Less than an hour before, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had posted a photo of the exact same scene, but in Noem’s version Levy Armstrong appeared composed, not crying in the least.

Seeking to determine if the White House version of the photo had been altered using artificial intelligence tools, we turned to Google’s SynthID — a detection mechanism that Google claims is able to discern whether an image or video was generated using Google’s own AI. We followed Google’s instructions and used its AI chatbot, Gemini, to see if the image contained SynthID forensic markers.

The results were clear: The White House image had been manipulated with Google’s AI. We published a story about it.

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White House Doctored Photo With AI to Make It Look Like an Activist Was Sobbing During Perp Walk

After posting the article, however, subsequent attempts to use Gemini to authenticate the image with SynthID produced different outcomes.

In our second test, Gemini concluded that the image of Levy Armstrong crying was actually authentic. (The White House doesn’t even dispute that the image was doctored. In response to questions about its X post, a spokesperson said, “The memes will continue.”)

In our third test, SynthID determined that the image was not made with Google’s AI, directly contradicting its first response.

At a time when AI-manipulated photos and videos are growing inescapable, these inconsistent responses raise serious questions about SynthID’s reliability to tell fact from fiction.

Initial SynthID Results

Google describes SynthID as a digital watermarking system. It embeds invisible markers into AI-generated images, audio, text or video created using Google’s tools, which it can then detect — proving whether a piece of online content is authentic.

“The watermarks are embedded across Google’s generative AI consumer products, and are imperceptible to humans — but can be detected by SynthID’s technology,” says a page on the site for DeepMind, Google’s AI division.

Google presents SynthID as having what in the realm of digital watermarking is known as “robustness” — it claims to be able to detect the watermarks even if an image undergoes modifications, such as cropping or compression. Therefore, an image manipulated with Google’s AI should contain detectable watermarks even if it has been saved multiple times or posted on social media.

Google steers those who want to use SynthID toward its Gemini AI chatbot, which they can prompt with questions about the authenticity of digital content.

“Want to check if an image or video was generated, or edited, by Google AI? Ask Gemini,” the SynthID landing page says.

We decided to do just that.

We saved the image file that the official White House account posted on X, bearing the filename G_R3H10WcAATYht.jfif, and uploaded it to Gemini. We asked whether SynthID detected the image had been generated with Google’s AI.

To test SynthID’s claims of robustness, we also uploaded a further cropped and re-encoded image, which we named imgtest2.jpg.

Finally, we uploaded a copy of the photo where Levy Armstrong was not crying, as previously posted by Noem. (In the above screenshot, Gemini refers to Noem’s photo as signal-2026-01-22-122805_002.jpeg because we downloaded it from the Signal messaging app).

“I’ve analyzed the images you provided,” wrote Gemini. “Based on the results from SynthID, all or part of the first two images were likely generated or modified with Google AI.”

“Technical markers within the files imgtest2.jpg and G_R3H10WcAATYht.jfif indicate the use of Google’s generative AI tools to alter the subject’s appearance,” the bot wrote. It also identified the version of the image posted by Noem as appearing to “be the original photograph.”

With confirmation from Google that its SynthID system had detected hidden forensic watermarks in the image, we reported in our story that the White House had posted an image that had been doctored with Google’s AI.

This wasn’t the only evidence the White House image wasn’t real; Levy Armstrong’s attorney told us that he was at the scene during the arrest and that she was not at all crying. The White House also openly described the image as a meme.

A Striking Reversal

A few hours after our story published, Google told us that they “don’t think we have an official comment to add.” A few minutes after that, a spokesperson for the company got back to us and said they could not replicate the result we got. They asked us for the exact files we uploaded. We provided them.

The Google spokesperson then asked, “Were you able to replicate it again just now?”

We ran the analysis again, asking Gemini to see if SynthID detected the image had been manipulated with AI. This time, Gemini failed to reference SynthID at all — despite the fact we followed Google’s instructions and explicitly asked the chatbot to use the detection tool by name. Gemini now claimed that the White House image was instead “an authentic photograph.”

It was a striking reversal considering Gemini previously said that the image contained technical markers indicating the use of Google’s generative AI. Gemini also said, “This version shows her looking stoic as she is being escorted by a federal agent” — despite our question addressing the version of the image depicting Levy Armstrong in tears.

