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project nimbus
Microsoft Fires 2 Employees Over Gaza Vigil
"Microsoft are facilitating a genocide, and punishing those who stand for humanity," one anti-war group said.
Oct 26, 2024
This piece was updated on Sunday, October 27 to include a statement from Council on American-Islamic Relations and its Washington state chapter.
Microsoft fired two of its employees hours after they held a vigil outside the tech giant's Redmond, Washington campus in honor of the Palestinians who have been killed in Israel's year-long assault on Gaza.
The vigil was "unauthorized," according to reporting from The Associated Press, but the employees said that their event—held during lunch on Thursday—was similar to other events Microsoft had approved to raise money for charity.
"We have so many community members within Microsoft who have lost family, lost friends or loved ones," one of the workers who was fired, Abdo Mohamed, told the AP. "But Microsoft really failed to have the space for us where we can come together and share our grief and honor the memories of people who can no longer speak for themselves."
"Our work is currently being used by the Israeli state to wreak unfathomable destruction on Palestinian life."
The Israeli assault on Gaza, which many experts consider to be a genocide, has claimed nearly 43,000 lives according to official figures, though the real number may be much higher.
Mohamed, who was born in Egypt, had a work visa for his job at Microsoft as a researcher and data scientist. He said he would need to find a new job within two months in order to maintain his visa and stay in the United States.
The other employee, Hossam Nasr, who grew up in Egypt, also helps to organize Harvard Alumni for Palestine.
Nasr said he had previously been investigated and punished by Microsoft for pro-Palestinian posts he had made on the company's internal social media platform.
Microsoft confirmed to the AP on Friday that it "ended the employment of some individuals in accordance with internal policy."
Both Mohamed and Nasr are members of a group called No Azure for Apartheid, which grew out of the wider No Tech for Apartheid campaign and opposes the use of Microsoft technologies such as its cloud computing program Azure to aid Israel's war on Gaza and the maintenance of its occupation in the West Bank.
Microsoft has a longstanding relationship with Israel, as No Azure for Apartheid detailed in May. While Amazon and Google won the bid to provide exclusive cloud computing to the Israeli government and military through Project Nimbus, departments continue to use Azure in the transition. In addition, Azure provides support for Israeli military company Elbit systems' new military simulation software. Microsoft also offers consulting services to the Israeli Prison Service.
"Our work is currently being used by the Israeli state to wreak unfathomable destruction on Palestinian life," No Azure for Apartheid wrote. "As producers of powerful technologies that are frequently misused to serve the interests of unethical government entities, we bear the unique responsibility of ensuring that our code is used for good."
Anti-war and Palestinian solidarity organizations and activists spoke out against the firings.
"Microsoft are facilitating a genocide, and punishing those who stand for humanity," CODEPINK wrote on social media on Saturday.
International Solidarity Movement co-founder Huwaida Arraf said: "Not only does Microsoft provide technology to enable genocide and apartheid, but it also fires employees for holding vigils to honor murdered family members."
University of Chicago professor and In These Times columnist Eman Abdelhadi linked the firings to several instances of retaliation for Palestinian solidarity activism at universities and companies.
"Harvard Library suspending faculty for a silent study-in. Microsoft firing workers for a Gaza vigil. U Chicago evicting a student for protesting. Universal canceling a TV show production because the author is anti-genocide... all within the last week," Abdelhadi pointed out on social media.
Microsoft's actions also come six months after Google fired 28 employees for staging protests against Project Nimbus.
On Sunday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its Washington state chapter called on Microsoft to reinstate the employees.
"This is yet another illustration of how employees of conscience, who are standing up for the human rights issue of our time, are being silenced in the corporate world," said CAIR-WA executive director Imraan Siddiqi in a statement.
CAIR National executive director Nihad Awad agreed: "Time after time, we see the 'except for Palestine' rule applied whenever anyone dares to defend the human rights, humanity, and dignity of the Palestinian people. In any other context, a corporation would celebrate its employees standing up for human rights and against genocide–'except for Palestine.'"
