Google workers arrested after protesting against contract with IDF in CEO's office.

[lfromnj]

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/17/google-workers-arrested-after-nine-hour-protest-in-google-cloud-ceos-office.html

The arrests, which were livestreamed on Twitch by participants, follow rallies outside Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle, which attracted hundreds of attendees, according to workers involved. The protests, led by the “No Tech for Apartheid” organization, focused on Project Nimbus — Google and Amazon’s joint $1.2 billion contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing services, including artificial intelligence tools, data centers and other cloud infrastructure.

Ok so there is at least a basis for the protest although what Google is doing is still good for both the world and shareholders.(Not sure why I double spoke there actually)

[Meclazine for Israel]

Might be a trip coming up to the HR office.

[Ferguson97]

Lmao this is the most performative nonsense I've seen in my life.

If these people truly believed that Google was complicit in genocide, they'd quit their jobs and work somewhere else. And it's not like they're minimum wage workers taking whatever job they can get to put food on the table, they're software engineers almost certainly pulling six figures.

[Brittain33]

Lmao this is the most performative nonsense I've seen in my life.

If these people truly believed that Google was complicit in genocide, they'd quit their jobs and work somewhere else. And it's not like they're minimum wage workers taking whatever job they can get to put food on the table, they're software engineers almost certainly pulling six figures.

Haven’t they effectively quit their jobs?

[Beet]

Relevant links:
https://futuresin.substack.com/p/israel-project-lavender-and-googles?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

https://www.newarab.com/news/contract-shows-google-cloud-deal-israeli-military

E.g., Google is selling the Israeli military a secured cloud environment that could be used to train AI models for automated killing.

"The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions."

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

Sounds like they experienced routine consequences for trespassing, something that still exists no matter how angry the existence of Jews makes people.

[Indy Texas]

Honestly, a lot of this is downstream of contemporary America's absolutely toxic work culture and insistence on defining everyone's worth as a person by how prestigious their career is and how rich they are.

If prestige firms/industries like Google are going to demand people work 70+ hours a week and jump through all kinds of flaming hoops to get and keep a job there, often deferring marriage or having children or making other significantly life-changing decisions to accommodate their careers, yes, they are going to demand their job align with their personal ethics and beliefs because their employers have crowded out any time or opportunity for them to pursue those things outside of their jobs.

[GeneralMacArthur]

No, this is downstream from people thinking the monoissue is so important that it can devour everything else and its victims just have to take it.  Your cause is being hijacked for Palestine, and you just have to take it, because if you oppose it then you literally want to kill babies.  Your organization is being hijacked for Palestine, and you just have to take it, unless you literally support genocide just like the Holocaust.  Your university, your classroom, your concert, your show, your park, your store, your whatever, it's being hijacked for Palestine.  Shut up and take it, genocide lover.  You're our bitch.

[Brittain33]

NYT reports that Google fired 28 employees for sit-ins. Credit where credit is due, unlike students who blocked classes and campuses against rules and then asked for forgiveness because of their immigration status, these employees made a real sacrifice.

[dead0man]

it's not a sacrifice to stop working for someone you feel is engaging in genocide, it's the right thing to do from their perspective.  Well, the right thing to do is to quit and tell people why with a legal protest, not tell people why in an illegal way and then get fired for it.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

It's not surprising they were fired; but if you read the actual details about the method that Israel has been using AI technology actions like this are not just understandable but required.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
This is a left-wing Israeli magazine that has sourced it's information from whistleblowers within the IDF.

According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”

During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.


However, sources said that the only human supervision protocol in place before bombing the houses of suspected “junior” militants marked by Lavender was to conduct a single check: ensuring that the AI-selected target is male rather than female. The assumption in the army was that if the target was a woman, the machine had likely made a mistake, because there are no women among the ranks of the military wings of Hamas and PIJ.


In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

it's not a sacrifice to stop working for someone you feel is engaging in genocide, it's the right thing to do from their perspective.  Well, the right thing to do is to quit and tell people why with a legal protest, not tell people why in an illegal way and then get fired for it.