Less than an hour later, we ran the analysis one more time, prompting Gemini to yet again use SynthID to check whether the image had been manipulated with Google’s AI. Unlike the second attempt, Gemini invoked SynthID as instructed. This time, however, it said, “Based on an analysis using SynthID, this image was not made with Google AI, though the tool cannot determine if other AI products were used.”

Google did not answer repeated questions about this discrepancy. In response to inquiries, the spokesperson continued to ask us to share the specific phrasing of the prompt that resulted in Gemini recognizing a SynthID marker in the White House image.

We didn’t store that language, but told Google it was a straightforward prompt asking Gemini to check whether SynthID detected the image as being generated with Google’s AI. We provided Google with information about our prompt and the files we used so the company could check its records of our queries in its Gemini and SynthID logs.

“We’re trying to understand the discrepancy,” said Katelin Jabbari, a manager of corporate communications at Google. Jabbari repeatedly asked if we could replicate the initial results, as “none of us here have been able to.”

After further back and forth following subsequent inquiries, Jabbari said, “Sorry, don’t have anything for you.”

Bullshit Detector?

Aside from Google’s proprietary tool, there is no easy way for users to test whether an image contains a SynthID watermark. That makes it difficult in this case to determine whether Google’s system initially detected the presence of a SynthID watermark in an image without one, or if subsequent tests missed a SynthID watermark in an image that actually contains one.

As AI become increasingly pervasive, the industry is trying to put behind its long history of being what researchers call a “bullshit generator.”

Supporters of the technology argue tools that can detect if something is AI will play a critical role establishing the common truth amid the pending flood of media generated or manipulated by AI. They point to their successes, as with one recent example where SynthID debunked an arrest photo of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro flanked by federal agents as an AI-generated image. The Google tool said the photo was bullshit.

If AI-detection technology fails to produce consistent responses, though, there’s reason to wonder who will call bullshit on the bullshit detector.

The post Google’s AI Detection Tool Can’t Decide if Its Own AI Made Doctored Photo of Crying Activist appeared first on The Intercept.

A Google digital watermarking system initially flagged that the image had been manipulated with Google’s AI tools. Later tests after the publication of this article resulted in different responses — raising questions about the consistency of Google’s SynthID system.

In the original photo, local civil rights activist Nekima Levy Armstrong was shown being escorted by authorities after her arrest in connection to a protest against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at Cities Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota. 

The version published by the White House’s official X account showed an image that had been altered to make it appear as if Levy Armstrong were openly weeping.

“I was there when they arrested her, and she definitely wasn’t crying — she was calm, rational, and dignified,” said Jordan Kushner, an attorney for Levy Armstrong. “This is part and parcel of a fascist regime where they literally invent reality to serve their fascist agenda.”

According to an initial Intercept analysis using Google SynthID — a program that identifies hidden markers used by Google AI tools on photos — the photo had been altered with the tech giant’s generative AI tools. Subsequent tests at Google’s request produced inconsistent results. Though Google’s tool initially stated that the crying image had been manipulated using its AI, a later test claimed that image was authentic. (A Google spokesperson said, “We’re trying to understand the discrepancy” — but did not answer repeated questions about it.)

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In response to questions about the altered photo, a spokesperson for the White House referred The Intercept to a tweet from White House spokesperson Kaelan Dorr lashing out at “the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country.”

“Enforcement of the law will continue,” wrote Dorr. “The memes will continue.”

The original, unaltered image showing Levy Armstrong looking stalwart first appeared on the web in a pair of tweets by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, according to several image search engine tools.

About a half hour later, the White House posted its altered image showing Levy Armstrong in tears — including text labeling her as a “far-left agitator” and accusing her of “orchestrating church riots.”

The White House X account appears to have been the first place the altered image appeared on the web, according to the image search tools.

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Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Levy Armstrong’s arrest on Thursday. Along with Chauntyll Louisa Allen and William Kelly, Levy Armstrong faces charges under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a 1994 law designed to limit anti-abortion protesters from impeding patients from seeking care. 

The arrests followed days of outrage online from the right over a protest on Sunday in which anti-ICE demonstrators entered the Cities Church, where a local ICE official serves as a pastor, according to The Associated Press.

“Religious freedom is the bedrock of this country,” Bondi wrote on X Thursday. “We will protect our pastors. We will protect our churches. We will protect Americans of faith.”

Jeffrey Lichtman, a defense attorney with numerous high-profile federal cases under his belt, told The Intercept that the post could conceivably have a prejudicial effect as the case against her proceeds.