"This hypocritical double standard must end," Awad urged. "Microsoft must rehire these principled employees and apologize for its biased actions that appear to support Israel's genocide and to deny Palestinian humanity."
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Investigation Exposes Big Tech Ties to Israeli Genocide in Gaza
"It's more than complicity: It's direct participation and collaboration with the Israeli military on the tools they're using to kill Palestinians," said one policy expert.
Aug 05, 2024
The Israeli military is using cloud storage and artificial intelligence services provided by U.S. tech titans for "direct participation and collaboration" in what many critics around the world call Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, according to an investigation published this week.
Two Israeli publications—+972 Magazine and Local Call—on Sunday published a joint investigation revealing that the Israeli military is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store data gleaned from the mass surveillance in Gaza, where nearly 10 months of bombings and ground invasion have left more than 140,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to local and international estimates.
Multiple sources told the outlets that pressure on the IDF since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel has "led to a dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon's AWS, and Microsoft Azure." The report states that cooperation between the IDF and AWS "is particularly close" and "even helped on rare occasions to confirm aerial assassination strikes in Gaza—strikes that would have also killed and harmed Palestinian civilians."
IDF Col. Racheli Dembinsky—who spoke at a recent "IT for IDF" event near Tel Aviv—told investigative journalist Yuval Abraham that the "most important" advantage offered by cloud computing companies is advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. AI, she said, provides the IDF with "very significant operational effectiveness" as it obliterates Gaza.
Last year, Abraham published an investigation on the same two websites that showed how the IDF is using AI to select targets, essentially creating what one former Israeli officer called a "mass assassination factory." In April, the journalist revealed that the IDF was using a previously undisclosed AI system that had replaced "human agency and precision" with "mass target creation and lethality."
According to Abraham:
Many of Israel's attacks in Gaza at the beginning of the war were based on the recommendations of a program called "Lavender." With the help of AI, this system processed information on most Gaza residents and compiled a list of suspected military operatives, including junior ones, for assassination. Israel systematically attacked these operatives in their private homes, killing entire families. Over time, the military realized that Lavender was not "reliable" enough, and its use decreased in favor of other software. +972 and Local Call could not confirm whether Lavender was developed with the help of civilian firms, including public cloud companies.
In 2021, Israel signed a $1.2 billion contract with Amazon and Google for Project Nimbus, which provides cloud services to the Israeli government and military. The move sparked the #NoTechForApartheid campaign, in which disaffected tech workers and dozens of advocacy groups rose up against Big Tech's complicity in Israeli human rights crimes in Palestine.
"Technology should be used to bring people together, not enable apartheid and ethnic cleansing," the campaign explained in 2021.
Earlier this year, Google—which Abraham said was briefly listed as a sponsor of the "IT for IDF" event—fired 50 employees for protesting Project Nimbus.
IDF Col. Avi Dadon told Abraham that "of course" tech companies want to work with the IDF, because "it's the strongest marketing."
"What the IDF uses was and will be one of the best selling points of products and services in the world," Dadon explained.
However, Big Tech's alleged complicity in Israeli human rights violations is coming under more intense scrutiny lately as Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Khan has also applied for arrest warrants for two Hamas leaders, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri and Ismael Haniyah—at least one of whom has since been killed.
Last month, the ICJ ruled in a separate case that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza is an illegal form of apartheid that must immediately end.
Some campaigners have noted that Google is apparently violating its own AI principles, which vow that the company "will not design or deploy AI in… technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm… weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people… technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms… [or] technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights."
Others have noted Google and Amazon's lack of transparency on how its systems are being used.
"Neither company has publicly disclosed what, if any, human rights due diligence they carried out before participating in Project Nimbus," Zach Campbell, a digital rights expert at Human Rights Watch, told Abraham. "They haven't mentioned which, if any, red lines there are in terms of what would be permissible use of their technology."