The right thing to do would be to sabotage the system and prevent it from ever coming into a function state in the first place.

[Libertas Vel Mors]

It's not surprising they were fired; but if you read the actual details about the method that Israel has been using AI technology actions like this are not just understandable but required.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
This is a left-wing Israeli magazine that has sourced it's information from whistleblowers within the IDF.

According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”

During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.


However, sources said that the only human supervision protocol in place before bombing the houses of suspected “junior” militants marked by Lavender was to conduct a single check: ensuring that the AI-selected target is male rather than female. The assumption in the army was that if the target was a woman, the machine had likely made a mistake, because there are no women among the ranks of the military wings of Hamas and PIJ.


In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

it's not a sacrifice to stop working for someone you feel is engaging in genocide, it's the right thing to do from their perspective.  Well, the right thing to do is to quit and tell people why with a legal protest, not tell people why in an illegal way and then get fired for it.

The right thing to do would be to sabotage the system and prevent it from ever coming into a function state in the first place.

Huh? I thought the whole criticism you guys were making was that you wanted more precision in airstrikes (despite the IDF already being very precise.) If AI can help do that and make sure the bad guys can be targeted more accurately, isn't that a good thing?

[Open Source Intelligence]

Zerohedge's opening sentence on this made me laugh:

Dozens of Google employees just learned they can't treat corporate offices like a college campus.

[GeneralMacArthur]

NYT reports that Google fired 28 employees for sit-ins. Credit where credit is due, unlike students who blocked classes and campuses against rules and then asked for forgiveness because of their immigration status, these employees made a real sacrifice.

Lol, sacrifice my ass, they're whining up a storm and accusing Google of "retaliation".  Entitled punks.  The NYT article calls them "activist employees".  Imagine being employed by a company for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and labeling yourself an "activist" against the company, and then winning when the company decides to stop paying you.

They're not noble martyrs who chose to sacrifice their careers for Palestine.  They're entitled morons who seriously thought they could do Occupy Google for Palestine, and Google would just have to grin and take it.  And now they're shocked because Google actually did put the boot in, and trying to use the press to bully Google into giving them their jobs back.  During a time when tech companies are laying employees off left and right too!

[Brittain33]

If we’re going to complain when people protest in a way that’s performative or ineffective or unconstructive or vain, we must acknowledge there are people protesting who are choosing appropriate targets (Google has much more involvement in Israel’s functioning than the Dean of UC Berkeley Law) and willing to take personal consequences even when I disagree with them. Maybe it’s stupid of them and maybe some of them thought they’d get away with it but I don’t think that matters.

It’s like when people vote Uncommitted in Democratic primaries. I very much disagree with their anger toward Biden and certainly those who make statements about sitting out the Presidential election, but as a Democrat, how can I complain about them using a protest vote in a primary as a way to voice their feelings?

[Libertas Vel Mors]

If we’re going to complain when people protest in a way that’s performative or ineffective or unconstructive or vain, we must acknowledge there are people protesting who are choosing appropriate targets (Google has much more involvement in Israel’s functioning than the Dean of UC Berkeley Law) and willing to take personal consequences even when I disagree with them. Maybe it’s stupid of them and maybe some of them thought they’d get away with it but I don’t think that matters.

No, we don't. People who object to Google's sales to Israel can try to stop them by trying to pass laws prohibiting weapons sales to Israel (obviously this would be a ridiculously evil move, but it would be the proper avenue if Israel was an evil country), or by refusing to do business with Google (ergo). They cannot legally or morally do so by violating private property rights.

For an analogy: if a Cuban-American working for Delta disliked Delta flying to Cuba so long as it remained under the Castro regime, it would be acceptable for them to try and pass a law sanctioning commercial ties with Cuba, or for them to boycott/resign from Delta, but not for them to occupy Delta offices.

The fact that the target was (more) on point does not merit praise when the action itself was still indefensible.

[ingemann]

As much as it hurt me to say this, this is fine.

