Google Once Proclaimed ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Now They Do Nothing But Evil
You can still read the blog here
Israel's
controversial computing contract | Digital Dilemma
Yesterday I published an Open Letter to Keir Starmer calling him a war criminal. Today it doesn’t exist as Google has taken it down from my Blogspot blog. When I went to see how many hits it had had I was greeted with a message
‘This post was deleted
because it violates Blogger community guidelines. To republish, please
update the content to adhere to the guidelines.
Of course there is no ‘Blogger community’ just faceless, amoral censors who responded no doubt to an offended genocide supporter. Someone had taken exception to Starmer being called what he is.
Fortunately I set up some years ago a shadow blog and that is what the donations that people send to my Blog Appeal goes towards maintaining. The article that Google censored can be accessed here.
There can be no doubt that Starmer is a war criminal. Anyone who supplies weapons and military intelligence to an ongoing genocide is a war criminal whose place is in the Hague. What Google objected to was factually correct. If the IG Farben trial of August 1947 were repeated today, Starmer would have been in the dock facing the prospect of being hanged for willingly aiding the genocidaires.
IG
Farben was the largest company in Europe and the world’s largest chemical and
pharmaceutical company. It manufactured Zyklon B, the gas used to murder people
in the gas chambers. It also used Auschwitz inmates as slave labour.
Starmer’s
culpability for war crimes and crimes against humanity is no less than that of
the Directors of IG Farben.
Although politicians pretend that Israel’s slaughter
of Palestinian civilians, nearly half of whom are children, is just military
warfare, every single human rights group from Amnesty
International to Human
Rights Watch has said that what is taking place is genocide and
extermination.
It’s not as if Israeli politicians hide their intentions. Never before have politicians of a state committing war crimes been so brazen. Prime Minister Netanyahu stated that
You
must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do
remember.
Amalek was the tribe that God commanded the Israelites to wipe out. He commanded:
Now go,
attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not
spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep,
camels and donkeys.
So why has Google been so sensitive. After all
this was the company which once had a mission statement proudly proclaiming
‘Don’t Be Evil’. Yet today Google does
nothing but evil.
As we do these days, I asked Chat GP what had happened to Google’s slogan. It told me that officially it had not dropped ‘Don't be evil’. It had simply been relegated to obscurity.
Until the early 2010s ‘Don't be evil’ ‘was a central part of Google's corporate code of conduct and public image’. It was prominently featured at the top of Google's Code of Conduct. But in 2015: When Google reorganized under the new parent company Alphabet Inc., the phrase ‘Do the right thing’ replaced ‘Don't be evil’ as the main ethical guideline.
In May 2018: Google updated its Code of Conduct and moved ‘Don't be evil’ from the beginning to the very end of the document. The line reads:
And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think
isn’t right – speak up!
Well employees of Google did speak up about its collaboration with Israel in perpetrating war crimes. What happened? It was reported that ‘Google has sacked 28 workers who took part in protests against a deal the technology giant has with the Israeli government.’ It went on:
Google has a joint contract with Amazon worth $1.2bn
(£960m) called Project Nimbus which provides Israel's government and military
with cloud computing and AI infrastructure.
Employees affiliated with the protest group No Tech
For Apartheid, staged sit-ins at the company’s New York and Sunnyvale,
California offices.
Google said Project Nimbus "is not directed at highly sensitive,
classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence
services”....
The dismissals, which Google confirmed to the BBC,
escalated longstanding tensions between the company and employees opposed to
supplying technology to Israel’s government.
Marches were held last year, following the start of
the war in Gaza in October, with protesters holding banners that read “No More
Genocide For Profit”.
In the most recent protests, staff entered offices
and refused to leave prompting Google to call law enforcement. In a statement
Google called the behaviour "completely unacceptable".
An article in Al Jazeera in April 2024 reported that
Project Nimbus, the joint contract between Google
and Amazon signed in 2021 aims to provide cloud computing infrastructure,
artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology services to the Israeli
government and its military, which has faced condemnation for its war on Gaza,
described by United Nations experts and several countries as a “genocide”.
Why are Google employees protesting against Project Nimbus?
Last week’s sit-ins in New York and
California’s Sunnyvale were led by No Tech For Apartheid, which has been
organising Google employees against Project Nimbus since 2021. Employees are
opposing their employer’s ties with Israel.
Tech workers are demanding that they
have the right to know how their labour is going to be used. With little
clarity about the project, they fear the technology might be used for harm.
Workers at Amazon and Facebook parent Meta have also clashed with their
employers over war links.
“It
is impossible to feel excited and energised to work when you know your company
is providing the Israeli government products that are helping it commit
atrocities in Palestine,” said, Tina Vachovsky, staff software engineer at
Google, in a testimonial published on
the No Tech Apartheid website.
According to a 2021 report by
the US-based news outlet The Intercept, Google is offering advanced AI
capabilities to Israel, which could harvest data for facial recognition and
object tracking as part of Project Nimbus.
“There’s actually a shocking lack of
transparency around exactly what this project covers, outside of providing
interoperable, comprehensive cloud computing, which is essentially systems of
data storage, data management and sharing,” Ramesh Srinivasan, professor at
the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), told Al Jazeera.
“Data
for the Israeli governments, of course, is likely to extend to the Israeli
[army]. So it’s a project that marks and sort of highlights the direct
connections that big technology companies in the United States have, not only
to the so-called military-industrial complex, but to directly aiding and
abetting the Israeli government.”
In a statement, the tech giant said
that the Nimbus contract “is not directed
at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or
intelligence services”. The tech behemoth says it works with several
governments around the world, including Israel.
