Google, Amazon Employees Call to Cancel Project Nimbus Contract With Israel

An open letter from anonymous Google and Amazon employees “of conscience from diverse backgrounds” published on Tuesday in The Guardian called on the company to pull out of the $1.2 billion contract for Project Nimbus that was signed in May and to cut all ties with the Israeli military. Project Nimbus will provide cloud services to the Israeli government, including the military, providing both storage and computational resources. The employees said they are remaining anonymous because they fear retaliation. “The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians,” the employees wrote in their letter.  According to the letter, more than 90 workers at Google and more than 300 at Amazon have signed on to the statement. Two employees, Gabriel Schubiner, a software engineer and researcher at Google, and Bathool Syed, a content strategist at Amazon, eschewed their anonymity and early Wednesday morning published an opinion article on the NBC News website also pressing for withdrawal from the project.