Google has fired an employee who publicly protested the company’s work on behalf of Israel, CNBC reports.
During a speech Monday in New York by the CEO of Google’s Israel branch, an employee in the company’s cloud division publicly protested, saying, “I refuse to build technology that fuels genocide.”
The incident occurred at Mind the Tech, an annual Israeli technology conference. The engineer was protesting against Project Nimbus, a program contracted by the Israeli Government worth $1.2 billion to access cloud services from Google and Amazon.
“Project Nimbus endangers members of the Palestinian community,” the employee said. “No to the ‘apartheid’ of the cloud,” he added. The employee was escorted out of the presentation shortly after, The Verge reports.
A Google spokesperson said in an email to CNBC on Thursday that the employee was fired for “interfering with an official company-sponsored event.” The spokesperson did not specify what rules had been violated.
More and more Google and Amazon employees have reportedly recently spoken out against Project Nimbus, noting that the technology “allows increased surveillance and illegal data collection on Palestinians.” With RT