Google and Amazon's Project Nimbus plot to surveil Palestinians

[yankeedoodle]

The massive, $1.2 billion contract, dubbed Project Nimbus, was signed in May and is one of Israel's largest technology infrastructure ventures. Google and Amazon will transfer Israel's data into six cloud-based storage centers over the next several years.

The open letter says the deal violates the signers' "core values" by allegedly fostering surveillance of Palestinians and encouraging the expansion of Jewish settlements.

Jewish employees play key role in push to cancel Google's $1.2 billion contract with Israel
https://www.jta.org/2021/10/30/united-states/jewish-employees-play-key-role-in-push-to-cancel-googles-1-2-billion-contract-with-israel

(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Two Jewish Google employees are playing a key role in a worker petition calling on Google and Amazon to cancel a joint contract to build cloud-based data centers on behalf of the Israeli government.

The massive, $1.2 billion contract, dubbed Project Nimbus, was signed in May and is one of Israel's largest technology infrastructure ventures. Google and Amazon will transfer Israel's data into six cloud-based storage centers over the next several years.

The open letter says the deal violates the signers' "core values" by allegedly fostering surveillance of Palestinians and encouraging the expansion of Jewish settlements.

"For me as a Jewish employee of Google, I feel a deep sense of intense moral responsibility," said Ariel Koren, who lives in San Francisco and works in Google's education division. "When you work in a company, you have the right to be accountable and responsible for the way that your labor is actually being used."

Koren, along with Gabriel Schubiner, a New York–based Google software engineer, helped devise the open letter calling for the two mammoth companies to end the Project Nimbus contract. It appeared in the opinion section of the U.K.'s Guardian news site Oct. 12, claiming it had been signed by 390 Google and Amazon employees.

"As workers who keep these companies running, we are morally obligated to speak out against violations of these core values," the statement read. "This technology allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel's illegal settlements on Palestinian land."

According to Koren, over 1,000 employees have now signed the petition, although they remain anonymous and J. is unable to verify the number of supporters. Koren and Schubiner are two of only three total signatories who have chosen to identify themselves publicly.

The pair of Jewish Googlers said their identity as Jews is essential to speaking out on behalf of Palestinian colleagues who fear retribution.

"As Jews, we're relatively more insulated against charges of antisemitism that often come up in these discussions," said Schubiner. "I do recognize the privilege that comes with my identity and talking about this issue without fear of retaliation."

The push to end the Project Nimbus contract faces an uphill battle. The contract reportedly contains a safeguard preventing the tech giants from pulling out due to boycott pressure. In a short statement to J., Amazon Web Services said the company is "focused on making the benefits of our world-leading cloud technology available to all our customers, wherever they are located." Google did not reply to a request for comment.

Koren and Schubiner pointed to previous instances when Google responded to employees' pressure, ending the renewal of a contract with the Pentagon and discontinuing work on a censored Chinese search engine. Schubiner added that if the contract with the Israeli government holds, he hopes the open letter will push Google and Amazon toward more transparency in their business contracts and the adoption of ethical standards for future data storage projects.

Koren and Schubiner told J. they have been working to convince Jewish tech employees who are not currently active in criticizing Israel to take a stance on the contract. "Trying to have these kinds of conversations, while also listening and being respectful with coworkers, is difficult," said Schubiner. "It's not an easy conversation. One that, frankly, Google has tried to avoid and tried to shut down because they think it is so difficult."

Public support for the appeal has been largely confined to hardline anti-Zionist critics of Israel, including Jewish Voice for Peace and American Muslims for Palestine. These groups back a complete boycott of the state. Both Koren and Schubiner declined to comment when asked if they want Google and Amazon to divest from Israel outside of Project Nimbus.

The two are also members of Jewish Diaspora in Tech, a coalition of left-wing Jews who say they have felt ostracized from Jewish tech spaces due to their highly critical positions on Israel and Zionism. Schubiner said the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 forced him to reassess the division between his personal life and his work at Google.

