According to a confidential internal assessment acquired by The Intercept, Google understood it couldn’t control what Israel and its military would use with the potent cloud computing technology before it signed its lucrative and contentious Project Nimbus arrangement.
The extent to which the tech giant recognized the dangers of delivering cutting-edge cloud and machine learning technologies to a country long accused of systematic human rights abuses and wartime atrocities is made clear in the study.
How much risk did Google accept with Nimbus?
The report points out that the deal may compel Google to obstruct criminal investigations by other countries into Israel’s use of its technology, in addition to the fact that Google would not be able to completely monitor or stop Israel from using its software to damage Palestinians. Additionally, it would necessitate a level of intimate cooperation with the Israeli security apparatus that has never been seen in Google’s agreements with other countries, including cooperative exercises and intelligence sharing.
It said that experts hired by Google had recommended that the company withhold machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools from Israel because of these risk factors.
Can tech firms be held accountable for war crimes?
According to three experts in international law who talked to The Intercept, Google may be held legally liable for its knowledge of the dangers and its presumption that it was unable to do due diligence. As Israel approaches the third year of what is largely considered a genocide in Gaza, the seldom-mentioned issue of legal accountability has gained importance. Shareholders are pressuring the corporation to investigate if their technology contributes to violations of human rights.
León Castellanos-Jankiewicz, a lawyer at the Asser Institute for International and European Law in The Hague, who saw parts of the research, stated, “They are aware of the risk that their products might be used for rights violations.” “At the same time, their ability to recognise and eventually reduce these risks will be limited.”
Three months before Google and Amazon were awarded the Nimbus contract, in January 2021, the company’s cloud computing leaders were presented with a conundrum.
Did Google knowingly enable Israeli human rights violations?
The corporation admitted that the arrangement was not without risk, given decades of violations of international law by the Israeli military and intelligence personnel it was now supporting. As a result, the corporation cautioned that “Google Cloud Services could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations, including Israeli activity in the West Bank.”
Google highlighted in the study how urgent it is to reduce these dangers to Palestinian human rights and Google’s reputation by exercising due diligence and enforcing the company’s terms of service, which prohibit certain illegal and destructive conduct.
However, the report highlights a significant barrier to any oversight effort: the Project Nimbus contract is structured in a way that would essentially keep Google in the dark about what its client was doing and prevent it from taking any action in the event that abuses were discovered.
The revelations come as Israel continues its genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, where it has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands more since launching an invasion against the territory in October 2023.