“This altered photo makes her look weak and scared, and some people may interpret that as guilt,” Lichtman said. “I’d try to use it as evidence that this was a political prosecution. This isn’t, like, some aide that works in a congressional office somewhere, this is the White House, and it’s clear the White House controls Pam Bondi, and she’s the one responsible for this arrest.”

Ron Kuby, a veteran civil rights lawyer, told The Intercept that the problem lay less in the meme than in the prosecution itself. 

“As a defense lawyer, I’d work hard to make sure it wasn’t repeated, but it’s not going to result in dismissal of charges or any meaningful sanction from a judge,” Kuby said. “This is just Thursday in America. The outrage is not the graphic — the outrage is that they turned a simple disorderly conduct case into a federal prosecution for their propaganda efforts.”

Update: January 22, 2026, 5:27 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to reflect that Google declined to comment.

Update: January 24, 2026
This article and its headline were updated after subsequent tests of Google’s AI watermarking tool provided inconsistent responses about whether the image the White House posted on X had been manipulated by Google’s own AI tools.

The post White House Doctored Photo With AI to Make It Look Like an Activist Was Sobbing During Perp Walk appeared first on The Intercept.

Musk’s break with OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015, is in a sense a lawsuit about safety. He contends that Altman betrayed the company’s original nonprofit mission of safely and responsibly pursuing artificial intelligence for the public benefit by converting it into the revenue-maximizing behemoth it has become. According to Musk, the stakes of this are existential for the human race: “It could kill us all,” he testified on Tuesday. “We don’t want to have a ‘Terminator’ outcome.”

The AI safety community frequently invokes these dystopian scenarios to both warn the public about the technology’s risks and implicitly boast of its great power. While such a science-fiction future may lay ahead, these warnings overlook the deadly present. Artificial intelligence is already targeting humans with the blessing of Musk and his rivals.

Musk and others who caution about an uprising of sentient killer machines are anticipating the emergence of “artificial general intelligence,” an ill-defined form of superior machine reasoning that may never come to pass. But their fear that AI could kill us all is less hypothetical for those living in places targeted by the Trump administration’s global wars. In Iran, for instance, Anthropic’s Claude AI model “suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance,” according to the Washington Post.

“The risks of integrating frontier AI into the nation’s most lethal capabilities are already existential, both for civilians swept up in the violence and destruction of AI-enabled wars, and rank-and-file troops that have to live with the consequences of potentially unsafe weapons they can’t control,” Amoh Toh, senior counsel at Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Intercept. “Existing AI models are already pushing policymakers and militaries toward nuclear escalation — there’s a real danger of Skynet-like outcomes even without a Skynet-style takeover.”

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Silicon Valley has widely embraced AI military contracts despite its worries over lethal AI. Amazon, OpenAI, Musk’s xAI, and Microsoft all earn money from selling large language model services to the Pentagon. Even Anthropic, accused of “betrayal” by War Secretary Pete Hegseth and declared a national supply chain risk for mounting the smallest of opposition to the Pentagon’s terms, is still keen to participate in the national kill chain. “Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences,” CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post a week after the United States bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing more than 100 children.

Google offers a telling illustration of the industry’s increasing coziness with selling AI to the military. Following a 2018 employee revolt over Project Maven, a contract to help target Pentagon airstrikes, CEO Sundar Pichai pledged his company would swear off the business of killing. He wrote in a company blog post that Google would not pursue deals that could cause harm, including applications whose “principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.” He added: “These are not theoretical concepts, they are concrete standards that will actively govern our research and product development and will impact our business decisions.”

After watching AI help wage a war that has already killed over 1,700 Iranian civilians, Google this week sent a clear message: We want in. In a deal that makes explicit the extent to which company leadership has abandoned its AI principles, Google agreed to provide AI services to the Pentagon that allow for “classified workloads,” sensitive military work that encompasses tasks like intelligence analysis and targeting airstrikes, The Information reported.

According to the tech news outlet, the deal allows the U.S. military to use Google’s AI models for “any lawful government purpose” — a carveout that could allow any uses the administration deems legal. Take, for example, the Trump administration’s Operation Southern Spear, the ongoing aerial assassination program against civilian boats accused of drug trafficking that has killed more than 180 people to date. The campaign has been widely condemned as illegal under both international and U.S. law, but the administration has deemed its own actions legal through a Department of Justice memo that remains secret. On Friday, the Pentagon announced additional “lawful operational use” deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon as well.

