BY AMBER RAHMAN
<aside> đź’ˇ Have you heard of #NoTechforApartheid? What about Project Nimbus?
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If you have, that’s great. If you haven’t, that makes sense. Amazon and Google don’t want you to know. These Big Tech companies don’t publicize their harmful contracts with the US Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), state and local police departments, and most recently, the Israeli government and military. These partnerships would disrupt their images as innovative stewards of the future. We are not supposed to know that when they say they’re building the future, they’re actually building a future of further entrenched systems of policing, incarceration, and settler-colonialism.
After months of actively pursuing this lucrative partnership with the Israeli government, Amazon and Google won the $1.22 contract with the Israeli government and military to build out a cloud services “ecosystem” for the Israeli public sector. According to Google’s announcement, this includes “all government entities from across the state, including ministries, authorities, and government-owned companies,” and they have already begun construction on three massive data servers, located across the region. Google says they are delighted to have been selected to “digitally transform Israel” in the realms of healthcare, transportation, and education, yet make no mention of its planned primary use by the Israeli defense forces and police.[1]
Plans of the planned Amazon center in Israel. The plan can be seen overlaid on an aerial picture of the region. Credit: Harel Dan, Govmap 2020
What does it mean to “digitally transform” Israel and “invest in Israel’s future,” as Amazon’s press release about the contract says?[2] By making this statement indicating Amazon and Google’s investment in building the future of Israel, they indicate their investment in building a colonial future built on the continued apartheid and dispossession of Palestinians. What does it mean to build a future for a colonial regime? A colonial future? The future of “economic development” and “innovative startups” in Israel rely on the control and oppression of Palestinians, underscoring why Professor Ruha Benjamin argues that “innovation relies on social precarity.” This contract was only made possible because of the ongoing apartheid against Palestinians that has forced millions of Palestinians to become refugees, stolen and demolished thousands of homes, and controls their movement through concrete apartheid walls, hundreds of military checkpoints, and violent policing. Palestinians are forced to live within the colonial imaginations of Israel and U.S. tech companies.
The historic and ongoing processes of apartheid and movement control are made more efficient through the deployment of digital technologies, what scholar Rohan Talbot has called “automating oppression.”[3] Many activists, scholars, and digital rights organizations like 7amleh in historic Palestine have been raising the alarm about how state control of Palestinians is being made more precise, deadly, and efficient through electronic ID cards that use biometric technologies, including fingerprinting and facial recognition, at military checkpoints that Palestinians are required to pass through to travel across the region. This is effective for them because biometrics are so unique and specific to the person that vast masses of data can be collected and searched in reference to particular people. Just this past week in April 2022, Al Jazeera reported that Israel instituted new rules requiring Palestinians in the diaspora to share invasive personal information with the Israeli government to visit the Palestinian West Bank, which is only adding to the vast databases of information the Israeli government is holding on Palestinians.[4] 7amleh has reported extensively on the uses of social media surveillance by the Israeli government that has led to arrests and home invasions.[5]
This cloud technology contract only makes these surveillance policies more invasive, and therefore, deadly. By looking at surveillance practices enabled by Big Tech by U.S. police (many of which are almost identical to the tactics of surveillance against Palestinians)[6], we can further understand how enabling the expansion of the infrastructure of cloud technology is so alarming. The phenomenal community organization fighting the police surveillance state, Stop LAPD Spying, has spoken extensively about the ways that Big Tech’s complicity goes beyond “new high-tech surveillance tools.” In Tech Companies’ Complicity in State Violence Runs Deep, they write:
“Cloud storage, word processing, and database software may seem benign, but a deeper look at how law enforcement agencies operationalize them reveals that it is these technologies that make the violent act of policing easier, faster, or even possible at all.”[7]
Any infrastructure, particularly digital infrastructure, that “centralizes and expedites data collection, storage, sharing, and analysis” is a threat to racialized and oppressed communities like Palestinians living under apartheid and occupation. Scholars D'Ignazio and Klein write in Data Feminism that “the databases and data systems of powerful institutions are built on the excessive surveillance of minoritized groups,” underscoring how the data servers Amazon and Google are currently building will hold the stolen data of Palestinians, all of which will be the property of these U.S. corporations as well.[8] The act of collecting this data is a form of what scholar of ethics and information technology Anna Lauren Hoffman has called data violence. Data is the conduit by which control is exercised, and the act of violently collecting it is a mechanism of Israeli colonial violence.[9]
Michael Kwet, scholar of technology and empire, coined the term “digital colonialism” to highlight the ways that “Big Tech is not only global in scope, but fundamentally colonial in nature” due to its privatized control of the public sectors of governments across the world “and dominated by the United States.”[10] ****Digital colonialism is highly integrated with and reliant on Israeli apartheid. The increased privatization of public services across the globe by overwhelmingly U.S. companies plays a huge role in enabling the surveillant and oppressive goals of governments like Israel: Palestinian oppression is only made possible due to transnational collaboration by colonial companies, which implicates us as students entering the workforce.
<aside> 💡 Nothing has to look or function the way it does. — AMIRI BARAKA [11]
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As students whose potential labor young researchers, programmers, designers, analysts, data scientists, lawyers, marketers, engineers, and more is sought out by Amazon or Google, we can pressure them to cut their Project Nimbus Contract. Over 2,000 Amazon and Google workers stood up against this contract, and we can, too. Refusal is a challenge to power, one that has been utilized by student activists for generations. When students organized to resist university complicity in apartheid in South Africa at Princeton, they called upon divestment from IBM because of its partnerships with the apartheid government providing technologies for their racial categorization systems and was the largest supplier of computers to them, writing and speaking about IBM’s “computer sales” just as Black workers at IBM rose up as well.[12] One key way we can resist is to collectively refuse labor at these companies. The further sections of this zine will expand on how students and laborers can disrupt the practices of these companies. Keep reading and spread the word about #NoTechforApartheid!