A Google employee claims she was fired for criticizing a secret project with Israel

One ​​of Google’s employees opposed the provision of the company’s artificial intelligence for the needs of the Israeli government. Now she claims that she was forced to resign because of criticism of this project.

Marketing manager Ariel Koren worked at the company for 10 years. She says she had no choice but to leave after facing “illegal actions” and retaliation from Google. Before her dismissal, Koren created several petitions against the project with the Israeli government. One of them was signed by more than 800 company employees and 37,500 members of the public.

Not much is known about the Nimbus project, which the activist opposes. It is a joint development between Google and Amazon that will provide AI and cloud tools to the Israeli government and military. According to Koren, this is against Google’s AI policy.

The tools provided by Nimbus “have the potential to expand Israel’s pattern of surveillance, racial profiling, and other forms of tech-assisted human rights violations,” the activist says.

According to her, Google aggressively pursues military contracts and suppresses dissenting voices through policies of silencing and retaliation against individuals employees. The company asked her to move from San Francisco to Google’s office in Brazil within 17 days or quit. The woman believes that the ultimatum was a “creative” way to get her to leave.

Google denies allegations of retaliation against Ariel Koren. At the same time, the company confirms cooperation with the Israeli government. However, there is no mention of military goals.

“We are proud that Google Cloud has been selected by the Israeli government to provide public cloud services to help digitally transform the country. The project includes making Google Cloud Platform available to government agencies for everyday workloads such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education, but it is not directed to highly sensitive or classified workloads,” the company says.

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