Google and Amazon Seek Defense Contracts, Despite Worker Protests

Hundreds of Google workers and their supporters gathered near the company’s downtown San Francisco offices Thursday, raising signs that read “No Tech for Apartheid” and filling the air with chants of “Tech from Amazon and Google! You can’t claim that you are neutral!” Similar scenes unfolded outside Google and Amazon offices in New York and Seattle, and a Google office in Durham, North Carolina. Google and Amazon employees were joined at the rallies by tech workers from other companies and Palestinian rights organizations. They all convened to protest Project Nimbus, Google and Amazon’s cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.

Google documents published by The Intercept show the contract including AI technology such as face detection, video analysis, and sentiment analysis. Opponents of the deal worry the Israeli military could use the technology to expand surveillance of Palestinians living in occupied territories and violate human rights. In an email, Google Cloud spokesperson Atle Erlingsson wrote that Google Cloud proudly supports numerous governments, including Israel’s.

He accused protestors of misrepresenting Project Nimbus, saying that “Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads,” but acknowledged that the contract will provide Israel’s military access to Google technology. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Google workers protested outside the company’s New York office Thursday.

The demonstrations retread familiar territory for Google, where in 2018 thousands of workers signed a letter condemning a Pentagon drone surveillance contract, Project Maven. Dozens of employees resigned over the deal, which also prompted outcry from academics, including Google cofounder Larry Page’s former Stanford adviser. The company eventually said it would not seek to renew the contract and published a set of AI principles meant to serve as ethical guideposts.

Some Google employees who oppose Project Nimbus say it breaches some of those promises, which include a pledge not to pursue technologies that “gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms,” or breach “widely accepted principles of international law and human rights. ” Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say Israel routinely abuses Palestinian human rights, and call Israel an apartheid state. Aniran Chandravongsri joined Google’s cloud division as a Seattle-based software engineer during the height of the Maven protests in May 2018.

Having previously worked at General Electric, a major Pentagon contractor, he says seeing the outcry “was a reason I felt a little bit more comfortable joining Google. ” Over the years, he has signed petitions protesting the company’s work with police departments and US Customs and Border Patrol, but decided to take a leadership role in the pushback against Project Nimbus. Chandravongsri’s parents were born in Laos, where he still has extended family.

He has seen first-hand how CIA-led bombing campaigns during the 1960s and 1970s have left a deadly legacy of unexploded ordnance that still threatens lives today, a problem seen in many war zones, including Gaza. He says reading the AI capabilities included in Project Nimbus, “really scared me. ” Chandravongsri is far from the only worker in Google’s vast, international workforce whose background provides a different perspective on the Pentagon and its military allies from that of many US employees and executives.

“There are a lot of places that Google workers are from that have been at the wrong end of US policy,” says Chandravongsri. “There are also a lot of Palestinian employees. They fear speaking out a lot.

” After Google retreated from Maven, it continued its relationship with the Pentagon , albeit largely through lower-profile projects like anti-corrosion technology for Naval vessels and cloud security for the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit. The announcement of Project Nimbus in 2021, and Google’s bid for the Pentagon’s $9 billion flagship cloud project, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability , has some workers worried the company will significantly expand its military work. Alphabet Workers Union, which has more than 1,000 members across Google’s parent company but not collective bargaining rights, went public in January 2021 and has since its early days had a working group devoted to scrutinizing military work at Google.

Chandravongsri is a member of the group, which has pressured management about the JWCC and Project Nimbus. Last November, a question about the JWCC’s compatibility with Google’s AI principles received enough upvotes on an internal Q&A tool called Dory to get read out during a company-wide all-hands meeting. According to a report by CNBC , Google Cloud head Thomas Kurian responded that the company’s technology could be used for pieces of the contract that didn’t violate its AI principles.

He later published a blog post outlining some of these potential uses. Chandravongsri felt unsatisfied with the response, saying Kurian’s claims clashed with the military language of the US government’s bid solicitation , which talked of the need to take on China. Workers had less luck getting their questions about Project Nimbus asked at company-wide meetings or the Weather Report, the Cloud team’s all-hands—prompting employees to take their concerns public.

Ariel Koren, a Jewish marketing manager and outspoken opponent of Project Nimbus, resigned last week , saying she was pressured by managers, an allegation Google has denied. Koren also says she met pushback from other Jewish employees, who are supportive of Israel. Google and Amazon workers concerned about Project Nimbus got connected through activist group Jewish Voice for Peace.

In June of 2021, employees from the two companies formed a joint committee, and in October they published a letter in the Guardian opposing the contract. The collaboration represented new territory for Amazon employees, who have expressed less public dissent against their company’s military contracts, which are more extensive than Google’s. Amazon’s culture is widely seen as less open to dissent than that of Google, which from its early days encouraged employees to talk freely with their leaders in company forums.

So far the revolt against Project Nimbus has not reached the scale of the Project Maven uprising at Google in 2018. Workers and activists are hoping that Thursday’s protests will mobilize public support as the protests did four years ago. Two groups of investors at Google and Amazon filed shareholder proposals earlier this year asking the companies to reassess their military contracts like Project Nimbus, although both were voted down.

Kiran Aziz, head of responsible Investments at KLP, Norway’s largest pension fund, which holds shares in both Google and Amazon, said in an email to WIRED that the worker protests added to the investor’s concern about the project. “KLP is writing to both of these corporations to demand transparency and to rescind Project Nimbus on the basis of the clear risks of violating basic human rights,” she said. KLP recently divested from Motorola , citing its technology’s use in surveillance of the occupied Palestinian territories in violation of international norms.

Although the Nimbus protests may appear as a resurgence of a movement that began with Project Maven, they take place in a corporate culture transformed by that same campaign. Several of the employees behind the Maven protests and subsequent walkout over Google’s handling of sexual harassment say they were pushed out by managers. Some Google employees say Google’s culture has grown less open .

The Times of Israel reported that the Project Nimbus contract even includes a clause that prevents Google from withdrawing service in the event of boycotts, as if it were designed with a worker revolt in mind. Nevertheless, Chandravongsri and other protesters say they’ll continue pushing back on the project. .