Google’s values, and they wanted management to know about it. The discovery that their employer was working hand in hand with the Defense Department to bolster drone warfare “was a watershed moment,” said Meredith Whittaker, an A.I. researcher based in New York who led Google’s Open Research Group. “If they were able to do that without any internal backlash, dissent, we would have crossed a significant line.”