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A presentation by Google's director in Israel, Barak Regev, was interrupted on Monday (4) after a software developer at the company criticized an alleged use of technology against Palestinians.
The case occurred during the MindTheTech event aimed at Israeli technology companies and held in New York in the United States.
During Regev's speech, an audience member identified himself as an engineer at Google Cloud, the major tech cloud service, and said he opposed “developing technology that advances genocide, apartheid or surveillance.”
At the time of the outage, the man was referring to Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) project involving Google, Amazon and the Israeli government, including the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). , were involved.
“The Nimbus project puts members of the Palestinian community at risk,” he said.
Documents obtained by The Intercept show that the technological capabilities of Project Nimbus can be used for surveillance. In 2021, anonymous Google and Amazon employees wrote an article published in The Guardian newspaper stating that they feared that the technology they had developed could be used to illegally collect data and monitor Palestinians.
“I hope other engineers at Cloud see me doing this and I hope it encourages them,” the employee, who preferred to remain anonymous, told the Hell Gate website.
The disruption of the conference was organized by No Tech for Apartheid [nenhuma tecnologia pelo apartheid], a nationwide campaign made up of employees from tech companies, primarily Google and Amazon. One of the focal points is the Nimbus project.
The event, which ended this Tuesday (5), included presentations by CEOs of Israeli technology companies, New York Mayor Eric Adams and Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion.
“Part of the privilege of working at a company that promotes democratic values is making room for different opinions,” the Google director said after the engineer was removed from the audience by security guards. Regev gave a talk titled “From Vision to Reality: Roadmap to Becoming an AIpowered Nation.”
Calls for Israel to do more to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza have been growing since Israeli troops shot dead Palestinian civilians waiting in line for help in an area near Gaza City on the 29th, Hamas said of 112 deaths. while Tel Aviv only received 10 of them.
According to Gaza's Health Ministry figures released on Sunday, at least 30,410 Palestinians have died and another 71,700 have been injured since the war began on October 7 last year.