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On April 12, California State Senator Liz Figueroa announced she would introduce legislation outlawing Gmail. She did not have a Gmail account. She had never seen a Gmail account. Almost no one had. In a press release, she quoted from a letter she had sent to Google: "I cannot urge you strongly enough to abandon this misbegotten idea. I believe you are embarking on a disaster of enormous proportions."

When Sergey called the senator to explain that Gmail ads were placed automatically by computers, the same way emails were scanned for viruses, she didn't want to hear the details. She did not, in fact, like email, she informed him, and she certainly didn't want hers scanned by Google.

I had never heard of Liz Figueroa, but I looked her up online and saw that she soon would be forced out of office by term limits. I wondered if she hoped attaching her name to a "pro-consumer" issue would help her win her next election.*

A law against Gmail would certainly be a problem, but it wouldn't matter if we continued to be hammered by privacy groups and the press. No one would sign up for the service anyway.

The day after Figueroa's announcement, I headed to Washington, DC. The trip had nothing to do with Gmail. My mother's sister had passed away and I was going to her funeral. It was an emotional experience for me during an already stressful time. As I stood graveside, all the pressure that had been building within me found an acceptable release. I found myself crying uncontrollably when I dropped a handful of dirt onto my aunt's coffin as it was lowered into the ground. I hugged my mother and sister for what seemed like a very long time. With all that had been happening, I had not had a chance to breathe, let alone process the events bombarding me. I knew the avalanche of new problems back home was accelerating in my absence.

When I returned to the office, the atmosphere had changed. I sensed gloom and recrimination and frustration about the negative response to ads in Gmail. Sergey paced the office like a tiger in a tiny cage, commanding us to set up a war room to deal with the problem, demanding we put up more information on the site, and insisting that we tell everyone, "There is no privacy issue."

It was a perspective shared by Paul and other engineers as well. Computers did the scanning, and computers were good at keeping secrets. It was a closed system. If there was no loss of privacy, there was no privacy issue. Why couldn't people understand that?

"Just tell them spam filters and virus detectors have done this for years," Sergey instructed David Krane, who told me the founders dismissed critics as misinformed and intimated that they should "trust us, we have no record of doing anything bad." Sergey in particular seemed to take the criticism personally, and his frustration deepened with each passing day as Georges and Ana worked on a statement defending Gmail to post on the site. They had begun work on it while I was in DC, and when I rewrote it to make it more user-friendly, Sergey insisted we change it back. Though the writing was an improvement, he said, our users were not the target. He wanted a direct response to the points raised by privacy advocates, and he didn't care if users read it or not. In this time of crisis, Google would once again be a platform for expressing his personal perspective.

Cindy's mood also darkened by the hour. She was stung by the criticism from her professional colleagues and unhappy with the response of our group to the conflagration we had ignited. Googlers from other departments were asking why we were not responding to all the misinformation circulating. What was our PR strategy?

David and his group pushed Gmail accounts into the hands of journalists and analysts so they could see the service for themselves. Once they tried it, most backed off their alarmist tone about privacy, but that took time, and we were now on the wrong side of public opinion. Cindy demanded to know how soon we could launch a corporate blog