Supporters of Palestine from the “No Tech for Apartheid” movement, along with a number of tech professionals opposing technological collaboration between global tech giants and Israel during and before the war, boycotted the “Mind the Tech” conference held in New York on Monday to support the Israeli technology industry, according to a post by the “No Tech for Apartheid” movement on the Ex platform.
The conference included prominent figures in both the technology and political worlds, including New York Mayor Eric Adams, Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion, former National Security Agency director Michael Rogers, and Google Israel’s Managing Director Barak Regev. The main goal of the conference was to showcase the strength of Israeli technology.
One of the Google Cloud engineers who boycotted the conference shouted: he considers their actions and protests necessary ethically and professionally.
The engineer interrupted the presentation given by Google Israel’s Managing Director, Barak Regev, and shouted: “I am a software engineer at Google and I refuse to build technology that supports genocide or surveillance.”
Amidst the crowd’s outcry, he yelled, referring to the “Nimbus” project, a $1.2 billion cloud computing project between Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government, including the Israeli Defense Forces. Documents obtained by “The Intercept” website show that the computing capabilities in the Nimbus project can be used for surveillance, an integral part of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in particular.
He continued his outcry, saying: “The Nimbus project puts Palestinian society at risk. I refuse to build technology that will be used for cloud apartheid,” and shouted as he was escorted out of the hall by a security guard: “There is no technology for apartheid, stop the genocide.”
After about a minute, an activist from the Israeli group “Shoresh,” which opposes Zionism, and “Jewish Voices for Peace,” interrupted Regev again and shouted: “Google is complicit in genocide.”
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