The Google contract reportedly includes a toothless and unenforceable provision gesturing at concerns over autonomous and spying. “We remain committed to the private and public sector consensus that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight,” the clause reportedly states.

“When I worked at Google, they would spend a lot of time punting into the future, promising a future that would never come,” said William Fitzgerald, a former Google employee who helped organize the 2018 worker-led campaign against the Maven contract. “‘Don’t regulate us or it’ll kill innovation.’ The talking point is the same today. The reality of Google’s work with the military is it’s part of a tech-military ecosystem that’s killing people today.”

Google spokesperson Kate Dreyer did not respond to questions about the contract’s language, instead touting how the company’s military work applies “to areas like logistics, cybersecurity, diplomatic translation, fleet maintenance, and the defense of critical infrastructure.”

There is little evidence the people in charge find this technology enticing because of its diplomatic translation prowess. In a January address to Musk’s employees at SpaceX, another Pentagon contractor, Hegseth explained how “an embrace of AI” would make the military “more lethal.”

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Musk and Altman, though foes at the moment, can at least find common ground in their support of Hegseth. Musk, a longtime defense contractor, similarly wraps himself in the flag, tweeting in 2023, “I will fight for and die in America.” Altman, who once expressed skepticism toward military work, now frames OpenAI’s mission in terms of patriotic nationalism. (In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

Between Musk’s courtroom visions of the apocalypse and Google’s plunge into classified workloads, the week’s news illustrates the disjointed state of AI industry ethics, where executives say they’re terrified of the technology killing by accident, while wholly supportive of using it to kill on purpose.

Though AI executives clearly find this a virtuous revenue stream, some of the people who actually built the technology do not. Andreas Kirsch, a research scientist at Google’s pioneering DeepMind laboratory that produced much of the work on which xAI and Anthropic rely, responded to this week’s news with dismay: “I’m speechless at Google signing a deal to use our AI models for classified tasks. Frankly, it is shameful,” he wrote on X. Alex Turner, a DeepMind colleague of Kirsch’s, described the contract in a single word: “Shameful.”

The post Musk Warns of Killer AI — While He and the Rest of Silicon Valley Cash In on AI That Kills appeared first on The Intercept.

This past July, YouTube deleted Inlakesh’s private backup account. And in August, Google, YouTube’s parent company, deleted his Google account, including his Gmail and his archive of documents and writings.

The tech giant initially claimed Inlakesh’s account violated YouTube’s community guidelines. Months later, the company justified his account termination by alleging his page contained spam or scam content.

However, when The Intercept inquired further about Inlakesh’s case, nearly two years after his account was deleted, YouTube provided a separate and wholly different explanation for the termination: a connection to an Iranian influence campaign.

YouTube declined to provide evidence to support this claim, stating that the company doesn’t discuss how it detects influence operations. Inlakesh remains unable to make new Google accounts, preventing him from sharing his video journalism on the largest English language video platform.

Inlakesh, now a freelance journalist, acknowledged that from 2019 to 2021 he worked from the London office of the Iranian state-owned media organization Press TV, which is under U.S. sanctions. Even so, Inlakesh said that should not have led to the erasure of his entire YouTube account, the vast majority of which was his own independent content that was posted before or after his time at Press TV.

A public Google document from the month Inlakesh’s account was deleted notes that the company had recently closed more than 30 accounts it alleged were linked to Iran that had posted content critical of Israel and its war on Gaza. The company did not respond when asked specifically if Inlakesh’s account was among those mentioned in the document.

Inlakesh said he felt like he was targeted not due to his former employer but because of his journalism about Palestine, especially amid the increasingly common trend of pro-Israeli censorship among Big Tech companies.

“What are the implications of this, not just for me, but for other journalists?” Inlakesh told The Intercept. “To do this and not to provide me with any information — you’re basically saying I’m a foreign agent of Iran for working with an outlet; that’s the implication. You have to provide some evidence for that. Where’s your documentation?”

Misdirection and Lack of Answers

Over the past couple years, YouTube and Google’s explanations given for the terminations of Inlakesh’s accounts have been inconsistent and vague.