"I was kind of shocked to find that the conversations about equity that we tried to have in that [Jewish Google] space were very quickly derailed into conversations that used antisemitism as a means to avoid talking about other types of racial equity," Schubiner said. Now he says around 200 people have joined the internal Google group for Jewish Diaspora in Tech.

"I don't know if the demand to drop Nimbus is fully achievable," added Schubiner. "It's up to the workers to decide that this is an issue that we care about enough to really put our own skin in the game."

[yankeedoodle]

GOOGLE AND AMAZON FACE SHAREHOLDER REVOLT OVER ISRAELI DEFENSE WORK
"Project Nimbus" would insulate the Israeli government's cloud computing from political pressures stemming from the military occupation of Palestine.
https://theintercept.com/2022/05/18/google-amazon-israel-military-nimbus/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter

GOOGLE AND AMAZON are both set to help build "Project Nimbus," a mammoth new cloud computing project for the Israeli government and military that is spurring intense dissent among employees and the public alike. Shareholders of both firms will soon vote on resolutions that would mandate reconsideration of a project they fear has grave human rights consequences.

Little is known of the plan, reportedly worth over $1 billion, beyond the fact that it would consolidate the Israeli government's public sector cloud computing needs onto servers housed within the country's borders and subject solely to Israeli law, rather than remote data centers distributed around the world. Part of the plan's promise is that it would insulate Israel's computing needs from threats of international boycotts, sanctions, or other political pressures stemming from the ongoing military occupation of Palestine; according to a Times of Israel report, the terms of the Project Nimbus contract prohibit both companies from shutting off service to the government, or from selectively excluding certain government offices from using the new domestic cloud.

It remains unclear what technologies exactly will be provided through Nimbus or to what end, an ambiguity critics say is unnerving. Google in particular is known for the sophistication of its cloud-based offerings that are perfectly suited for population-scale surveillance, including powerful image recognition technology that made the company initially so alluring to the Pentagon's drone program. In 2020, The Intercept reported that Customs and Border Protection would use Google Cloud software to analyze video data from its controversial surveillance initiative along the U.S.-Mexico border.

While a wide variety of government ministries will make use of the new computing power and data storage, the fact that Google and Amazon may be directly bolstering the capabilities of the Israeli military and internal security services has generated alarm from both human rights observers and company engineers. In October 2021, The Guardian published a letter from a group of anonymous Google and Amazon employees objecting to their company's participation. "This technology allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel's illegal settlements on Palestinian land," the letter read. "We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip — actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court." In March, an American Google employee who had helped organize the employee opposition to Nimbus said the company abruptly told her she could either move to Brazil or lose her job, a move she said was retaliation for her stance.

Nimbus will now face a referendum of sorts among Google and Amazon shareholders, who next month will vote on a pair of resolutions that call for company-funded reviews of their participation in that project and others that might harm human rights. The filers of the Google resolution collectively own roughly $1.8 million in shares, according to Ed Feigen, a Google shareholder since 2014 and lead filer of the resolution. While these investors object to Nimbus on largely the same moral grounds as the authors of the Guardian letter, they're also tapping into the specific anxieties of the Wall Street investor: What if bad press from Project Nimbus loses us money? Citing the very public controversies surrounding Project Nimbus and other prior contracts with various governmental security agencies, the Google shareholder resolution warns that "employee and public opposition to such contracts will increase and pose a risk to Google's reputation and its strategic positioning on social responsibility," and asks that "the company issue a report, at reasonable expense and excluding proprietary information, reassessing the Company's policies on support for military and militarized policing agency activities and their impacts on stakeholders, user communities, and the Company's reputation and finances."

The Amazon resolution, filed by Investor Advocates for Social Justice, also calls for an independent inquiry into Nimbus and other surveillance contracts, stating: "Amazon's government and government-affiliated customers and suppliers with a history of rights-violating behavior pose risks to the company" and "Inadequate due diligence presents material privacy and data security risks, as well as legal, regulatory, and reputational risks."