It’s fine that some employees who quit over disagreement with its company’s ethics do it a manner which maximize the public focus on those ethics,

It’s fine that a company fire employees who behaves this way.

The sad thing is that these kind of legitimate protests have been delegitimized by all the other people who do this far more performative like students.

[Lief 🗽]

One of the people fired was this woman, who had a job at Google concerning “child safety” and in her free time made public posts on Twitter under her real name about how rape was okay if the victims were white or Jewish.
https://twitter.com/stopantisemites/status/1780935791390138470?s=46&t=o2Rmfe...

[dead0man]

wow

[Libertas Vel Mors]

As much as it hurt me to say this, this is fine.

It’s fine that some employees who quit over disagreement with its company’s ethics do it a manner which maximize the public focus on those ethics,

It’s fine that a company fire employees who behaves this way.

The sad thing is that these kind of legitimate protests have been delegitimized by all the other people who do this far more performative like students.

The former isn't what the employees did though. They occupied private property. That's not fine.

[Meclazine for Israel]

And........ sacked.

28 Google employees said they were protesting an Israeli contract and would occupy Google office space until

(a) they were arrested; or
(b) Google terminates it's contract with Israel.

Option C

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th__sZI-IxU

The Perils of Protesting at Work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ30UNboepk

[ingemann]

One of the people fired was this woman, who had a job at Google concerning “child safety” and in her free time made public posts on Twitter under her real name about how rape was okay if the victims were white or Jewish.
https://twitter.com/stopantisemites/status/1780935791390138470?s=46&t=o2Rmfe...

Well in that case I blame Google for not having fired her before this stunt.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Lmao this is the most performative nonsense I've seen in my life.

If these people truly believed that Google was complicit in genocide, they'd quit their jobs and work somewhere else. And it's not like they're minimum wage workers taking whatever job they can get to put food on the table, they're software engineers almost certainly pulling six figures.

Honestly, a lot of this is downstream of contemporary America's absolutely toxic work culture and insistence on defining everyone's worth as a person by how prestigious their career is and how rich they are.

If prestige firms/industries like Google are going to demand people work 70+ hours a week and jump through all kinds of flaming hoops to get and keep a job there, often deferring marriage or having children or making other significantly life-changing decisions to accommodate their careers, yes, they are going to demand their job align with their personal ethics and beliefs because their employers have crowded out any time or opportunity for them to pursue those things outside of their jobs.

it's not a sacrifice to stop working for someone you feel is engaging in genocide, it's the right thing to do from their perspective.  Well, the right thing to do is to quit and tell people why with a legal protest, not tell people why in an illegal way and then get fired for it.

Big employers like Google love to call their employees "stakeholders" and tell them how they are a valued part of the company. Doing that, and then acting like it is surprising or unjustified when employees demand a say in what the company does and how it impacts the real world is grand hypocrisy. If employees really are stakeholders (and not just mercenary hires of convenience) then Google as an entity should damned well take their personal view and morals into account.

Likewise, corporations love to make heady declarations in their charters and tell everyone about their commitments to making the world a better place. For example, Google said this in response to the attacks:

Our Jewish Googlers around the world are reeling from these attacks — which bring painful reminders of the worst moments in history — and are experiencing a rise in antisemitic incidents that call for increased security at synagogues and schools.

Our Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Googlers are deeply affected by a concerning rise in Islamophobia, and are watching with dread as Palestinian civilians in Gaza have suffered significant loss and fear for their lives amid the escalating war and humanitarian crisis.

No words can erase this pain.

Yet, we can create a culture of empathy to support our fellow Googlers through the coming weeks and months. I've always been proud of how Googlers come together in moments of crisis. I want to say a special thanks to our ERG communities — especially our Arab, Jewish and Muslim Googlers — for offering guidance and support over the past week.

Finally, we will continue to do everything we can to stand by our Googlers. Even when world events cause the deepest divisions and pain, we can draw strength from our internal community and the mission and values we hold in common. Be kind to yourselves and each other.

If Google meant any of the above, the employees were doing the right thing in trying to hold their company to account.

