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Science & Tech.
Mahesh

25/06/24 06:08 AM IST

Project Nimbus

In News
  • Recently,more than 1,200 self-identified STEM students and workers have signed a pledge to not take jobs or internships at Google or Amazon.
Project Nimbus
  • The Israeli government describes Project Nimbus as a “multi-year project, intended to give a comprehensive, in-depth response to the provision of public cloud services for government ministries, auxiliary units and related bodies.”
  • It says that there is “great value in having a public cloud service within the borders of the State of Israel.
  • This service will operate in a configuration that will preserve the sovereignty of information and prevent leakage of sensitive information outside the borders of the country”.
  • Google and Amazon jointly won the bid for Israel’s Project Nimbus in April 2021.
  • Google says that the agreement will “deliver cloud services to all government entities from across the state, including ministries, authorities, and government-owned companies.”
  • Critics of Project Nimbus say that it enables Israeli surveillance on Palestinians, and occupation of their land.
Criticism
  • The  products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court.
  • This language is similar to the one employed in the recent pledge, organised by No Tech for Apartheid, an online activism platform run in collaboration between American Muslim grasroots organisation M Power Change, and anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace.
  • Palestinians are already harmed by Israeli surveillance and violence.
  • By expanding public cloud computing capacity and providing their state of the art technology to the Israeli occupation’s government and military, Amazon and Google are helping to make Israeli apartheid more efficient, more violent, and even deadlier for Palestinians.
  • An investigation by The Intercept in 2022 found that Google was “offering advanced artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities to the Israeli government” through Project Nimbus.
  • The investigation reviewed training documents and videos obtained through a publicly accessible educational portal intended for Nimbus users to claim that “Google is providing the Israeli government with the full suite of machine-learning and AI tools available through Google Cloud Platform”.
  • The new cloud, the investigation revealed, could give “Israel capabilities for facial detection, automated image categorisation, object tracking, and even sentiment analysis that claims to assess the emotional content of pictures, speech, and writing”.
Source- Indian Express

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