Google has sacked a Cloud developer for interrupting managing director of the company’s operations in Israel Barak Regev during a lecture at an Israeli tech conference in New York, CNBC reports. “I’m a Google software engineer and I refuse to build technology that powers genocide or surveillance!” In a video that freelance journalist Caroline Haskins took and posted to the internet, the engineer can be heard and seen yelling. As he was being led away by security, he kept speaking and brought up Project Nimbus, all the while drawing jeers from the crowd. That’s the $1.2 billion deal that Google and Amazon secured to provide the Israeli military with AI and other cutting-edge technologies.
Last year, a group of Google employees published an open letter urging the company to cancel Project Nimbus, in addition to calling out the “hate, abuse and retaliation” Arab, Muslim and Palestinian workers are getting within the company. “Project Nimbus puts Palestinian community members in danger! I refuse to build technology that is gonna be used for cloud apartheid,” the engineer said. After he was removed from the venue, Regev told the audience that “part of the privilege of working in a company, which represents democratic values is giving the stage for different opinions.” He ended his speech after a second protester interrupted and accused Google of being complicit in genocide.
A Google Cloud engineer just interrupted Google Israel managing director Barak Regev at Israeli tech industry conference MindTheTech this morning in NY.
“I refuse to build technology that powers genocide!” he yelled, referring to Google’s Project Nimbus contract pic.twitter.com/vM9mMFlJRS
— Caroline Haskins (@car0linehaskins) March 4, 2024
The incident took place during the MindTheTech conference in New York. Its theme for the year was apparently “Stand With Israeli Tech,” because investments in Israel slowed down after the October 7 Hamas attacks. Haskins wrote a detailed account of what she witnessed at the event, but she wasn’t able to stay until it wrapped up, because she was also thrown out by security.
The Google engineer who interrupted the event told Haskins that he wanted “other Google Cloud engineers to know that this is what engineering looks like — is standing in solidarity with the communities affected by your work.” He spoke to the journalist anonymously to avoid professional repercussions, but Google clearly found out who he was. In a statement to Engadget, a Google spokesperson said, “Earlier this week, an employee disrupted a coworker who was giving a presentation – interfering with an official company-sponsored event. This behavior is not okay, regardless of the issue, and the employee was terminated for violating our policies.”
