Employees of Google Protest Sale of Project Nimbus to Israel
What is Project Nimbus?
What is the protest about?
Even though Google announced that the project “is not directed to highly sensitive or classified workloads,” anti-Israel employees at the companies worry that the Israeli military might make use of the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities of Nimbus to augment their surveillance of Palestinians.
Anti-Israel employees of Google and Amazon are basing their claims on an article published in The Intercept. The article claims to have accessed training materials for Nimbus which detail the features that will be provided with the service. Those features include standard AI capabilities: facial detection, automated image categorization and object tracking.
Yet, The Intercept article acknowledges Israel’s “thriving research and development sector” and cites evidence that the country already has similar AI technology.
In addition, as The Intercept reports, the training materials – which are publicly available – provide no indication as to how Nimbus will be used. As The Intercept reports, the capabilities of Nimbus
“appear to be standard educational materials distributed to Google Cloud customers and presented in prior training contexts elsewhere.”
(Photo right: Advert for the protests)
Is this another BDS ruse by the anti-Israel crowd?
The Israeli government anticipated that Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) tactics would be used against Google and Amazon to try to prevent the sale of Nimbus to Israel. Thus, the contract stipulates that the cloud service will be available to all parts of the Israeli government.
This theoretically includes the defense department.
The Intercept reports that one worker contends that the image analysis would be a natural fit for military and security applications, adding,
“Object recognition is useful for targeting, it’s useful for data analysis and data labeling. An AI can comb through collected surveillance feeds in a way a human cannot to find specific people and to identify people, with some error, who look like someone. That’s why these systems are really dangerous.”
But the question is, dangerous for whom? Israel is a country plagued with a significant daily threat of Palestinian terrorism. It is most likely safe to assume that if Israel makes use of Google Cloud’s advanced AI capabilities, it will be used to save lives.
Are employees of Google and Amazon unfairly singling out Israel?
One aspect of BDS activity that makes it fall under the U.S. government’s accepted definition of antisemitism is,
“Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”
Google sold the same cloud services to the Canadian government, yet, there has not been a word of protest. This is despite the surveillance conducted against 33 million Canadian citizens during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Google Cloud also does business with the American government. Although Google pulled out of work on Project Maven with the U.S. Defense Department over employee concerns about the use of AI in surveillance, it has since “quietly pursued some of the Pentagon’s largest tech contracts and in 2020 was one of five companies to win an award on the intelligence community’s coveted C2E contract, potentially worth tens of billions of dollars.”
Google is also in contention for a $9 billion Pentagon contract for its Joint Warfighting Cloud platform. That would mean that Google would be hosting some of the military’s most sensitive and classified data.
Not a word has been heard about these contracts from employees of Google, which most likely include AI surveillance programs.
Further, similar to Israeli concerns regarding the need for surveillance to fight terrorism, commentators say Google’s pullout from Project Maven will likely cost the lives of American troops abroad.
Project Nimbus: the ‘Deadly Exchange’ 2.0?
Objections by employees of Google and Amazon against Project Nimbus are relatively small at the moment. But they are reminiscent of previous protests launched by other BDS initiatives.
In particular, in 2017, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) concocted a smear campaign against Israel called the “Deadly Exchange.”
The campaign was based on the fact that "exchange" programs exist between the Israeli military and American police. JVP professed that these exchange programs facilitated
“a two-way exchange in methods and equipment for state violence and control, including mass surveillance, racial profiling and suppression of protest and dissent.”
In short, JVP said American police were coming to Israel to learn the Israeli military’s “worst practices.” These practices, they claimed, were to be used against “black and brown communities” at home.
In reality, no police tactics were taught in the program. Rather, American law enforcement learned counter-terrorism techniques and how to save lives after mass terror attacks. In addition, the Israelis shared methods of how to build trust in diverse communities.
Testimonies of participants (many of whom are people of color) confirmed the veracity of what the program was really about.
Yet, despite being presented with the facts, JVP disseminated the Deadly Exchange lie to their all too eager intersectional, anti-Israel allies. In fact, by the time the American street erupted over the death of George Floyd, the Deadly Exchange was so mainstreamed that both American and global media outlets were blaming Israel outright for the police tactics they claimed killed Floyd.
In short, the Deadly Exchange campaign amounted to a blood libel against Israel that continues to this day.
Are Protests Against Israel's acquisition of Project Nimbus Anti-Semitic?
Five years after the Deadly Exchange libel, the same crowd is using the same tactic against Israel with Project Nimbus. These tech workers disingenuously fail to acknowledge that:
- Google and Amazon themselves testify that their cloud platform “is not directed to highly sensitive or classified workloads”
- Publicly-available training documents for Nimbus show that Israel is receiving the same service as other governmental clients
- There was no outcry by them against the sale of Google Cloud to governments until it was sold to Israel
- Israel already has its own sophisticated AI platforms
- Israel, a country under daily assault, needs the highest protection from terrorism
As with the Deadly Exchange, the protest against the sale of Nimbus to Israel clearly smacks of anti-Semitism.