Amazon appeared to significantly beef up security for its New York Amazon Web Services Summit on Wednesday, two weeks after activists disrupted the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C., to protest Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google's $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. The crackdown in New York thwarted plans by several activists to interrupt the keynote speech by Matt Wood, AWS's vice president of AI products.
Amazon only allowed approved individuals into the keynote speech. The activists, who had registered online to attend, all received emails prior to the conference saying they would not be allowed to attend due to space constraints.
In addition, there was a large presence of private security guards and personnel from the New York Police Department and New York State Police at the conference. Despite being barred from the keynote, the activists did enter the building, where security confiscated posters and flyers during bag checks, which not all attendees were subjected to.
Amazon has previously said it respects the “rights of its employees to express themselves without fear of retaliation, intimidation or harassment,” referring to the Project Nimbus protests. However, the heightened security shows the company is taking steps to thwart further dissent. Google, for its part, laid off 50 workers following a high-profile protest in April over the company’s cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.
The activists behind the planned disruption of the keynote are all organizers of No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), a coalition of tech workers, organizers from the Islamist grassroots group MPower Change, and members of the anti-Zionist Jewish group Jewish Voices for Peace. (NOTA was founded in 2021, shortly after news of Project Nimbus broke.) The group planned the sit-in protest at Google and other recent actions targeting Project Nimbus.
Those planning to interrupt Wood’s keynote include Zelda Montes, a former YouTube software engineer, and Hasan Ibraheem, a former Google software engineer. Both were among the 50 Google employees laid off in the spring. Jamie Kowalski, a former Amazon software employee who worked at the company for six years, Ferras Hamad, a former Meta employee who was recently fired after raising concerns about anti-Palestinian censorship, and another tech employee who did not want his name publicly reported, also planned to protest.
Five other NOTA activists stood directly outside the AWS Summit, behind a series of barricades, distributing informational flyers. They held large banners reading “Google and Amazon Workers Say: Drop Nimbus, End the Occupation, No Tech for Apartheid” and “Genocide Powered by AWS” above an image of a Gaza neighborhood reduced to rubble.
Photo: Caroline Haskins
