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Training materials reviewed by The Intercept confirm that Google is offering advanced artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities to the Israeli regime through its controversial “Project Nimbus” contract. The Israeli finance ministry announced the contract in April 2021 for a $1.2 billion cloud computing system jointly built by Google and Amazon. The project is intended to provide the regime, the war establishment and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution, the ministry said in its announcement.
Google engineers have spent the time since worrying whether their efforts would inadvertently bolster the ongoing Israeli military occupation of Palestine. In 2021, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International formally accused the occupying regime of Israel of committing crimes against humanity by maintaining an apartheid system against Palestinians. While the Zionist military and security services already rely on a sophisticated system of computerized surveillance, the sophistication of Google’s data analysis offerings could worsen the increasingly data-driven military occupation.
According to a trove of training documents and videos obtained by The Intercept through a publicly accessible educational portal intended for Nimbus users, Google is providing the Zionist regime with the full suite of machine-learning and AI tools available through Google Cloud Platform. While they provide no specifics as to how Nimbus will be used, the documents indicate that the new cloud would give Israel capabilities for facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and even sentiment analysis that claims to assess the emotional content of pictures, speech, and writing. The Nimbus materials referenced agency-specific trainings available to the regime’s personnel through the online learning service Coursera, citing the ministry of war as an example.
Jack Poulson, director of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, shared the portal’s address with The Intercept after finding it cited in Israeli contracting documents.
“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 Forces for the International Criminal Court,” said Poulson, who resigned in protest from his job as a research scientist at Google in 2018, in a message. “Given Human Rights Watch’s conclusion that the Israeli regime 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.”
Though some of the documents bear a hybridized symbol of the Google logo and Zionist flag, for the most part they are not unique to Nimbus. Rather, the documents appear to be standard educational materials distributed to Google Cloud customers and presented in prior training contexts elsewhere.
The documents obtained by The Intercept detail for the first time the Google Cloud features provided through the Nimbus contract. With virtually nothing publicly disclosed about Nimbus beyond its existence, the system’s specific functionality had remained a mystery even to most of those working at the company that built it. In 2020, citing the same AI tools, U.S Customs and Border Protection tapped Google Cloud to process imagery from its network of border surveillance towers.
Many of the capabilities outlined in the documents obtained by The Intercept could easily augment the occupying regime’s ability to surveil people and process vast stores of data — already prominent features of the Israeli occupation.
“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.”
