HN user
A writer hired to write the wording on Google's websites could submit a change that rot13s every word on Google's web properties. This would not be against the law, additionally it would be exactly what the employee was hired to do. But the employee should be fired all the same.
Also the people arguing for giving the employee a "talking to" instead of firing I think are not considering the game theory aspect to this.
If the precedent is "a talking to" with future offenses resulting in a firing, then smart Google employees will realize that they can create an internal activist email list, get new hires to join it, and then when an opportunity for activism presents itself get an employee with a clean record to perform the activism, rinse repeat.
Of course the message in this case wasn't terribly harmful, so I'm sympathetic to the argument of "it's not such a big deal". But the problem is, Google doesn't want to wait for the big deal (for example a chrome extension change to search exec's TextAreas for keywords a "whistleblower" might want to report on) to actually happen and then fire them. They want to prevent employees from thinking they should ever try doing that in the first place which means putting the foot down before the inevitable happens.
If the employee had added a message,
"You have the constitutional right to keep and bear arms" when employees visited cabelas.com, would you call it a political message?
Both are simply informing people of their rights.