In a surge of activism highlighting the moral quagmire inside big tech, students and workers at Google and Amazon are coming together to protest their employers for becoming embroiled in a $1.2 billion dollar surveillance system development project for the Israeli government dubbed Project Nimbus. The project – which is believed to have included top-tier cloud and AI services – was highly controversial, sparking protests and strikes against what protestors reportedly feared might be used to further fuel the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Project Nimbus is essentially a joint project between Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Israeli government. The project, launched in 2021, is intended to give cutting-edge cloud computing and AI capacity to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) alongside different Israeli government bodies. Examples of such technologies include facial recognition, sentiment analysis, and automated image categorisation, which critics say can be weaponised to accelerate surveillance operations against Palestinians.
The protests on Project Nimbus: Unanimity for principles
The funding for Project Nimbus has got a wider swathe of tech workers and students rallied in opposition. Protests were held at Google offices in New York, California, Seattle and Durham on April 16, 2024. Organised by the group calling itself No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), protesters have been coming into office spaces, staging in front of them with visuals and chanting “No tech for apartheid,” demanding an end to the Nimbus contract.
NOTA is essentially a coalition of tech workers and activists from Muslim grassroots movement MPower Change and advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace. Since 2021, NOTA has advocated for Google and Amazon to boycott and divest from Project Nimbus and any other work for the Israeli government.
“Palestinians are already harmed by Israeli surveillance and violence,” the pledge, which marks the latest backlash against Google and Amazon, reads. “By expanding public cloud computing capacity and providing their state of the art technology to the Israeli occupation’s government and military, Amazon and Google are helping to make Israeli apartheid more efficient, more violent, and even deadlier for Palestinians.”
A harsh corporate response
The protests generated a swift and cold response from Google. The company fired more than 28 workers who participated in the sit-ins for policy violations and disruptive conduct. Many have since decried it as an effort to quash dissent and make sure employees fell in line. Jane Chung, a spokeswoman for NOTA, reckoned Google’s aims are clear.
“The corporation is attempting to quash dissent, silence its workers, and reassert its power over them,” Chung said in a press release. “In its attempts to do so, Google has decided to unceremoniously, and without due process, upend the livelihoods of over 50 of its own workers.”
Bigger implications for tech
As the protests with Project Nimbus have proven, it could end up becoming a much bigger issue than anyone was previously prepared for. They are indicative of a watershed moment in the tech industry, one that sees workers more prepared to take their employers on about ethical issues. This activism reflects a significant change in the field where employees are demanding more accountability and conscience from technology.
The protest has also laid bare a vast gulf between corporate strategies and the attitudes of a different workforce. Employees from all over the world, particularly Palestinian activists and Muslim staff members, as well as their allies have been harassed and retaliated against because of their opposition to Facebook’s arbitrary suppression of Palestinians. It is also why there has been a growing call for these tech companies to meaningfully manifest the values they claim to hold — values around advancing and respecting innovation and human rights
Overall, protests against Project Nimbus raise an important question about the participation of technology in contemporary warfare and a discussion on the responsibleness of tech development and deployment by programmers. These protests are only going to gain momentum, so they will have an impact on the way tech companies decide who their future contracts should be with, and how much they need to think about the potential human rights risks of their technologies.
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Tags: AWS, cloud, google cloud
