More than 600 Google employees signed a letter to Google’s marketing leadership asking it to drop its sponsorship of Mind the Tech, an annual conference that promotes Israel’s tech industry taking place in New York this week. “Please quit Follow Tech, apologize, and stand with Google employees and customers who are despairing of the massive loss of life in Gaza; we need Google to do better.” The letter was seen by Wired.
The two-day event begins on Monday with a series of industry-focused talks and concludes with an evening gala on Tuesday. It aims to highlight the resilience of Israel’s tech sector, especially as the country’s economy slumps following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants. About 1,200 Israelis were killed in the attacks; as of March 4, Israel’s military operations in Gaza had killed 30,000 Palestinians.
On Monday, Barak Regev, managing director of Google Israel, was interrupted at a conference by a Google Cloud software engineer who shouted that the results of his work should not be used for surveillance and genocide. He was joined by organizers from anti-Zionist Israel group Shoresh and Jewish Voice for Peace, interrupting the event.
“I don’t see any way I could continue my engineering job without doing this,” the Google engineer later told Hellgate anonymously. “I consider this part of my engineering job and I hope other engineers in the cloud see me doing this and I hope it inspires them.” Both activists were quickly forced to withdraw from the event. The same goes for Hell’s Gate correspondent, who is also the author of this article. Organizers of the event did not explain why a member of the press was expelled.
Google is a “gold” sponsor of Mind the Tech, according to the conference website, although it’s unclear what financial commitment that might require. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Other speakers on Monday included New York Mayor Eric Adams, Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Leon and former National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers.
Zelda Montes, a YouTube software engineer who participated in protests outside the conference on Monday, told Wired that the workers’ concerns come amid “Israeli AI technology being used to surveil and massacre the Palestinian people.” Unity is particularly important.
“While our ‘leadership’ continues to fail us, I hope that we as Googlers feel more empowered to turn to each other and ask ourselves what else we can do to stand against the oppression of technology together,” Montes said.
The internal letter opposing Google’s participation in Mind the Tech was first shared within Google on February 29. The letter was co-authored by several organizers of No Tech for Apartheid, a group calling for the termination of Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli telecommunications company. The government contracts with Google and Amazon announced in 2021, and any other objectionable contracts.
No Tech for Apartheid claims that terms of the Nimbus contract could allow the US company’s cloud technology, including artificial intelligence tools, to be used for military purposes. Documents obtained by The Intercept suggest that Project Nimbus tools could be used for surveillance, an integral part of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.