Amazon Ramps Up Security to Head Off Project Nimbus Protests

Amazon appeared to person importantly heightened information for its New York Amazon Web Services Summit connected Wednesday, 2 weeks aft a fig of activists disrupted the Washington, DC, AWS Summit successful protestation against Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google’s $1.2 cardinal unreality computing contract with the Israeli government. The clampdown successful New York quelled respective activists’ plans to interrupt the keynote code from Matt Wood, the vice president for AI products astatine AWS.

Amazon allowed lone approved individuals to be the keynote speech. The activists, who had registered online to attend, each received emails up of the league informing them that they would not beryllium allowed into the keynote owed to having excessively small space.

In addition, determination was a dense beingness of backstage information guards and unit from the New York Police Department and New York State Police astatine the conference. Despite being barred from the keynote, the activists did participate the building, wherever information confiscated posters and flyers during container checks, which not each attendees were subjected to.

Amazon has antecedently said that it respects its “employees’ rights to explicit themselves without fearfulness of retaliation, intimidation, oregon harassment,” referring to Project Nimbus protests. However, the heightened information shows that the institution is taking steps successful an effort to thwart further dissent. Google, for its part, fired 50 employees aft a high-profile April protest implicit the company’s cloud-computing declaration with the Israeli government.

The activists down the planned keynote disruption are each organizers with No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), a conjugation of tech workers, organizers with the Muslim grassroots radical MPower Change, and members of the anti-Zionist Jewish radical Jewish Voices for Peace. (NOTA was created successful 2021 soon aft news astir Project Nimbus became public.) The radical planned the Google sit-in protestation and different recent actions targeting Project Nimbus.

Those intending to interrupt Wood’s keynote see Zelda Montes, a erstwhile YouTube bundle engineer, and Hasan Ibraheem, a erstwhile Google bundle engineer. Both were among the 50 Google employees fired successful the spring. Jamie Kowalski, a erstwhile Amazon bundle worker who worked astatine the institution for six years, Ferras Hamad, a erstwhile Meta worker who was recently fired aft raising concerns astir anti-Palestinian censorship, and 1 different tech worker, who did not publically disclose their name, had besides planned to protest.

Five different NOTA activists stood straight extracurricular the AWS Summit, down sets of barricades, and distributed informational flyers. They held ample banners speechmaking “Google and Amazon Workers Say: Drop Nimbus, End the Occupation, No Tech for Apartheid” and “Genocide Powered by AWS” atop an representation of a Gazan vicinity reduced to rubble.