Documents Reveal Advanced AI Tools Google Is Selling to ‘Israel’ – The Intercept

By Sam Biddle | The Intercept, Edited by Al-Ahed News

Training materials reviewed by The Intercept confirm that Google is offering advanced artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities to the ‘Israeli’ government through its controversial “Project Nimbus” contract.

The ‘Israeli’ Finance Ministry announced the contract in April 2021 for a $1.2 billion cloud computing system jointly built by Google and Amazon. “The project is intended to provide the government, the military establishment and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution,” the ministry said in its announcement.

Google engineers have spent the time since worrying whether their efforts would inadvertently bolster the ongoing ‘Israeli’ military occupation of Palestine. In 2021, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International formally accused ‘Israel’ of committing crimes against humanity by maintaining an apartheid system against Palestinians. While the ‘Israeli’ military and security services already rely on a sophisticated system of computerized surveillance, the sophistication of Google’s data analysis offerings could worsen the increasingly data-driven military occupation.

According to a trove of training documents and videos obtained by The Intercept through a publicly accessible educational portal intended for Nimbus users, Google is providing the ‘Israeli’ government with the full suite of machine-learning and AI tools available through Google Cloud Platform. While they provide no specifics as to how Nimbus will be used, the documents indicate that the new cloud would give ‘Israel’ capabilities for facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and even sentiment analysis that claims to assess the emotional content of pictures, speech, and writing. The Nimbus materials referenced agency-specific trainings available to government personnel through the online learning service Coursera.

Jack Poulson, director of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, shared the portal’s address with The Intercept after finding it cited in ‘Israeli’ contracting documents.

“The former head of Security for Google Enterprise — who now heads Oracle’s ‘Israel’ branch — has publicly argued that one of the goals of Nimbus is preventing the German government from requesting data relating on the ‘Israel’ Military Forces for the International Criminal Court,” said Poulson, who resigned in protest from his job as a research scientist at Google in 2018, in a message. “Given Human Rights Watch’s conclusion that the ‘Israeli’ government is committing ‘crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution’ against Palestinians, it is critical that Google and Amazon’s AI surveillance support to the ‘Israeli’ military be documented to the fullest.”

Though some of the documents bear a hybridized symbol of the Google logo and ‘Israeli’ flag, for the most part they are not unique to Nimbus. Rather, the documents appear to be standard educational materials distributed to Google Cloud customers and presented in prior training contexts elsewhere.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

The documents obtained by The Intercept detail for the first time the Google Cloud features provided through the Nimbus contract. With virtually nothing publicly disclosed about Nimbus beyond its existence, the system’s specific functionality had remained a mystery even to most of those working at the company that built it. In 2020, citing the same AI tools, US Customs and Border Protection tapped Google Cloud to process imagery from its network of border surveillance towers.

Many of the capabilities outlined in the documents obtained by The Intercept could easily augment ‘Israel’s’ ability to surveil people and process vast stores of data — already prominent features of the ‘Israeli’ occupation.

“Data collection over the entire Palestinian population was and is an integral part of the occupation,” Ori Givati of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation advocacy group of ‘Israeli’ military veterans, told The Intercept in an email.

“Generally, the different technological developments we are seeing in the Occupied Territories all direct to one central element which is more control.”

The educational materials obtained by The Intercept show that Google briefed the ‘Israeli’ government on using what’s known as sentiment detection, an increasingly controversial and discredited form of machine learning. Google claims that its systems can discern inner feelings from one’s face and statements, a technique commonly rejected as invasive and pseudoscientific, regarded as being little better than phrenology. In June, Microsoft announced that it would no longer offer emotion-detection features through its Azure cloud computing platform — a technology suite comparable to what Google provides with Nimbus — citing the lack of scientific basis.

Google workers who reviewed the documents said they were concerned by their employer’s sale of these technologies to ‘Israel,’ fearing both their inaccuracy and how they might be used for surveillance or other militarized purposes.