Anthony Levandowski is a Google employee who has helped develop Google's futuristic self-driving cars. He lives in the Bay Area, where he normally commutes by self-driving car about 43 miles to the Googleplex, Google's headquarters in Mountain View. Earlier this week though, Levandowski couldn't get to work on time, after protesters blocked his driveway for 45 minutes.

Protests in the Bay Area are certainly not uncommon -- the University of California Berkley campus is an iconic site of protests going back to the 1960s. Protests of Google employees in San Francisco are also not uncommon these days.

Protesters have been gathering outside of Google employee commuter bus stops for at least half a year, airing complaints about the effects of high-salary Google employees gentrifying neighborhoods in the Bay Area and effectively causing housing prices to skyrocket to levels unaffordable for residents who are not employed by an internet technology behemoth.

They saw the Google commuter busses -- which pick up Google employees living in the Bay Area for work -- as a sign of privilege and disconnection with the community. And those protesters got results, as the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors voted this week to prevent corporate shuttles from using the busiest municipal bus stops, to require them to yield to public transit vehicles, and to charge corporate shuttle busses a fee for using city bus stops. 

But the same day that -- albeit small -- victory was won, the "Google Bus Protests" took a darker, more personal turn. Early Tuesday morning, protestors went to Levandowski's home, blocked his way out, held a banner in front of his house that said "Google's Future Stops Here," and placed fliers on the windshield of nearby cars that read, "Anthony Levandowski is building an unconscionable world of surveillance, control and automation. He is also your neighbor."

The group protested Levandowski -- who works at the advanced-project laboratory Google[x], which created the self-driving cars, Google Glass, and recently announced it was developing robots with Google-acquired robotics companies like Boston Dynamics -- for working "with the defense industry" and developing a luxury condo in Berkeley. The "defense industry" pretext likely refers to Boston Dynamics, which had active defense contracts when Google bought it that Google said it would honor while also saying it had no plans to renew or pursue in the future.

According to Ars Technica, the protest group, calling itself "the Counterforce," also anonymously posted an anti-Google declaration on the local news website IndyBay, which is where story starts to resemble a dystopian science fiction novel where underground luddites fight against the advance of technology.

"All of Google's employees should be prevented from getting to work. All surveillance infrastructure should be destroyed. No luxury condos should be built. No one should be displaced," said the posting by "the Counterforce." The almost comically paranoid post paints a picture of Google as a part of an evil empire, destroying the city and working with the government for the purposes of war and wrecking civil rights. Referring to Levandowski, the post said, "It is very likely that this person, who develops war robots for the military and builds surveillance infrastructure, is a pleasant neighbor. But so what?"

Whether or not "the Counterforce" is entirely serious about their screed is hard to tell with writing like this:

"We will not be held hostage by Google's threat to release massive amounts of carbon should the bus service be stopped. Our problem is with Google, its pervasive surveillance capabilities utilized by the NSA, the technologies it is developing, and the gentrification its employees are causing in every city they inhabit. But our problem does not stop with Google. All of you other tech companies, all of you other developers and everyone else building the new surveillance state -- We're coming for you next."

But the protesters' flyer includes a creepy amount of detail about Levandowski's morning routine -- enough to be a cause for concern for anyone. "Preparing for the action, we watched Levandowski step out of his front door," said the Counterforce flyer, which was also posted as an image on IndyBay. "He had Google Glasses over his eyes, carried his baby in his arm, and held a tablet with his free hand. As he descended the stairs with the baby, his eyes were on the tablet through the prism of his Google Glasses, not on the life against his chest. He appeared in this moment like the robot he admits that he is."

Bus protests have gotten more intense in the past few months, with one incident in December resulting in a broken window on a Google Bus. Protesters concerned about the impact of giant tech companies on the local economy now have another thing to worry about: extremism in its own ranks.