Of course, the reality is that Google (like all corporations) in an amoral beast devoted to profit and shareholder value that treats its employees as fungible cogs. And should be treated as such.

[dead0man]

Big employers like Google love to call their employees "stakeholders" and tell them how they are a valued part of the company. Doing that, and then acting like it is surprising or unjustified when employees demand a say in what the company does and how it impacts the real world is grand hypocrisy. If employees really are stakeholders (and not just mercenary hires of convenience) then Google as an entity should damned well take their personal view and morals into account.

Likewise, corporations love to make heady declarations in their charters and tell everyone about their commitments to making the world a better place. For example, Google said this in response to the attacks:

Our Jewish Googlers around the world are reeling from these attacks — which bring painful reminders of the worst moments in history — and are experiencing a rise in antisemitic incidents that call for increased security at synagogues and schools.

Our Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Googlers are deeply affected by a concerning rise in Islamophobia, and are watching with dread as Palestinian civilians in Gaza have suffered significant loss and fear for their lives amid the escalating war and humanitarian crisis.

No words can erase this pain.

Yet, we can create a culture of empathy to support our fellow Googlers through the coming weeks and months. I've always been proud of how Googlers come together in moments of crisis. I want to say a special thanks to our ERG communities — especially our Arab, Jewish and Muslim Googlers — for offering guidance and support over the past week.

Finally, we will continue to do everything we can to stand by our Googlers. Even when world events cause the deepest divisions and pain, we can draw strength from our internal community and the mission and values we hold in common. Be kind to yourselves and each other.

If Google meant any of the above, the employees were doing the right thing in trying to hold their company to account.

Of course, the reality is that Google (like all corporations) in an amoral beast devoted to profit and shareholder value that treats its employees as fungible cogs. And should be treated as such.

Yeah, Google should stop doing that (calling employees "stakeholders").  The "company" doesn't give a sh**t about you (the generic you) and you shouldn't give a sh**t about them.  Show up to work on time, do your job, go home, collect as much money as they'll give you.  They all try and say they care, and maybe some individuals in "the company" might give a sh**t about you, but "the company" doesn't.  They're trying to get as much out of you for as little as possible.  Your job is the exact opposite, to get as much out of them by doing the least.

<obviously there are exceptions where going above and beyond in the hopes of future earnings makes sense, and small business owners might care in ways "the company" doesn't. I'm sure we can all come up with other exceptions to my above "rule" that I wouldn't disagree with, but I don't think it detracts from my broader point though, which is you don't owe anybody anything and nobody owes you anything.  If you can get a job, get one and do it just good enough to not get fired.>

oh, and if you (still the generic you) think the company you work for does horrible things, STOP WORKING FOR THEM!  If you don't, you are complicit, even if they act like they give a sh**t.  By all means tell your story, hold your rallies, make your phone calls, try and be the change you believe in (or however that goes), hopefully you won't have too many bigots like the above lady muddying your message with her racism.

[Fuzzy Bear]

It's not surprising they were fired; but if you read the actual details about the method that Israel has been using AI technology actions like this are not just understandable but required.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
This is a left-wing Israeli magazine that has sourced it's information from whistleblowers within the IDF.

According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”

During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.


However, sources said that the only human supervision protocol in place before bombing the houses of suspected “junior” militants marked by Lavender was to conduct a single check: ensuring that the AI-selected target is male rather than female. The assumption in the army was that if the target was a woman, the machine had likely made a mistake, because there are no women among the ranks of the military wings of Hamas and PIJ.


In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

it's not a sacrifice to stop working for someone you feel is engaging in genocide, it's the right thing to do from their perspective.  Well, the right thing to do is to quit and tell people why with a legal protest, not tell people why in an illegal way and then get fired for it.

The right thing to do would be to sabotage the system and prevent it from ever coming into a function state in the first place.

Huh? I thought the whole criticism you guys were making was that you wanted more precision in airstrikes (despite the IDF already being very precise.) If AI can help do that and make sure the bad guys can be targeted more accurately, isn't that a good thing?

Some people here want Hamas to win.