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What “Nimbus” project did Google sacrifice its employees and reputation for?”
Protests from Google employees against the company’s management have escalated over the past weeks, so the company decided to respond by firing more than 50 employees. The US company has fired employees who have publicly criticized the company in the past, but it has not fired so many employees at once.
For years, Google has earned a reputation as the most free and open among the big tech companies in terms of culture and work environment. The company was celebrating an internal culture in which employees knew what other teams were working on and encouraged them to discuss and object to the decisions of company leaders.
But the recent protests from employees were not because of the working conditions at the company, but rather an objection to a project to provide the government and the Israeli army with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services, which became famous as “Nimbus” (Nimbus), a collaboration between Google and Amazon with Israel.
The beginning is before the October 7
In 2022, dozens of Google and Amazon employees demonstrated in front of Google’s office in New York City, protesting a cloud computing project known as Project “Nimbus”. A year earlier, specifically in April 2021, the government of Israel signed an agreement with Google and Amazon to build regional data centers to provide cloud services, thereby ensuring the continuity of the service even if the two companies came under international pressure to boycott Israel later, the cost of the project was estimated at 1.2 billion dollars.
This, of course, was officially mentioned in the media at the time, but the “Nimbus” project involved more than just regional data centers, and although there were not many official details about the “Nimbus” project, a report for the “The Intercept” website, released in July 2022, cited internal documents and training videos Google indicates that a key part of the project will provide Israel with a full range of machine learning and artificial intelligence tools offered by the Google Cloud Platform.
The protests organized by the employees of the two companies were already spreading in a number of US states, and the main reason behind them at that time was the employees ‘ fears that the Israeli army would use these technologies to monitor and suppress Palestinians within the apartheid regime followed by the occupying power for many years.
The military and security services of the occupying state already rely on complex electronic and digital surveillance systems, perhaps the most famous of which is the “Blue Wolf” system, in which the occupation soldiers use special phones equipped with the application, photograph Palestinians and personal identity cards in order to create a digital database on the citizens of the occupied West Bank.
But the more advanced technologies offered by the data analysis offerings of Google and Amazon systems are likely to lead to an increase in the repressive capabilities of the occupation army, which has become increasingly dependent on such data over the past years.
"Nimbus" is smarter and stronger than the "Blue Wolf"
Almost nothing about the “Nimbus” project was publicly disclosed outside of its existence, and its basic function remained a mystery even to most employees of the companies that developed it from the ground up. But the set of training documents and videos explaining the project, addressed to Israeli government employees, explained for the first time the advantages of the Google Cloud Platform provided by the company to the occupation army through the project.
Google provides a full range of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, these technologies will give the occupation army greater capabilities in recognizing faces, automatically classifying images, tracking the trajectory of moving objects, and even the ability to analyze emotions, which documents claim can assess the emotional content in images, speech and writing. These capabilities will increase the capabilities of the occupation army to impose strict control on Palestinian citizens, in addition to processing huge amounts of data.
What worried the company’s employees the most, about the surveillance technologies and military applications of this system, was the AutoML prototype”AutoML”, another machine learning tool that Google provides through the Nimbus project.
Machine learning is defined as a training model for artificial intelligence to recognize patterns within a set of data, and then in the future it will be able to correctly predict when it sees data similar to those it has been trained on, and it is applied in various systems, such as image recognition systems, or even text production, such as the GPT system on which the chatbot relies.”The famous “chat GPT”.
The problem here is that training such a model from scratch requires a lot of resources, be it financial resources or very powerful computer hardware. But for companies the size of Google and Amazon, This is not a problem at all, which is why countries and other companies choose them to take advantage of ready-made artificial intelligence systems that are pre-trained on a set of data, and this is basically what the “Nimbus”project offers.
But the idea of the “AutoML” model facilitates the process of training those models, so that customers can use their own data to design a model from scratch without consuming huge resources, and without the need for data or expertise of the originally developed Company.
Also, one of the advantages of this model, which raises employees ‘ concerns, is the fact that without censorship, the ready-made models provided by Google usually put some technical restrictions on them, for example, the model’s work may be limited to simply detecting that there is a face in front of the camera, and it cannot recognize this face and match it with the data it owns and thus identify the owner of this face. While with the “Auto ML” model, the IDF can take advantage of Google’s powerful computing capabilities and capabilities to train new models using the special government data it already has on Palestinians, such as the data it collects from the “Blue Wolf”application.
BREAKING—PRO-PALESTINE @googlecloud ENGINEER DISRUPTS @Google ISRAEL DIRECTOR AT GOOGLE-SPONSORED ISRAELI TECH CONFERENCE IN NYC.
— No Tech For Apartheid (@NoTechApartheid) March 4, 2024
The worker demanded that Google STOP using worker labor to power genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. #NoTechForApartheid pic.twitter.com/t2mqCqFFay
The contract that exposed Google's claims
“We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is intended for the ministries of the Israeli government, such as finance, healthcare, transport and education, and is not directed to highly sensitive or secret military work related to weapons or intelligence services,”a Google spokesperson told TIME magazine.
However, a recent document revealed that Google provides cloud computing services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and the giant company negotiated to deepen its partnership during the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, as the document seen by Time magazine showed.
According to the document, the Israeli Ministry of defense had a so-called “Landing Zone” in the Google Cloud Service, which means an Access account to the computing infrastructure provided by the company, and allows the ministry to store and process data and access artificial intelligence services, which are part of the Nimbus project services.
Reports in the Israeli press had previously indicated that the contract of Google and Amazon does not allow them to provide military entities with their own technology under the “Nimbus”project. But for the first time, a contract has been announced that shows that the Israeli Ministry of defense is a client of Google Cloud technology.
Big tech companies such as Google and Amazon are involved in the direct targeting of Palestinians, although these companies always make pledges to avoid the use of their technologies in wars and human rights violations.