Tech giants involved in warfare? Google accused of providing Israeli cloud computing services as lethal weapons?

According to a report by The Verge, tech giant Google has fired 28 employees this week for staging sit-in protests at two of Google's offices. The reason for the protest was Google's involvement in a project with the Israeli government's Nimbus, which turns cloud computing services and AI tools into lethal weapons.

Employees who were fired participated in protests against Google's Nimbus project, a $1.2 billion cloud computing and artificial intelligence agreement between the Israeli government and tech giants Google and Amazon.

Google stated that its work with the Israeli government is primarily for civilian purposes. A Google spokesperson said, "We are very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads from Israeli government departments running on our commercial platform, such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education. It does not target highly sensitive or classified military workloads related to weapons or intelligence services." However, Google employees interviewed by Time magazine stated that the company has little ability to monitor customers, especially sovereign nations like Israel, on their cloud infrastructure.

Time magazine also reported that the Israeli Ministry of Defense has its own "landing zone" in Google's cloud - a secure entry point to Google's computing infrastructure that allows the ministry to store and process data and utilize its AI services.

Israeli media recently reported that the country's military controlled by the Ministry of Defense is using AI systems to select targets for airstrikes in Gaza. Such AI systems may require cloud computing infrastructure to operate.

To protest against the Nimbus contract signed between Google and the Israeli government, several employees staged sit-in protests in New York and California, objecting to cloud computing services becoming tools for killing. However, these individuals have been dismissed this week for occupying office space, damaging Google's property, and disrupting the work of other employees.