How Documents Reveal Google and Amazon's Involvement in Empowering 'Israel'?

While the Israeli military was bombing homes and hospitals in Gaza and threatening to exclude Palestinian families from their homes in Jerusalem in May 2021, Amazon and Google signed a $1.22 billion contract to provide cloud technology to the Israeli Occupation, making it easier for Israeli forces to accurately surveil Palestinians and force them off their own land.

Documents examined by The Intercept this week revealed that the two big tech giants are providing the most prominent techniques of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the Occupation, including analyzing human emotions and recognizing faces.

 

Tech For Apartheid

After reviewing training documents and videos, The Intercept has recently confirmed Google and Amazon's responsibility in offering "advanced artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities to the Israeli government through its controversial 'Project Nimbus' contract," which was announced by the Israeli Finance Ministry in April 2021; the contract was about a $1.2 billion cloud computing system built by the two tech giants, Google and Amazon, according to the American non-profit news organization.

"The project is intended to provide the government, the defense establishment, and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution," the Israeli Ministry said when announcing the project.

The materials were obtained through an accessible educational portal created for Nimbus users. Their review uncovered Google's provision of "machine-learning and AI tools, including facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking and even sentiment analysis that claims to assess the emotional content of pictures, speech, and writing, through Google Cloud Platform" to the Israeli government, reported The Intercept.

The Director of Tech Inquiry, Jack Poulson, said that "the former head of Security for Google Enterprise—who now heads Oracle's Israel branch—has publicly argued that one of the goals of Nimbus is preventing the German government from requesting data relating on the Israel Defense Forces for the International Criminal Court."

He added: "Given Human Rights Watch's conclusion that the Israeli government is committing 'crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution' against Palestinians, it is critical that Google and Amazon's AI surveillance support to the IDF be documented to the fullest."

 

AI to Kill Palestinians

For decades, the Israeli Occupation interests were focused on using AI to control Palestinians. In a report published in 2021, The Washington Post talked about the existence of Blue Wolf, which was a secret military program aimed at monitoring Palestinians through smartphones and cameras, including facial recognition applications.

Mona Shtaya, a Palestinian digital rights advocate at 7amleh-The Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, said in a message that "living under a surveillance state for years taught us that all the collected information in the Israeli/Palestinian context could be securitized and militarized."

"Image recognition, facial recognition, emotional analysis, among other things, will increase the power of the surveillance state to violate Palestinian right to privacy and to serve their main goal, which is to create the panopticon feeling among Palestinians that we are being watched all the time, which would make the Palestinian population control easier," she added.

According to The Intercept, the documents also detailed, for the first time, the Google Cloud features provided through the Nimbus contract.

Nothing was publicly disclosed about Nimbus except for its existence, and its system and functionality had remained ambiguous even for those who built it.

With the same AI system, U.S Customs and Border Protection used Google Cloud "to process imagery from its network of border surveillance towers."

The details in the documents could easily increase the Israeli Occupation's ability to control more people and obtain vast stores of data, and these are already prominent features of the Israeli forces.

"Data collection over the entire Palestinian population was and is an integral part of the occupation," Ori Givati of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation advocacy group of Israeli military veterans, told The Intercept in an email. "Generally, the different technological developments we are seeing in the Occupied Territories all direct to one central element, which is more control."

 

New War Profiteers

Engineers at Google were worried whether their efforts would indirectly support and empower the ongoing Israeli Occupation of Palestine.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International accused, in 2021, the Occupation of committing crimes against humanity by maintaining an apartheid system against Palestinians, but the condemnation was formal.

The Israeli Occupation and security services are still relying on a system of highly computerized surveillance, and Google's data support won't help the Palestinians regain their land; it will rather worsen the data-driven military Occupation.

Amazon and Google's collaboration with Israeli apartheid is part of a larger pattern of Big Tech fueling state violence across the globe. Tech companies like Amazon and Google have dim human rights records and are the new war profiteers.

Amazon, for example, helps power ICE's deportation-detention machine and works with more than 2,000 American police departments to track and criminalize Black and brown communities "through its doorbell camera Ring," The Intercept investigation revealed.

Whereas Google sold AI to the American Department of Defense to "make its drone strikes deadlier and, despite ending this contract after public and worker pressure, Google still holds ties with the Pentagon," according to the same source.

Despite both companies' claims to maintain and respect human rights commitments, their involvement in human rights violations is now very apparent.

Amazon released Global Human Rights Principles, promising to "embed respect for human rights throughout our business." Similarly, Google states that companies "can make money without doing evil." Instead of respecting those values, Google and Amazon are glorifying profit before humanity by empowering the Israeli Occupation.

Technology should bring people together, but when these tech giants use it to harm communities, the world will be less safe.