Activists supporting Palestine from the “No Technology to Apartheid” movement, and a number of technicians who rejected technological cooperation between global technology giants and Israel during the war and before it, boycotted the “Mind the Tech” conference that was held in New York on Monday to support the Israeli technology industry, according to what was published by the movement’s account. “No Technology for Apartheid” on the X platform.
The conference included prominent figures in the world of technology and politics alike, including New York Mayor Eric Adams, Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Leon, former National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers, and Google Israel Managing Director Barak Regev, and the main goal of the conference was to showcase the power of Israeli technology. .
One of the Google Cloud engineers who interrupted the conference by shouting said: He considers their actions and protests morally and professionally necessary.
The engineer interrupted the presentation by Barak Regev, managing director of Google in Israel, and shouted: “I am a software engineer at Google and I refuse to build technology that supports genocide or surveillance.”
he shouted to cheers from the crowd, referring to Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing project between Google, Amazon and the Israeli government, including the Israel Defense Forces. Documents obtained by The Intercept show that computing capabilities in Project Nimbus could be used to Monitoring service, which is an integral part of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in particular.
He continued his rant, saying, “Project Nimbus is endangering members of the Palestinian community. I refuse to build technology that will be used for cloud apartheid,” and chanted as he was pulled out of the hall by a security guard: “There is no technology for apartheid, stop the genocide.”
About a minute later, an activist from the anti-Zionist Israeli group Shoresh and Jewish Voices for Peace interrupted; Regev again chanted: "Google is complicit in genocide."
A group of activists demonstrated outside the hall after the protesters inside were expelled, and raised banners condemning the use of developed technology in cooperation with Israel, especially during the war and in the deliberate bombing of civilians based on artificial intelligence techniques and spyware. Hundreds of technicians signed a petition to reject these partnerships.