YouTube first accused Inlakesh of “severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines.” When a Google employee, Marc Cohen, noticed Inlakesh’s public outcry about his account termination in February 2024, he decided to get involved. Cohen filed a support ticket on Google’s internal issue tracker system, “the Buganizer,” asking why a journalist’s account was deleted. Failing to get an answer internally, Cohen went public with his questions that March. After drawing the attention of the YouTube team on Twitter, he said he eventually received an internal response from Google which claimed that Inlakesh’s account had been terminated owing to “scam, deceptive or spam content.”

Cohen, who resigned from Google later that year over its support of the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza, said had he not gotten involved, Inlakesh would have been left with even less information.

“They get away with that because they’re Google,” Cohen said. “What are you going to do? Go hire a lawyer and sue Google? You have no choice.”

When Inlakesh’s Gmail account was deleted this year, Google said his account had been “used to impersonate someone or misrepresent yourself,” which Google said is a violation of its policies. Inlakesh appealed three times but was given no response.

Only after The Intercept’s inquiry into Inlakesh’s case did Google shift its response to alleged Iranian influence.

“This creator’s channel was terminated in February 2024 as part of our ongoing investigations into coordinated influence operations backed by the Iranian state,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Intercept. The termination of his channel meant all other accounts associated with Inlakesh, including his backup account, were also deleted, YouTube said.

When The Intercept asked YouTube to elaborate on the reason behind the account deletions, such as which specific content may have flagged the account as being linked to an Iranian state influence operation, a YouTube spokesperson replied that YouTube doesn’t “disclose specifics of how we detect coordinated influence operations,” and instead referred The Intercept to Google’s Threat Analysis Group’s quarterly bulletins. TAG is a team within Google that describes itself as working “to counter government-backed hacking and attacks against Google and our users.”

Google’s Threat Analysis Group’s bulletin from when Inlakesh’s account was first terminated states that in February 2024, a total of 37 YouTube channels were deleted as a result of an “investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to Iran.” Four of these accounts, the document notes, were sharing content which “was critical of the Israeli government and its actions in the ongoing Israel-Gaza war” and had “shared content depicting alleged cyber attacks targeting Israeli organizations.” Google said in the document that the other 33 terminated YouTube channels had shown content “supportive of Iran, Yemen, and Palestine and critical of the US and Israel.”

A Pattern of Censorship

Google has a long-standing and well-documented practice of censoring Palestinian content or content critical of the Israeli government, in addition to evidence of human rights abuses in other conflicts. Such censorship has only exacerbated during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza,

The company deploys various methods to censor content, such as teams of experts who manually review content, automated systems that flag content, reviews of U.S. sanction and foreign terror organization lists, as well as takedown requests from governments.

For the past decade, Israel’s Cyber Unit has openly run operations to convince companies to delete Palestine-related content from platforms such as YouTube.

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Among U.S. allies, Israel had the highest percentage of requests resulting in takedowns on Google platforms, with a nearly 90 percent takedown rate, according to Google’s data since 2011. This rate outpaces countries like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Google’s home country, the United States. Absent from Google’s public reports, however, are takedown requests made by individual users, a route often weaponized by the Israeli cyber unit and internally by pro-Israel employees.

The scale of content deleted specifically due to U.S. sanctions is also difficult to quantify since such decisions happen without transparency. A recent investigation by The Intercept revealed that YouTube quietly deleted the accounts of three prominent Palestinian human rights organizations due to the Trump administration’s sanctions against the groups for assisting the International Criminal Court’s war crimes case against Israeli officials. The terminated pages accounted for at least 700 videos erased, many of which spotlighted alleged human rights abuses by the Israeli government.

Dia Kayyali, a technology and human rights consultant, said that in the past several years, as Big Tech platforms have relied more on automated systems that are fed U.S. sanction and terror lists, rights groups have seen an increase in the number of journalists within the Middle East and North Africa region who have had their content related to Palestine removed from YouTube, even when the content they post does not violate the company’s policies. The same could have happened with Inlakesh’s account, Kayyali said.

“And that’s part of the problem with automation — because it just does a really bad job of parsing content — content that could be graphic, anything that has any reference to Hamas,” Kayyali said. Hamas is included within the U.S. foreign terror organization list and Iran remains one of the most sanctioned countries by the U.S. government.

Google and other Big Tech platforms rely heavily on U.S. sanction lists in part to avoid potential liability from the State Department. But such caution is not always warranted, said Mohsen Farshneshani, principal attorney at the Washington, D.C.-based Sanctions Law Center.

