What is Project Nimbus and why are Google employees protesting the Israel deal? | Explanatory news

US-based Google employees staged protests at the tech giant’s offices in New York, California and Seattle last week to oppose a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government.

Known as Project Nimbus, the joint contract between Google and Amazon signed in 2021 aims to provide cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technological services to the Israeli government and its military, which has faced condemnation for its ongoing war in Gaza.

Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and destroyed vast areas of the Palestinian coastal enclave since launching a military offensive last October. The country justified the offensive by saying it targets Hamas fighters who carried out a deadly attack on October 7.

Here’s a look at why tech workers oppose military collaborations amid the misuse of AI and other technologies in conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, among others.

Why are Google employees protesting Project Nimbus?

Last week’s protests in New York and Sunnyvale, California, were led by No Tech For Apartheid, which has been organizing Google employees against Project Nimbus since 2021. The employees oppose their employers’ ties to Israel, which faces an indictment of genocide for his war against Gaza at the World Court.

Tech workers demand that they have the right to know how their work will be used. With little clarity about the project, they fear the technology could be used to cause harm. Workers at Amazon and Facebook parent Meta have also clashed with their employers over wartime calls.

“It’s impossible to feel excited and energized to work when you know that your company is providing the Israeli government with products that help it commit atrocities in Palestine,” said Tina Vachovsky, a software engineer at Google, in a statement. Published on the No Tech Apartheid website.

According to a 2021 report via US-based media outlet The Intercept, Google is offering advanced AI capabilities to Israel that could collect data for facial recognition and object tracking as part of Project Nimbus.

Activists and academics have been alarmed by Israel’s use of AI to target Palestinians, while legal experts say the use of AI in warfare violates international law.

“In fact, there is a shocking lack of transparency around what exactly this project covers, beyond providing comprehensive and interoperable cloud computing, which is essentially data storage, management and sharing systems,” Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Angeles (UCLA), he told Al Jazeera.

“The data for Israeli governments, of course, will likely extend to the Israeli government [army]. Therefore, it is a project that marks and highlights the direct connections that large technology companies in the United States have, not only with the so-called military-industrial complex, but also with direct aid and complicity with the Israeli government.”

In a statement, the technology giant said the Nimbus contract “is not targeted at highly sensitive, classified or military-relevant workloads for weapons or intelligence services.” The tech giant says it works with several governments around the world, including Israel.

The company fired at least 28 employees on Tuesday for “violating Google’s code of conduct” and “harassment, discrimination and retaliation policy” during Tuesday’s events. Additionally, at least nine Google employees were arrested for protests at its offices in New York and Sunnyvale.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai issued a thinly veiled warning in a blog post last week.

“We have an open and vibrant culture of discussion that allows us to create incredible products and turn great ideas into action. This is important to preserve. But ultimately, we are a workplace, and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, not a place to act in a way that upsets coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to try use the company as a personal platform, or to fight for troubling issues or debate politics. This is too important a time as a company to be distracted,” he wrote.

But tech workers were undeterred by the warning. Mohammad Khatami, a Google software engineer who was arrested for participating in the protest in New York, told US channel Democracy Now that the workers were arrested for “speaking out against the use of our technology to fuel the first AI-driven genocide.” .

Is there a history of tech workers opposing collaborations with the military?]

This is not the first time that Amazon and Google employees have expressed their displeasure with Project Nimbus. Last October, Amazon and Google employees expressed their concerns anonymously in an open letter published by British media outlet The Guardian:

“We write as conscientious Google and Amazon employees from diverse backgrounds. We believe the technology we build should work to serve and uplift people around the world, including all of our users. As workers who keep these companies running, we are morally obligated to report violations of these fundamental values. For this reason, we are forced to call on the leaders of Amazon and Google to withdraw from Project Nimbus and sever all ties with the Israeli military. So far, more than 90 Google employees and more than 300 Amazon employees have signed this letter internally. We are anonymous because we fear retaliation.”

In 2018, thousands of Google employees protested a Pentagon contract known as Project Maven. In 2017, Google partnered with the Pentagon to use the company’s AI technology to analyze drone surveillance footage.

In February, about 30 activists gathered around the entrance to OpenAI’s San Francisco office, due to the company quietly removing the “military and war” ban from its usage policies the previous month. OpenAI would eventually confirm that it was working with the US Department of Defense on open source cybersecurity software solutions.

On March 4, at the Mind the Tech conference in New York, Google employee Eddie Hatfield stood up in a conference room and shouted, “I’m a software engineer at Google Cloud, and I refuse to build technology that powers genocide, apartheid or surveillance.” !”

Hatfield was fired days after interrupting Google Israel managing director Barak Regev. This would ultimately set the stage for the recent protests against the Nimbus Project.

In December last year, in response to Project Nimbus, 1,700 employees sent a petition to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stating that “by providing a cloud ecosystem for the Israeli public sector, Amazon is bolstering artificial intelligence and the surveillance capabilities used by the Israeli military.” to repress Palestinian activists and impose a brutal siege on Gaza.”

Human rights organizations – Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International – accused Israel of committing international apartheid crimes against Palestinians. A previous UN report accused Israel of establishing an apartheid regime.

What other technology companies have partnered with the Israeli military?

It’s not just cloud computing technology companies that offer contracts to the Israeli military. On a report published last week by Brown University, Roberto J Gonzalez, professor of cultural anthropology at San Jose State University, describes how the US public company Palantir Technologies is involved with Israel.

“For years, Palantir had several contracts with the Israeli government [army]and extended its support to Israel after the start of the war against Hamas in October 2023”, says Gonzalez in an article published on April 17.

Palantir, the Denver-based data analytics company that provides artificial intelligence to military institutions, was co-founded by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel. Palantir, which has worked with the US National Security Agency, has previously provided technology solutions to the Israeli military.

The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an international organization that works to challenge injustices around the world, has maintained a directory from “Companies Profiting from Israel’s Attacks on Gaza in 2023-2024”.

More than 50 companies from the US, China, Germany and the UK were listed.

“This is a form of corporate welfare not only for the biggest weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing and General Dynamics, who have seen their stock prices soar, but also for companies that are not normally seen as part of of the arms market. industry, such as Caterpillar, Ford and Toyota,” states the AFSC Action Center for Corporate Accountability.

What do we know about collaborations between technology companies and the military around the world?

US military and spy agencies signed contracts worth at least $53 billion between 2019 and 2022, according to the report published by Brown University on April 17.

In December 2022, the Pentagon awarded Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft a $9 billion contract for a top-secret cloud environment.

U.S.-based companies such as New York City-based Clearview AI provide facial recognition software to help Ukraine identify Russian soldiers and officers who participated in the military invasion. Ukraine received free access to Clearview AI software starting in 2022.

The same report also shows a growing role for big technologies in the military-industrial complex.

“While much of the Pentagon’s $886 billion budget is spent on conventional weapons systems and goes to well-established defense giants such as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing and BAE Systems, it is emerging a new political economy, driven by the imperatives of big technology companies, venture capital (VC) and private equity firms,” the report says.

The introduction of new technologies can often have a terrible human cost if not properly tested and evaluated.

“Everyone knows that these AI systems will make mistakes… so that there will be unjust deaths and murders, as we saw with so many civilians in Gaza,” says Srinivasan, the UCLA professor.