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, U.S. policy fellow at the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told Abraham that while "there's always a lot of focus on the direct military assistance the United States provides to Israel—the munitions, fighter jets, and bombs," far less attention "has been paid to these partnerships that span both civilian and military environments."
"It's more than complicity: It's direct participation and collaboration with the Israeli military on the tools they're using to kill Palestinians," he stressed.
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Amazon, Alphabet Workers Protest Companies' Complicity in Israeli Apartheid
"As an Amazon employee, I do not want my work to support apartheid and war crimes," said one protesting worker.
Jul 26, 2023
Under the rallying cry of #NoTechForApartheid, a group of Amazon and Alphabet workers rallied Wednesday with allied activists outside the tech titan's annual Amazon Web Services Summit today to demand that the company and Google cancel a billion-dollar cloud computing services contract with Israel's government and military.
The employees of Amazon and Alphabet—Google's parent company—protested Project Nimbus, through which the two tech giants sell cloud services to the Israel Defense Forces, enabling the Israeli government's surveillance and oppression of Palestinians. The project also provides data support to the Israel Land Authority, which, according to Human Rights Watch, uses discriminatory policies to expand illegal Jewish-only settler colonies on stolen Palestinian land.
Among the demonstrators standing with Amazon and Google workers were activists from MPower Change, Jewish Voice for Peace, Adalah Justice Project, Fight for the Future, and the Athena Coalition.
Project Nimbus has been the target of previous protests by Amazon and Alphabet workers, shareholders, and other activists.
"As an Amazon employee, I do not want my work to support apartheid and war crimes," software engineer Alestin Sphere said in a statement. "This contract will directly accelerate the expansion of surveillance tech, the weaponization of AI, and the proliferation of cyber weapons."
"As an employee, it's my responsibility to speak out against it, and as a Palestinian, it is my duty," Sphere contended. "Allowing this contract to be implemented without protest would be a major disservice to the world."
Laith Abad, another Amazon engineer, said that "today I'm joining my co-workers as both a first-generation Palestinian American and Amazon engineer to ensure that the tech we build and sell doesn't harm our own communities and those of our users through contracts like Project Nimbus."
"Through this contract, Amazon and Google enable the same kind of violence that the Israeli government and military inflict on many Palestinians, similar to the violence my own father and family experienced as they were ethnically cleansed from their homes," he continued.
"Amazon cannot continue justifying this contract," Abad added. "As an Amazon worker, I want a real say in my labor. I don't want my labor to be used to inflict the same violence and suffering that my family has faced on anyone else."
The employees noted that the protest "also takes place during the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, or the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war" when more than 700,000 Arabs were ethnically cleansed from their homeland—sometimes by massacres—to make way for the establishment of the modern state of Israel.
Dani Noble, campaigns organizer at Jewish Voice for Peace, said that "leading human rights organizations have confirmed what Palestinians have been saying for decades: that Israel is an apartheid state based on Jewish supremacy, where Israeli Jews have more rights and freedoms than Palestinians."
"Amazon technology can all too easily be used by the Israeli government to entrench its apartheid system: expand Jewish-only settlements, force Palestinian families off of their land, and destroy their homes," Noble noted. "Amazon tech workers are bravely saying no more—they want their labor to help people, not enable violence against Palestinians. As Jews organizing for Palestinian freedom, we are proud to show up in solidarity with tech workers standing up for Palestinian rights."
Lau Barrios, senior campaign manager at MPower Change, a grassroots movement led by U.S. Muslims, said that Amazon "profits from surveillance, land grabs, and deadly violence against the Palestinian people."
"For almost two years, Amazon's own tech workers have been clear: They don't want their labor to enable this suffering," she asserted. "Tech companies are the new war profiteers: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was head of AWS in May 2021 when he approved the contract and while the Israeli military systematically bombed Palestinian homes, hospitals, and schools in Gaza."
"Jassy can still choose to put people over profit, listen to his own workers, and cut ties with Israel's brutal military occupation," Barrios added. "It's our duty to show up with workers today to say No Tech For Apartheid together."
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