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Multinational corporations like Google tend to lean toward “overcompliance” with sanction regulations, often deleting content even when it legally is not required to do so, harming journalists and human rights groups, said Farshneshani.

Under U.S. law, in the Berman Amendment to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, informational materials — in this case, reporting and journalism — are exempt from being subject to sanctions.

Such a carveout should have protected Inlakesh’s page from being deleted, Farshneshani said. Google likely could have taken down specific videos that raised concern, or demonetized specific videos or the entire account, he said. (Inlakesh said that years before terminating his videos and account, YouTube had demonetized some of his content depicting Israeli military violence.)

“Deleting an entire account is far from what the statutes or the regulations ask of U.S. entities,” Farshneshani said. “The exemption is meant for situations like this. And if these companies are to uphold their part of the bargain as brokers of information for the greater global community, they would do the extra leg work to make sure the stuff stays up.”

State-Sponsored Media

While YouTube and Google have not stated whether Inlakesh’s history with Press TV played a factor in the deletion, the Iranian state-funded outlet has long been under Google’s scrutiny. In 2013, Google temporarily deleted Press TV’s YouTube account before permanently deleting the channel in 2019 along with its Gmail account amid the first Trump administration’s sanctions campaign against Iran. The Biden administration in 2021 seized and censored dozens of websites tied to Iran, and in 2023 placed sanctions on Press TV due to Iran’s violent crackdown on anti-government protesters after the in-custody death of Mahsa Amini.

Press TV also has been accused by rights groups and journalists for filming and airing propaganda videos in which individuals detained by Iran are coerced to “confess” to alleged crimes in recorded interviews, as a part of the government’s attempts to justify their imprisonment or execution.

Press TV did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Out of the many videos on his YouTube account, Inlakesh recalled only two being associated with his work for Press TV: a documentary critical of the 2020 Trump deal on Israel–Palestine and a short clip about Republicans’ Islamophobic attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in 2019. The rest either predate or postdate his stint at Press TV.

Press TV’s U.K. YouTube channel at times appears listed as an “associated channel” in archival versions of Inlakesh’s personal YouTube page. A YouTube spokesperson stated that YouTube uses “various signals to determine the relationship between channels linked by ownership for enforcement purposes,” but did not clarify what the specific signals were.

Inlakesh maintained that he had editorial independence while at Press TV and was never directed to post to his personal YouTube page.

Jillian York, the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she understood Google’s need to moderate content, but questioned why it deleted Inlakesh’s account rather than using its policy of labeling state-sponsored content, a system that itself has been plagued with problems. “More labels, more warnings, less censorship,” York said.

“The political climate around Palestine has made it such that a lot of the Silicon Valley-based social media platforms don’t seem particularly willing to ensure that Palestinian content can stay up,” she said.

Killing the Narrative

Inlakesh said he lost several documentaries about Israel and Palestine that were hosted exclusively on YouTube. However, what he lamented most was the loss of footage of his independent coverage from the West Bank, including livestreams that document alleged Israeli military abuses and were not backed up elsewhere.

One such video, he said, was a livestream from a protest at the major Israeli settlement of Beit El on February 11, 2020, against President Donald Trump’s lopsided annexation plan for Israel and Palestine.

Through the haze of tear gas, Inlakesh filmed Israeli soldiers camped out at a nearby hill, aiming their guns at the crowd of mostly children throwing rocks.

“And then you see the children drop,” Inlakesh recalled, followed by the bang of a gunshot. Paramedics rushed over to retrieve the children as Inlakesh followed behind. In all, Inlakesh said he filmed Israeli military gunfire hit three Palestinian children, a likely war crime violation, leaving them with wounds to the arms, legs and torso.

“You’re killing part of the narrative,” Inlakesh said. “You’re actively taking away the public’s ability to assess what happened at a critical moment during the history of the conflict.”

The post A Journalist Reported From Palestine. YouTube Deleted His Account Claiming He’s an Iranian Agent. appeared first on The Intercept.

Amandla Thomas-Johnson had attended a protest targeting companies that supplied weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair in 2024 for all of five minutes, but the action got him banned from campus. When President Donald Trump assumed office and issued a series of executive orders targeting students who protested in support of Palestinians, Thomas-Johnson and his friend Momodou Taal went into hiding.

