The affair began about a fortnight ago when a handful of pro-Palestinian employees staged a sit-in in front of the New York offices of one of the subsidiaries of US giant Google Cloud. At the same time, in California, in Sunnydale, several dozen employees took over the office of the general manager of this subsidiary, waving signs in Google colors, but on which one could read ‘genocide’. The police intervened, the demonstrators were arrested and about fifty employees have been fired so far.
These employees have denounced a contract worth just over one billion euros signed in May 2021 between the Israeli state and Google in partnership with another American technology giant, the web service Amazon.
This contract, called “Nimbus Project”, aims to provide Israel with data storage solutions. But it would also provide access to artificial intelligence technologies used by the Ministry of Defense and the Israeli army in Gaza.
THE WashingtonPost It recently emerged that internal emails had been circulating for months to protest this agreement. And in March, during a conference he gave in New York, one of Google’s executives in Israel was even attacked by a company employee.
This isn’t the first time Google employees have terminated a contract signed by the company, but it is the first time it has led to outright layoffs. To attract the best talent, Google for centuries maintained that speech was free within the company… as free as it was on college campuses. In 2018, nearly 4,000 Google engineers denounced the “Maven” project, a Pentagon program aimed at using artificial intelligence developed by the American giant on a fleet of autonomous drones equipped with cameras. Faced with the uprising of its employees, Google has not renewed its contract with the Pentagon.
Some time later, still under pressure from its engineers, the company returned to another project, “Dragon Fly”: a search engine designed specifically for China that violated Beijing’s censorship, because the searches “human rights ” or “Nobel Prize” were not possible.
Today, for Google, there is no question of breaking its contract with Israel.
A position that can also be explained by the already difficult relations that the company maintains with the White House. Several complaints and investigations against the tech giant are still ongoing, with the threat of dismantling.
We probably haven’t finished talking about the “Nimbus” project yet.
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