Nine Google employees arrested during sit-in protest over Project Nimbus

Nine Google employees who occupied the company's offices in New York and California were arrested Tuesday night after an eight-hour sit-in.

The workers were protesting Google's involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion Israeli government contract for cloud computing services between Google and Amazon. On Tuesday afternoon, employees at the Sunnyvale, California, campus occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Klians, while employees in New York staged a sit-in in the common area of ​​the 10th floor of the Chelsea office.

Employees at the New York office videotaped the arrests. Around 9:45 p.m. on Tuesday, nearly eight hours after the protests began, a group of police officers and a man who appeared to work for Google approached the four remaining employees at the New York office and asked them to leave the building. I instructed him to do so. After the man put the employees on administrative leave and informed them that their access to the building had been canceled, he said, “I am asking them one last time to come out.”

When demonstrators refuse to leave, police tell them they will be arrested if they do not comply. Listen, let's walk out the door right now, no problem if you want to go. If they don't, they will be arrested for trespassing, a New York City police officer told protesters.

The Sunnyvale arrest also occurred around the same time. Employees at the Sunnyvale office were livestreaming the protest on Twitch, where the moment of the arrest was captured. In the video, a man who appears to be a security guard asks his employees to voluntarily leave and threatens to call the police. Six police officers then entered the office and arrested five employees.

In an emailed statement, the employees arrested Tuesday called on Google to terminate the Project Nimbus contract.

We didn't come to Google to work on technology that kills people. “By working on this deal, leadership has betrayed our trust, our AI principles, and our humanity,” said Billy van der Laar, a Sunnyvale-based software engineer. .

Project Nimbus, first announced in 2021, caused sustained internal protests at Google and Amazon. That year, a coalition of technology workers from both companies called on their employers to terminate their contracts under a campaign called “No Technology for Apartheid.” Since the start of Israel's war on Gaza, opposition to the Nimbus project has been revived. In March, Google fired software engineer Eddie Hatfield, who publicly protested Project Nimbus during an executive presentation at Israel's annual technology conference Mind the Tech in New York.

I'm a Google Cloud software engineer, and I refuse to build technology that promotes genocide, apartheid, and surveillance. “Project Nimbus is putting Palestinian community members at risk,” Hatfield said at the meeting. Vidana Abdel Khalek, Google's UK-based policy chief, resigned in protest after Hatfield was fired, Time reported.

More than 600 Google employees have signed an open letter calling on leadership to end its sponsorship of Mind the Tech.

We didn't come to Google to work on technology that kills people.

In an emailed statement to The Verge, Anna Kowalczyk, Google Cloud's external communications manager, said Project Nimbus is not affiliated with the Israeli military. The Nimbus agreement is for workloads run on commercial clouds by Israeli government ministries and clarifies that Israeli government ministries agree to abide by our Terms of Service and Terms of Use. Kowalczyk said the work is not aimed at highly sensitive classified or military workloads related to weapons or intelligence, she said.

But last week, TIME reported that Google is providing cloud computing services to the Israel Defense Forces. Corporate documents seen by TIME show that the Israeli Ministry of Defense has its own landing zone on Google Cloud. The Defense Department reportedly asked Google for consulting assistance to expand access to the cloud, according to a contract seen by TIME. According to the contract, Google offered the DoD a 15% discount on consulting fees because of the Nimbus framework, and the DoD paid more than $1 million for Google's consulting services. Although the contract was not signed, the comment said it was part of the Israel-Nimbus deal.

Workers who occupied the two offices cited TIME magazine's reporting as the impetus for recent protests.

Kowalczyk, the Google Cloud spokesperson, said the protests are part of a years-long campaign by groups of organizations and people who don't primarily work at Google. A small number of employee protesters entered several of our locations and caused disruption. Physically interfering with the work of other employees or preventing access to our facilities is a clear violation of our policies and we will investigate and take action.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133056/google-protests-project-nimbus-no-tech-for-apartheid The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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