The company fired at least 28
employees last week for “violating
Google’s code of conduct” and “policy
on harassment, discrimination and retaliation”. In addition, at least nine
Google employees were arrested for the sit-ins at its offices in New York and
Sunnyvale.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai issued a veiled warning in a blog post last week.
“We have a culture of vibrant, open
discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into
action. That’s important to preserve. But ultimately we are a workplace and our
policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act
in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use
the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or
debate politics. This is too important a moment as a company for us to be
distracted,” he wrote.
In other words, whatever our mission statement says ‘ultimately we are a workplace... this is a business’ and we cannot be ‘distracted’ from our main goal which is to make as much money as possible in support of the war machine of imperialism. This is the logic of capitalism. Google is as much an amoral company as any other. The article goes on:
But tech workers have not been fazed by
the warning. Mohammad Khatami, a Google software engineer who was arrested
for participating in the sit-in in New York, told US outlet Democracy Now that
workers were arrested for “speaking out against the use of our technology to
power the first AI-powered genocide”.
Google fired another 20
protesters this week, according to the No Tech For Apartheid group, bringing
the total number of people sacked to about 50.
“Google’s aims are clear: the
corporation is attempting to quash dissent, silence its workers, and reassert
its power over them,” Jane Chung, a spokesperson for No Tech For Apartheid,
said on Tuesday.
Google said it fired the additional
workers after its investigation gathered details from coworkers who were
“physically disrupted” and it identified employees who used masks and did not
carry their staff badges to hide their identities. It did not specify how many
were fired.
Google is very concerned over the workers who were ‘physically disrupted’. But the Palestinians whose lives were disrupted, if not terminated, are of no concern.
Is there a
history of tech workers opposing collaborations with the military?
This is not the first time Amazon and Google employees have voiced their displeasure with Project Nimbus. Last October, Amazon and Google employees expressed their concerns anonymously in an open letter published by British news outlet The Guardian:
“We are writing as Google and
Amazon employees of conscience from diverse backgrounds. We believe that the
technology we build should work to serve and uplift people everywhere,
including all of our users. As workers who keep these companies running, we are
morally obligated to speak out against violations of these core values. For
this reason, we are compelled to call on the leaders of Amazon and Google to
pull out of Project Nimbus and cut all ties with the Israeli military. So far,
more than 90 workers at Google and more than 300 at Amazon have signed this
letter internally. We are anonymous because we fear retaliation.”
On March 4, at the Mind the Tech conference in New York, Google employee Eddie Hatfield stood up in a conference room and shouted, “I am a Google Cloud software engineer, and I refuse to build technology that powers genocide, apartheid, or surveillance!”
Hatfield was fired days after interrupting the managing director of Google Israel, Barak Regev. This would eventually set the stage for the recent protests against Project Nimbus.
In December of last year, in response to Project Nimbus, 1,700 employees sent a petition to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stating that
by providing a cloud ecosystem
for the Israeli public sector, Amazon is bolstering the artificial intelligence
and surveillance capabilities of the Israeli military used to repress
Palestinian activists and impose a brutal siege on Gaza.
Which other tech companies have ties with
the Israeli military?
It’s not just cloud computing tech companies providing contracts to the Israeli military. In a report published last week by Brown University, Roberto J Gonzalez, professor of cultural anthropology at San Jose State University, describes how the US public company Palantir Technologies is involved with Israel.
“For years, Palantir has had
multiple contracts with the Israeli [army], and it extended its support for
Israel after its war against Hamas began in October 2023,” Gonzalez said in
comments in published on April 17.
Palantir, the Denver-based data analysis firm that provides military institutions with artificial intelligence, was co-founded by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel. Palantir, which has worked with the US National Security Agency, has previously provided tech solutions for the Israeli military.
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an international organisation that works to challenge injustices globally, has maintained a directory of “Companies Profiting from Israel’s 2023-2024 attacks on Gaza”. More than 50 companies hailing from the US, China, Germany and the United Kingdom have been listed.
“This is a form of corporate
welfare not only for the largest weapons manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin,
RTX, Boeing, and General Dynamics, which have seen their stock prices
skyrocket, but also for companies that are not typically seen as part of the
weapons industry, such as Caterpillar, Ford, and Toyota,” the AFSC Action
Center for Corporate Accountability states.
What
do we know about collaborations between tech companies and armies around the
world?
The US military and spy agencies signed contracts worth at least $53bn between 2019 and 2022, according to the report published by Brown University on April 17.
In December of 2022, the Pentagon awarded Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft a $9bn contract for a top-secret cloud environment.
US-based companies like Clearview AI, based out of New York City, provide facial recognition software to help Ukraine identify Russian soldiers and officials who have participated in the military invasion. Ukraine was given free access to Clearview AI software starting in 2022. The same report also shows an increasing role of big tech in the military-industrial complex.“Although much of the Pentagon’s
$886bn budget is spent on conventional weapon systems and goes to
well-established defense giants such as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman,
General Dynamics, Boeing, and BAE Systems, a new political economy is emerging,
driven by the imperatives of big tech companies, venture capital (VC), and
private equity firms,” the report says.
Often, the introduction of new technologies can come at a terrible human cost if not properly tested and vetted.
“Everybody knows these AI systems
will make mistakes … so that there will be wrongful deaths and wrongful
assassinations as we’ve seen with so many civilian people in Gaza,” Srinivasan,
the UCLA professor, says.
So what we have is Google Blogspot’s ‘Community Guidelines’ being hauled out in order to defend the genocide of Gaza’s Palestinians. Whether that is evil I will leave to others to decide.
Tony Greenstein
