Nine Google employees were arrested this week at the company’s offices in California and New York after holding an hour-long sit-in protest over Google’s contract to provide cloud services to Israel. The workers expressed strong opposition to Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract between Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services to supply cloud computing infrastructure to various government offices in Israel.
as per the border, the sit-in demonstrations took place on Tuesday at the Google offices in California and New York. In California, five workers occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian to express their concerns about Project Nimbus.
In New York, four workers protested in the 10th floor common area of ​​Google’s Chelsea office. After refusing police orders to leave, protesters were arrested at both locations after occupying the offices for about eight hours.
Employees have argued that Google’s technology could empower harmful applications such as mass surveillance of Palestinians or enable military operations in the region. More than 600 former Google employees Sign an open letter Calls on the company’s leadership to reconsider its involvement.
Google claims that Project Nimbus only covers non-sensitive government workloads. Anna Kovalczyk, Director of External Communications for Google Cloud, said;
We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running in our commercial cloud by Israeli government departments, who agree to abide by our terms and conditions and acceptable use policy. This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services
On the other hand, recent reports indicate that the Israeli army also uses Google’s cloud services. Leaked contract see Show TIME The Ministry of Defense received help, advice and discounts from Google in relation to the deal.
Google’s Anna Kovalczyk also stated that the protests were “part of a multi-year campaign by a group of organizations and people, most of whom do not work at Google.”