Feigen told The Intercept he and several fellow investors felt compelled to oppose Nimbus as soon as they learned of it. "I'm also a member of the organization Jewish Voice for Peace," Feigen said, "which works to ensure US foreign policy advances peace, human rights, and follows international law so we can ensure freedom and justice for Palestinians." Feigen added that the resolution was drafted in collaboration with Google employees who similarly oppose the contract on human rights grounds. "We also felt the need to support Google employees who'd spoken out against contracts Google was pursuing with militaries and police agencies like CBP and ICE," Feigen said, "both because we believe that profiting from violence is plainly immoral, and because we see pursuing such contracts as a liability for investors––especially given the history of Google employees protesting such contracts."

A Google software engineer who provided feedback for the resolution and spoke on the condition of anonymity told The Intercept that they're concerned employees are just as much in the dark about Nimbus as the general public, and fear how the company's technology would be used to repress Palestinians. "It became a point of shame," they said in an interview. "We know that the IDF, one of its projects is mass constant surveillance of various areas of the Occupied Territories, and I don't believe there are any restrictions on which cloud services the Israeli government wants to procure from [Google] Cloud. Google offers big data analysis, machine learning, and AI tool suites through Cloud; I don't think there's any reason to assume they aren't consuming all of these products to help them work on this."

This engineer added that while they have found like-minded colleagues who are similarly disturbed by the prospect of their cloud technologies being used to fortify the Israeli occupation, employee activism against Nimbus is much diminished since the waves of worker-led protests against prior Google contracts like Project Maven and Dragonfly, the company's planned custom-built Chinese search engine. "Right now we're kind of in a slump," they said. While past employee movements spurred heated discussions on internal chat forums, they said, "We haven't had anything like that from Nimbus, which is really unfortunate." In addition to fearing retaliation from Google itself, this source said Google employees who might otherwise vocally oppose the Nimbus contract have remained quiet in order to avoid accusations of antisemitism. "The harm is documented, putting Palestinians under constant surveillance is very well documented, and yet [this contract] is the one where even if workers care about it, not only do they face retaliation from management, some coworkers might retaliate in their own ways." Googlers could stand to think more about how their creations could be misused, they added: "If workers are working on cloud AI products or large scale data management, they should think of themselves as working on technology that is oppressing people." But the engineer pointed to the fact that Google engineers likely trust the company's vague public commitments to human rights values and "AI principles," even if naively. "Leadership has failed to take these commitments seriously, so they've passed responsibility to ensure our technology is used responsibly on to us."

As with most activist shareholder resolutions, these will likely be a difficult sell. Government contracts like Nimbus are enormously lucrative, and both Amazon and Google have made it clear they are continuing to seek them even in the face of protest from within and without. Global internet giants have seen their profits soar in recent years, a trend they hope to continue by taking on military and law enforcement work that in previous eras may have been handed to traditional defense contractors. It will be difficult to convince investors chiefly concerned with maximizing share prices that these firms should walk away from the giant payouts defense or national security-related projects would bring. Even if successful, neither resolution would end Project Nimbus or thwart either company's involvement. The Google software engineer added that most of their fellow anti-Nimbus colleagues don't believe the resolution goes far enough: "It calls for a report on potential impacts to be prepared, but otherwise does not propose any binding action." Still, they hope that the resolution, doomed or not, will help draw scrutiny and public pressure to the project, a sentiment Feigen shares: "This is the first time a resolution like this has ever been introduced, so we know it's a big challenge," he said. "It's still too early to know whether the resolution will pass, but whether it does or not, this is just the first step in calling attention to these important concerns."




See related articles here:
Re: Google kicks jewish employee out of the US for opposing Israhell
http://theinfounderground.com/smf/index.php?topic=29244.msg95871#msg95871

and here:
How Google advances the Zionist colonization of Palestine
http://theinfounderground.com/smf/index.php?topic=28846.msg95160#msg95160