The TIME:

A growing movement inside Google that is calling on the company to drop Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract with Israel, jointly held with Amazon.

The No Tech for Apartheid protest group has around 40 Google employees and its consensus is growing.

The contract is for Google and Amazon to provide AI and cloud computing services to the Israeli government and military. Nimbus reportedly involves Google establishing a secure instance of Google Cloud on Israeli soil, which would allow the Israeli government to perform large-scale data analysis, AI training, database hosting, and other forms of powerful computing using Google’s technology, with little oversight by the company.

Google documents suggest that the Google services on offer to Israel via its Cloud have capabilities such as AI-enabled facial detection, automated image categorization, and object tracking.

The Google workers base their protests on 3 main concern:
• the Israeli finance ministry’s 2021 explicit statement that Nimbus would be used by the MOD
• the nature of the services available to Israel within Google’s cloud; and
• the apparent inability of Google to monitor what Israel does with its technology.

Recent reports in the Israeli press indicate that air-strikes are being carried out with the support of an AI targeting system; it is not known which cloud provider provides the computing infrastructure required for such a system to run.

Workers argue that Google’s relationship with Israel breaks the company’s “AI principles” prohibiting to causing “overall harm,” contributing to “weapons or other technologies” to cause injury, or building technologies “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

Other Google workers point to what they know about Google Cloud as a source of concern about Project Nimbus. The cloud technology that the company ordinarily offers to its clients includes a tool called AutoML that allows a user to rapidly train a machine learning model using a custom dataset, which could be used by the Israeli government to build a surveillance or targeting tool.


[RT]