
An employee of Google was let go after he openly denounced the company's cooperation with the Israeli military in a keynote address at the annual Mind the Tech conference in New York.
An employee of Google's Israel division staged a protest against the company's cooperation with the Israeli military on Monday.
Shaking off the proceedings, the fired Google Cloud engineer yelled, "I refuse to build technology that powers genocide or surveillance."
A Google representative, Bailey Tomson, confirmed the dismissal and said, "Earlier this week, an employee interrupted a coworker who was presenting—interfering with an official company-sponsored event." Regardless of the problem, this attitude is unacceptable, and the employee was fired for breaking our procedures."
According to CNBC, the demonstration was directed towards Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion agreement between the Israeli government and internet behemoths Google and Amazon. Since its launch in 2021, this initiative—which attempts to improve access to cloud services—has generated criticism. Critics raise ethical issues by arguing that these technologies make it easier to monitor and collect data on Palestinians.
According to CNBC, more than 600 Google employees recently signed a letter to the firm's leadership requesting that the business stop sponsoring the annual Mind the IT conference, which supports the Israeli IT sector.
The group "No Tech for Apartheid," which is against Project Nimbus, issued a statement in response to the Google engineer who had been protesting being fired.
Google's objectives are rather clear: the company wants to silence employees in order to cover up its moral shortcomings. With Project Nimbus, Google is facilitating the first genocide enabled by AI in history. Google and Amazon are supporting the Israeli apartheid regime and its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza by means of this deal. Google "is punching down on its own workers instead of cleaning up its own house and terminating its contract with a genocidal regime," the organisation stated.
The statement went on: "This worker spoke from a point of great personal worry about the direct, violent repercussions of their labour as a cloud software developer on key technology that enables Project Nimbus to run on sovereign Israeli data centres. Their words were based on a sincere conviction that engineering that is truly moral must take global communities into consideration.