Above photo: Zelda, a NOTA organizer and former Google software engineer at a tabling event in February, 2024.
The members of No Tech For Apartheid (NOTA) advocate for their companies (mainly Google and Amazon) to divest from Israel, ICE, and military contracts.
N, like many of her colleagues at Google, began working at the company out of a desire to make a comfortable living and do a little good in the world. (N is speaking on the condition of anonymity as she is not authorized by her employer to speak to press).
She had high hopes that by working there she’d gain a salary that would allow her to live well, use her skills as a program manager and take advantage of the opportunity to work somewhere that was “positioned really well to provide all these different services at a free level, for people to be able to connect with each other, to be able to find their way around the world, to do all kinds of productive things.”
N is based in California and told The Indy that in the last couple of years, she feels that “her labor is being used for something really terrible. Every single one of my paychecks is soaked in blood at this point in time, and it feels absolutely disgusting” thanks to Google’s contracts with ICE and the Israeli government.
N is a part of No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), an organization of tech workers that has burgeoned since Israel’s escalation of its genocide in Gaza in the past two and a half years. NOTA was created in October 2021, following the establishment of a $1.2 billion cloud contract between Israel, Google and Amazon called Project Nimbus.
The de-centralized, international campaign is made up of tech workers (mostly from Google and Amazon) who want their companies to stop using their labor to create technology that is used in the genocide in Palestine, and to divest from contracts with Department of Homeland Security and the Department of War. Their impetus is convincing their employer to withdraw from Project Nimbus.
Many details about Project Nimbus are unknown, but it’s clear that Google is not being straightforward with how the Israeli government is using their software.
“Project Nimbus gives use of Cloud computing and AI software to the Israeli government. What we’ve officially been told by Google leadership is that it’s being used for workloads like HR,” said N. “But documents published by The Guardian and The New York Times tell us that the Cloud Workloads and facial recognition technology were being used to surveil Palestinians. It helped Israel in individually targeting people within their homes, which, of course, led to not just military target deaths, but also civilian deaths.”
The Palestinian journalist Mohammed R. Mhawish, writing for New York Magazine, describes the surveillance supplied by American companies like Google as such: “It is operated through a system of watching, knowing and collecting us: drones that hovered endlessly overhead, quadcopters that dipped near windows and entered houses, facial-recognition scans at checkpoints, movements followed through phone tracking, calls that broke with static before an air strike. The Israeli army was using artificial intelligence to generate kill lists, monitoring our social-media accounts and storing in bulk the audio of our phone calls.”
Zelda, an organizer with NOTA, said that Google’s surveillance technology has transformed Israel’s persecution of Palestinians.
“In the past, Israeli acts of aggression would typically end for a couple months, because Israeli military intelligence would run out of targets. Now, the Israeli government is able to continue to develop targets because they are generating targets [via surveillance tools provided by Google] and continue their campaign of aggression and displacement,” explained Zelda.
N sees Google’s contract as a major departure of what drew her to the company, yes, but also as its new normal. “Google is engaging in problematic contract after problematic contract since Nimbus: Contracts for the US Air Force, Customs and Border Patrol, the Department of War,” she said.
NOTA’s activism has been most publicized on two occasions. In early February of this year, 900 Google employees signed a petition demanding more transparency over what the company’s technology is being used for in contracts with the United States government. In 2024, over 50 employees, including Zelda, were fired after holding a sit-in against Project Nimbus.
N’s involvement in NOTA has mostly been through email campaigns, both to do with Palestine and with accountability for Google executives who were in the Epstein files. Mostly, she tries her best to educate people on the connection between big tech and the genocide in Palestine.
“I think that we should have a say in not having our paychecks soaked in blood,” N said when asked what drew her to joining NOTA.
Zelda worked at Google from 2021-2024, when they were fired after being arrested during the sit-in in 2024. They became involved with NOTA the year prior, after a mass-call in the early weeks of November 2023.
“I learned about the Nakba. I learned about apartheid. I learned about the role of technology in automating that apartheid. And then I learned about the role of Google,” said Zelda.
From then on, they become deeply involved in NOTA. Zelda started tabling inside Google’s offices, with flyers and a sign on their laptop that said “Ask Me About Project Nimbus.”
While Google’s policies banned Zelda from handing out flyers, if someone approached them and asked for one they could distribute them. “I was just trying to cut through the culture of silence and censorship by physically embodying a presence that was aware of project Nimbus, against project Nimbus, and grieving the genocide that was unfolding,” they said.
Now Zelda organizes from the outside, using their position as a former Google employee to remind current workers that they are empowered to change their company.
“I am really trying to make it clear to workers, ‘when you go to work, people die, and it doesn’t have to be that way,’” said Zelda.
“I want workers to decide for themselves by engaging in processes that build agency and build labor consciousness, to work alongside the other people who they work with and ask them, ‘What can we do about this?’ Because something has to be done.”
