Google and Amazon employees are pressuring their companies to drop a $1.2 billion cloud computing project that they believe will harm Palestinians.
By Zane McNeill, Waging Nonviolence
Hundreds of community members and workers across four cities gathered to protest Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract between Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government and military, on Thursday.
“There can be no tech for war. No tech for apartheid,” Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, expressed to a crowd of demonstrators led by Amazon and Google tech workers.
While the cloud-computing project has been hailed as a “game changer” for Israel, activists have feared that it will lead to data privacy issues, especially if utilized by the Israeli military to further the surveillance and data collection of Palestinians.
Google’s own internal documents suggest that Project Nimbus would allow the Israeli government and military to use “facial detection, automated image categorization, [and] object tracking” that workers believe will be used to fuel Israeli apartheid. According to a report from The Intercept, Project Nimbus provides Israel, including the Israel Defense Forces, with advanced artificial intelligence technology that could be used for the digital surveillance of occupied Palestine territories.
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