CARTOON: Google, Amazon & Other US Tech Giants Profiting Off Direct Role In Israeli War Crimes
"It's more than complicity: It's direct participation and collaboration with the Israeli military on the tools they're using to kill Palestinians."
Cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy (8/7/24)
There was a time — long ago — when the Tech Bros of Silicon Valley posed some pretense of altruism, as epitomized in Google’s corporate phrase “don’t be evil.” Well, after trillions of dollars in profit, dark webs of secret government contracts and trillions passed back and forth between military and intel agencies, several pricey wars for corporate profit, coups, targeted assassinations, collaboration with Israel’s Mossad, murderous drone killings of families, looting and profiting off of all your private data and the global high-tech immiseration of millions, any pretense of any shred of Big Tech morality has long ago been scorched to ashes.
In fact, that gooey high-tech California-dreamin’ bullshit was sidelined early — when Google quietly scrubbed “don’t be evil” from the employee code of conduct way back in 2018. Now it’s all about profiting off deceit all the time, even when it comes to cashing in on one of the most evil, grotesque genocides imaginable. And now we learn Big Tech is not just about profiting from genocide, it is also about actively participating in genocide.
The new Google motto?
“profit off evil…always…in all ways.”
ACTION NOTE: Call Democrats On Gaza & Walz VP Pick!!!
Having lived in far western Wisconsin, I am fairly familiar with Democratic Party VP candidate Minnesota Gov. Ken Walz. There are many positive qualities about him — especially his innate communication skills, but his record on Gaza is pretty much AIPAC mainstream. Should he and Harris win will anything change in the pro ZioNazi norm of the DNC machine? No.
I made a point of contacting Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s (D-WI) office to say that while I have some admiration for Walz, having him on the ticket is not enough to get me to vote for genocide supporter Harris or Baldwin; the genocide and all support to Israel needs to end, now.
I urge you to do the same, especially in light of this article in The Guardian, “US Support For Israel Is Collapsing. And AIPAC Knows It”. Note who is the author, which lends credibility to this sliver of hope.
The Israeli ‘Defense’ Force is using AI to select targets, essentially creating what one former Israeli officer called a "mass assassination factory."
By Brett Wilkins
Common Dreams (8/5/24)
The Israeli military is using cloud storage and artificial intelligence services provided by U.S. tech titans for "direct participation and collaboration" in what many critics around the world call Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, according to an investigation published this week.
Two Israeli publications—+972 Magazine and Local Call—on Sunday published a joint investigation revealing that the Israeli military is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store data gleaned from the mass surveillance in Gaza, where nearly 10 months of bombings and ground invasion have left more than 140,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to local and international estimates.
"Mass target creation and lethality”
Multiple sources told the outlets that pressure on the IDF since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel has "led to a dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon's AWS, and Microsoft Azure." The report states that cooperation between the IDF and AWS "is particularly close" and "even helped on rare occasions to confirm aerial assassination strikes in Gaza—strikes that would have also killed and harmed Palestinian civilians."
IDF Col. Racheli Dembinsky—who spoke at a recent "IT for IDF" event near Tel Aviv—told investigative journalist Yuval Abraham that the "most important" advantage offered by cloud computing companies is advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. AI, she said, provides the IDF with "very significant operational effectiveness" as it obliterates Gaza.
Last year, Abraham published an investigation on the same two websites that showed how the IDF is using AI to select targets, essentially creating what one former Israeli officer called a "mass assassination factory." In April, the journalist revealed that the IDF was using a previously undisclosed AI system that had replaced "human agency and precision" with "mass target creation and lethality."
According to Abraham:
Many of Israel's attacks in Gaza at the beginning of the war were based on the recommendations of a program called "Lavender." With the help of AI, this system processed information on most Gaza residents and compiled a list of suspected military operatives, including junior ones, for assassination. Israel systematically attacked these operatives in their private homes, killing entire families. Over time, the military realized that Lavender was not "reliable" enough, and its use decreased in favor of other software. +972 and Local Call could not confirm whether Lavender was developed with the help of civilian firms, including public cloud companies.
In 2021, Israel signed a $1.2 billion contract with Amazon and Google for Project Nimbus, which provides cloud services to the Israeli government and military. The move sparked the #NoTechForApartheid campaign, in which disaffected tech workers and dozens of advocacy groups rose up against Big Tech's complicity in Israeli human rights crimes in Palestine.
"Technology should be used to bring people together, not enable apartheid and ethnic cleansing," the campaign explained in 2021.
