Nine Google employees were removed by police from the company’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, on Tuesday night after staging an hours-long sit-in over a cloud contract with the Israeli government.
The protest in Sunnyvale lasted for more than eight hours, occupying the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in a building near Google’s main headquarters in Silicon Valley. The protest in New York took over a common area on the tenth floor of Google’s Chelsea facility.
Video seen by WIRED showed what appeared to be Google security personnel, accompanied by local police, walking towards protesting workers at two different offices. In the video from New York, a man appears to be relaying a message from Google management, informing protesting workers that they have been placed on administrative leave and asking them to take the opportunity to leave peacefully.
“We’re not leaving,” one protesting worker replied. A uniformed man then introduced the officers as the New York Police Department and issued an ultimatum, saying the workers had one last chance to walk out freely. “If not, you could be arrested for trespassing,” he said. When the protesters again refused to leave, police handcuffed them.
WIRED could not independently verify whether the four workers in New York and five in Sunnyvale who were apparently detained by police have been arrested or charged. A person involved in coordinating the protests said New York workers were arrested with appearance tickets, which specify when a person must appear in court. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Police took action Tuesday night after “dozens” of employees were placed on administrative leave after participating in a sit-in protest that day and left peacefully, sources said. Protest rallies were also held outside Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle.
The action requires Google to abandon a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government called Project Nimbus, in which Amazon is also involved.last week time According to reports, the contract involves the provision of direct services to the Israel Defense Forces.
Workers detained in New York include software engineers Hasan Ibraheem and Zelda Montes. They also include two employees who call themselves Jesus and Muhammad, who held hands-free calls with protesters outside Google’s New York offices on Tuesday.
Project Nimbus has been the target of employee protests at Google and Amazon for years. After details of the cloud contract were made public, a campaign group called “No Tech for Apartheid” was formed in 2021, made up of technologists from two Muslim- and Jewish-led activist groups, MPower Change and Jewish Voice for Peace.
In 2022, employees at Google and Amazon protested outside their company offices after The Intercept published documents showing contracts containing artificial intelligence technology such as video analysis. Protesting tech workers said the capabilities could be used by Israeli security agencies to harm Palestinians.
Israel’s military assault on Gaza began after Hamas killed some 1,100 Israelis on October 7, adding new impetus to internal opposition to the Nimbus plan. The IDF has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians since it bombed and entered Gaza last fall.
Last month, Google Cloud software engineer Eddie Hatfield upset Google Israel’s general manager at the Mind The Tech conference, a conference hosted by the company that focuses on the Israeli tech industry. More than 600 other Google employees signed a petition opposing the company’s sponsorship of the conference. Hatfield was fired three days later, and Google trust and safety policy employee Vidana Abdel Khalek resigned in protest.
Google isn’t the only Silicon Valley giant to see worker activism tied to Israel’s war on Hamas. In late March, more than 300 Apple employees signed an open letter claiming retaliation against employees who expressed support for the Palestinians and urging company leadership to publicly support the Palestinians.