Video: Engineer interrupts director of Google in Israel – 03/06/2024 – Tech

A presentation by Google’s director in Israel, Barak Regev, was interrupted on Monday (4) after a company software engineer criticized an alleged use of technology against Palestinians.

The case occurred during the MindTheTech event, aimed at Israeli technology companies, held in New York, in the United States.

During Regev’s talk, a listener identified himself as an engineer at Google Cloud, the big tech cloud service, and said he refuses “to develop technology that fuels 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. Israel (IDF).

“The Nimbus project puts members of the Palestinian community in danger,” he said.

Documents obtained by The Intercept show that the technological power of Project Nimbus can be used for surveillance. In 2021, anonymous employees from Google and Amazon wrote an article published in The Guardian newspaper in which they stated they were afraid that the technology they developed could be used to collect data and monitor Palestinians illegally.

“I hope other engineers within 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 to the conference was organized by No Tech for Apartheid [nenhuma tecnologia pelo apartheid], a national campaign made up of employees from technology companies, mainly Google and Amazon. Project Nimbus is one of its main focuses.

The event, which ended this Tuesday (5), featured presentations by CEOs of Israeli technology companies, the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, and the mayor of Jerusalem, Moshe Lion.

“Part of the privilege of working at a company that represents democratic values ​​is giving space to different opinions,” said the Google director after the engineer was removed from the audience by security guards. Regev was presenting a talk titled “From Vision to Reality: Roadmap to Becoming an AI-Powered Nation.”

Calls for Israel to do more to address the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip have intensified since the episode in which Israeli troops shot Palestinian civilians who were waiting in line for aid in an area near Gaza City, on the 29th — Hamas spoke of 112 deaths, while Tel Aviv admitted only 10 of them.

According to information from the Gaza Ministry of Health released on Sunday, since the start of the war, on October 7 last year, at least 30,410 Palestinians have died and another 71,700 have been injured.