Google Workers in California and New York are planning sit-ins The company’s ties to Israel “Apartheid Without Tech” organizers told Gizmodo on Tuesday.Protesters are demanding that their companies abandon Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract held by Google and Amazon to provide Cloud computing services Israeli government and military.
“The desired outcome is that Google abandons the Nimbus project and literally abandons all support for the Israeli military,” Cheyne Anderson, a Google software engineer and organizer of Apartheid No Tech, told Gizmodo in a phone interview. “How can you stand by and continue to do business as usual with the news coming out of Gaza?”
No Tech for Apartheid expects more than 50 employees to participate in a sit-in on Tuesday between Google’s Sunnyvale and New York City offices. In Sunnyvale, workers planned a sit-in at the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
Anderson told Gizmodo that the movement against Google’s ties to the Israeli military is growing within the company. In 2021, Israel’s Finance Ministry said that Google and Amazon’s Nimbus project would provide the country’s “defense agencies” provides a full range of cloud solutions. Since then, little information has been revealed about the contract. “No Technology Supports Apartheid” seeks to increase transparency about how the Israeli military uses Google services. Google DeepMind researcher told time Last week, cloud providers often had limited visibility into their government customers’ servers.
Part of Tuesday’s “Technology Apartheid” protest was to reinstate Eddie Hatfield. Google fired Hatfield, a 23-year-old software engineer who last month interrupted an executive’s speech by shouting “Technology without apartheid!” at the Israel Tech Conference in New York. A Google spokesperson told edge Hatfield was fired for interfering with a company-sponsored event, not for the specific content of what the employee yelled. However, Anderson said Apartheid No Tech viewed Hatfield’s firing as an act of retaliation for speaking out about Project Nimbus.
“Google’s claim that Eddie was fired for interrupting another employee’s speech is clearly more unethical than the war profiteering behavior Google executives engaged in,” Anderson said.
Google did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
There is no evidence that Google or Amazon technology has been used to kill civilians.However, recent reports +972Magazine indicates that Israel is using a method called “Lavender“marks Gaza citizens as targets on a kill list. Israel is known for using another artificial intelligence system in its war, called “Gospel,” to select bombing targets in Gaza. It’s not clear what cloud provider will power these AI systems, but it’s likely that fairly advanced computing infrastructure will be required.
No technology could support apartheid, a sign of the tech community’s growing concern about how artificial intelligence could be used in warfare. Time Magazine previously reported that Two workers resigned Concerns about Google’s involvement with the Israeli government. Technology has always played a role in the war, even if some at Google don’t want it to.