Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.
The company also said that its work “is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
“Google Cloud supports numerous governments around the world in countries where we operate, including the Israeli government, with our generally available cloud computing services,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday evening.
The Israeli prime minister’s office and Israel Defense Forces did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News.
The workers were also protesting labor conditions at the company — saying the contract was impacting “health and safety on the job” — and what they said was Google’s disregard “for the well-being of our Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim colleagues facing Google-enabled racism, discrimination, harassment, and censorship.”
The project has become a “major health & safety workplace conditions issue,” with many employees quitting after citing “mental health consequences of working at a company that is using their labor to enable a genocide,” the group said in a statement posted on Medium on Wednesday.
“On a personal level, I am opposed to Google taking any military contracts — no matter which government they’re with or what exactly the contract is about,” Cheyne Anderson, a Google Cloud software engineer based in Washington, told CNBC on Wednesday.
Anderson was one of the nine workers arrested across the country on Tuesday, with some of those arrests streamed live on Twitch.
