Google and Amazon workers penned an open letter on The Guardian Tuesday calling for the condemnation of “Project Nimbus,” a military contract between the Israeli Government and Google/Amazon.
Citing claims of human rights abuses and discrimination against Palestinians, the anonymous workers hope to see the contract rejected, along with “future contracts that will harm our users."
“As Google and Amazon employees of conscience from diverse backgrounds. We believe that the technology we build should work to serve and uplift people everywhere, including all of our users,” the letter states. “As workers who keep these companies running, we are morally obligated to speak out against violations of these core values.”
Project Nimbus was awarded to Google and Amazon last April, beating out bids on the project from Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM.
The Nimbus Project is intended to provide a comprehensive, in-depth cloud services solution for the government, the national defense system, and other bodies in the Israeli economy. The tech giants will establish cloud-based data centers in a plan to move a majority of the government’s IT infrastructure to cloud-based servers at an initial investment of NIS 4 billion.
The workers condemning the project remain anonymous and it is unclear how many signed or were involved in the letter. Another opinion piece was later posted on NBC by two of the aforementioned workers: Gabriel Schubiner, software engineer and researcher at Google, and Bathool Syed, content strategist at Amazon, who made pleas for support of their cause.