A man has been charged with arson after setting a Google Street View car on fire because he “felt Google was watching him”.
Raul Diaz, 30, of Oakland, California, was arrested outside Google offices in Bayshore Parkway on 30 June. Guns and a device which bomb squad officers identified as a half-finished pipe bomb were found in his car, according to a criminal complaint filed by the state.
Diaz’s arrest came after a series of attacks on Google cars, starting in mid May, when molotov cocktails were thrown at a parked Street View car in Mountain View. The car failed to catch fire, as the bottles only shattered when they hit the ground. A suspect was seen fleeing to a dark SUV on CCTV footage.
One month later, police were called after shots were fired at a Google building. A car was again caught on CCTV, apparently the same model as the earlier attempted arson attack. Six days after that, another Google car – described by the affidavit as a “self-driving car”, something Google later denied – was found engulfed in flames. Video footage showed a man nearby holding a makeshift water-pistol, believed by police to contain flammable liquid used to start the fire.
The police say Diaz, who was arrested three weeks after the second fire in a traffic stop, drives a car similar to that seen on the footage, and the arresting officer “recognised Diaz to be the possible suspect”. Shortly after his arrest, Diaz “shared information about previous events unrelated to the traffic stop [and] mentioned Google, Facebook and Larry Page [the chief executive of Alphabet, Google’s parent company]”.
The affidavit continues: “Diaz told officers that his motivation behind the attacks was that he felt Google was watching him and that made him upset. Diaz said that he kept journals of the times that he felt Google had been watching him.”