New York, April 17 (RHC)-- At least nine workers at Google were arrested Tuesday after staging sit-ins at Google’s office in New York City and the office of Google Cloud’s CEO in Sunnyvale, California, to protest Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli government and military.
Emaan Haseem is a Google software engineer in Sunnyvale. She told reporters: “We demand that Google drop Project Nimbus, the $1.2 billion contract between them and Israel. We demand that Google protect their Arab, Muslim and Palestinian worker voices from harassment, retaliation, suppression. And we demand that Google recognize Project Nimbus as a workplace safety and health concern.”
Google workers had previously staged rallies in front of the company’s offices in various cities, demanding an end to its cooperation with the Israeli regime. Back in March, Google fired an employee who staged a protest against the tech giant’s cooperation with Israel in its war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The employee, who has identified himself as a cloud software engineer, stood up during an event in New York City, disrupting the speech of the managing director of Google Israel, Barak Regev. He denounced Google for being complicit in the apartheid regime’s months-long war against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Under the $1.2-billion Nimbus contract, Google (Google Cloud Platform) and Amazon (Amazon Web Services) were selected to provide Israeli agencies with cloud computing services, including artificial intelligence tools and machine learning.
Google workers are raising concerns about the misuse of the company's AI and cloud computing tools for surveillance, military targeting, or weaponization.
No Tech for Apartheid has censured Google and Amazon for playing a role in the genocidal attacks on Gaza by partnering with Israel in the billion-dollar agreement. The organization demands that “companies immediately cancel Project Nimbus and end their complicity in Israel’s war crimes.”
Current and former Google workers also say that they are fearful of speaking up internally against Project Nimbus or in support of Palestinians, due to what some described as fear of retaliation.