Earlier this year, Google—which Abraham said was briefly listed as a sponsor of the "IT for IDF" event—fired 50 employees for protesting Project Nimbus.
Google workers take part in a bicoastal sit-in protest against Project Nimbus in Sunnyvale, California on April 16, 2024. (Photo: @MPower_Change/X)
Blood for money
IDF Col. Avi Dadon told Abraham that "of course" tech companies want to work with the IDF, because "it's the strongest marketing."
"What the IDF uses was and will be one of the best selling points of products and services in the world," Dadon explained.
However, Big Tech's alleged complicity in Israeli human rights violations is coming under more intense scrutiny lately as Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan seeks arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Khan also sought ICC arrest warrants for two Hamas leaders, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri and Ismael Haniyah, who were both recently assassinated by Israel.
Last month, the ICJ ruled in a separate case that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza is an illegal form of apartheid that must immediately end.
Google hypocrisy for dollars
Some campaigners have noted that Google is apparently violating its own AI principles, which vow that the company "will not design or deploy AI in… technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm… weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people… technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms… [or] technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights."
Others have noted Google and Amazon's lack of transparency on how its systems are being used.
"Neither company has publicly disclosed what, if any, human rights due diligence they carried out before participating in Project Nimbus," Zach Campbell, a digital rights expert at Human Rights Watch, told Abraham. "They haven't mentioned which, if any, red lines there are in terms of what would be permissible use of their technology."
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, U.S. policy fellow at the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told Abraham that while "there's always a lot of focus on the direct military assistance the United States provides to Israel—the munitions, fighter jets, and bombs," far less attention "has been paid to these partnerships that span both civilian and military environments."
"It's more than complicity: It's direct participation and collaboration with the Israeli military on the tools they're using to kill Palestinians," he stressed.
Massive Loss For Google: Court Rules It's An Illegal Monopoly
“Google is paying apple and other similar companies enormous amounts of money to ensure that only Google stays on your phone or whatever other product you buy in exchange for revenue shares.”
By Glenn Greenwald
System Update (8/6/24)
26-minute video
Life After The Googleopoly
Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by excluding rivals from the general search engine market in order to maintain its monopoly. What happens now?
By Matt Stoller
Big (8/6/24)
Monday was a big day for American business.
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence,” wrote Judge Amit Mehta in his decision of the case United States of America vs. Google LLC, “the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”
Fifteen years after it was first investigated, search giant Google is finally going to be held accountable for unfairly thwarting competition. In this piece, I’m going to discuss the complaint against Google, why it lost, the next steps, and what this case means for American business going forward.
What Happened?
The government’s case against Google was simple. The search giant pays tens of billions of dollars a year to companies that distribute search engines - Apple, LG, Motorola, Samsung, AT&T, T-Mobile, Mozilla, Opera, UCWeb, and Verizon - to make sure it was the only search engine consumers saw. A colleague described the case in 2020:
The government is saying that Google put its search engine in front of consumers so rivals – like Bing or DuckDuckGo – never get a chance to compete. The most important way to distribute search engines is to be the preset default general search engine on a device; most consumers simply never change their defaults. To take advantage of this dynamic, Google has agreements with mobile phone companies like Apple and Samsung, wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon, and browser companies like Mozilla to gain default status for Google.
In other words, it bought up all the shelf space. Such a tactic, a monopolist paying off partners to prevent distribution of a rival, is called “monopoly maintenance.”
In digital markets, monopolization is meaningful for a specific reason. When a search engine gets a lot of users, it learns what users click on, and can tweak results to make them better and more relevant. In other words, the use of the product actually improves the product. So Google’s ability to deny scale and data to rivals meant that no one could get enough information to produce a sufficiently high quality service to foster actual competition.
So what’s the harm? As Yosef Weitzman put it late last year:
The alleged harms of this monopoly maintenance are what you’d expect. The government argues it allowed Google to raise prices for advertisers without regard to the prices of ads on other digital platforms, and has allowed Google to forgo quality improvements in privacy and other areas that it would have otherwise pursued. Consumers are also deprived of the potential for a higher-quality search engine that could emerge if there was healthier competition.
Poor quality search costs lives, as Dave Dayen wrote in 2017 when showing how Google’s bad stewardship of its search engine directed users to bad rehab clinics. …
Money trumps everything for these and so many other corporations.
If you're anti-war and have investments in Big Tech stocks, especially Palantiir, you should take your money out. It's another way to take down the Nazi militarist machine.