Hundreds of Google employees and their supporters gathered near the company’s offices in downtown San Francisco on Thursday to lift signs that read “No Tech for Apartheid” and fill the air with chants of “Tech from Amazon and Google! !”
Similar scenes took place outside the Google and Amazon offices in New York and Seattle, and a Google office in Durham, North Carolina. Employees from Google and Amazon were joined in the demonstrations by technical staff from other companies and Palestinian human rights groups. They all gathered to protest Project Nimbus, Google and Amazon’s cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.
Google docs published by The Intercept show the contract includes AI technology such as face detection, video analytics and sentiment analysis. Opponents of the deal fear the Israeli military could use the technology to increase surveillance of Palestinians living in occupied territories and to violate human rights.
In an email, Google Cloud spokesperson Atle Erlingsson wrote that Google Cloud proudly supports numerous governments, including Israel’s. He accused protesters of misrepresenting Project Nimbus, saying that “Our work does not focus on highly sensitive or classified military workloads,” but acknowledged that the contract will provide Israel’s military access to Google technology. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The demonstrations are entering familiar territory for Google after thousands of workers signed a letter in 2018 condemning a Pentagon drone surveillance contract, Project Maven. Dozens of employees have resigned over the deal, which has also sparked outrage from academics, including the former Stanford advisor to Google co-founder Larry Page. The company eventually said it would not attempt to renew the contract and published a set of AI principles intended as ethical guidelines.
Some Google employees who oppose Project Nimbus say it is violating some of those promises, including a pledge not to pursue technologies that “collect or use information for surveillance that violates internationally accepted standards” or “generally accepted principles.” of international law and human rights violations”. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say Israel routinely violates Palestinian human rights and calls Israel an apartheid state.
Aniran Chandravongsri joined Google’s cloud division as a Seattle-based software engineer during the height of the Maven protests in May 2018. Having previously worked at General Electric, a major Pentagon contractor, he says that seeing of the outrage “one reason was that I was a little more comfortable joining Google.” Over the years, he has signed petitions protesting the company’s work with law enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, but decided to take a leading role in pushing back Project Nimbus.
Chandravongsri’s parents were born in Laos, where he still has an extended family. He has witnessed firsthand how CIA-led bombing raids in the 1960s and 1970s left a deadly legacy of unexploded ordnance that still threatens lives today, a problem common to many war zones, including Gaza. He says that reading the AI capabilities in Project Nimbus “really scared me”.