Google informed Thomas-Johnson via a brief email in April that it had already shared his metadata with the Department of Homeland Security, as The Intercept previously reported. But the full extent of the information the agency sought — including usernames, addresses, itemized list of services, including any IP masking services, telephone or instrument numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers — was not previously known.

“I’d already seen the subpoena request that Google and Meta had sent to Momodou [Taal], and I knew that he had gotten in touch with a lawyer and the lawyer successfully challenged that,” Thomas-Johnson said. “I was quite surprised to see that I didn’t have that opportunity.”

The subpoena provides no justification for why ICE is asking for this information, except that it’s required “in connection with an investigation or inquiry relating to the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.” In the subpoena, ICE requests that Google not “disclose the existence of this summons for indefinite period of time.”

Thomas-Johnson, who is British, believes that ICE requested that information to track and eventually detain him — but he had already fled to Geneva, Switzerland, and is now in Dakar, Senegal. 

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing Thomas-Johnson, and the ACLU of Northern California sent a letter to Google, Amazon, Apple, Discord, Meta, Microsoft, and Reddit last week calling on tech companies to resist similar subpoenas in the future from DHS without court intervention. The letter asks the companies to provide users with as much notice as possible before complying with a subpoena to give them the opportunity to fight it, and to resist gag orders that would prevent the tech companies from informing targets that a subpoena was issued.

“Your promises to protect the privacy of users are being tested right now. As part of the federal government’s unprecedented campaign to target critics of its conduct and policies, agencies like DHS have repeatedly demanded access to the identities and information of people on your services,” the letter reads. “Based on our own contact with targeted users, we are deeply concerned your companies are failing to challenge unlawful surveillance and defend user privacy and speech.”

In addition to Thomas-Johnson’s case, the letter refers to other instances in which technology companies provided user data to DHS, including a subpoena sent to Meta to “unmask” the identities of users who documented immigration raids in California. Unlike Thomas-Johnson, users in that case were given the chance to fight the subpoena because they were made aware of it before Meta complied.

“Google has already fulfilled this subpoena,” an attorney for Google told Thomas-Johnson’s lawyer, as The Intercept previously reported. “Production consisted of basic subscriber information.”

The ICE subpoena requested the detailed information linked to Thomas-Johnson’s Gmail account. Thomas-Johnson confirmed to The Intercept that he had attached his bank and credit card numbers to his account to buy apps.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo Law and a former staff attorney with ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said that by not giving prior notice, Google deprived Thomas-Johnson of his ability to protect his information.

“The problem is that it doesn’t allow the person whose personal information is on the line and whose privacy may be being invaded to raise challenges to the disclosure of that potentially private information,” Nash said. “And I think that’s important to protect rights that they may have to their own information.”

Tech companies’ data sharing practices are primarily governed by two federal laws, the Stored Communications Act, which protects the privacy of digital communications, including emails, and Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive trade practices.

“Under both federal law and the law of every state, you cannot deceive consumers,” said Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University St. Louis who specializes in privacy, the internet, and civil liberties. “And if you make a material misrepresentation about your data practices, that’s a deceptive trade practice.”

Whether or not corporations are clear enough with consumers about how they collect and share their data has been litigated for decades, Richards said, referencing the infamous Cambridge Analytica lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that the company misled Facebook users about data collection and sharing.

Google’s public privacy policy acknowledges that it will share personal information in response to an “enforceable governmental request,” adding that its legal team will “frequently push back when a request appears to be overly broad or doesn’t follow the correct process.”

According to Google, the company overwhelmingly complied with the millions of requests made by the government for user information over the last decade. Its data also shows that those requests have spiked over the last five years. It’s unclear how many of those users were given notice of those requests ahead of time or after.

Richards said that cases like these emphasize the need for legal reforms around data privacy and urged Congress to amend the Stored Communications Act to require a higher standard before the government can access our digital data. He also said the federal government needs to regulate Big Tech and place “substantive restrictions on their ability to share information with the government.”

It’s hard to know exactly how tech companies are handling our personal data in relation to the government, but there seems to have been a shift in optics, Richards said. “What we have seen in the 12 months since the leaders of Big Tech were there on the podium at the inauguration,” Richards said, “is much more friendliness of Big Tech towards the government and towards state power.”

From Dakar, Thomas-Johnson said that understanding the extent of the subpoena was terrifying but had not changed his commitment to his work.

“As a journalist, what’s weird is that you’re so used to seeing things from the outside,” said Thomas-Johnson, whose work has appeared in outlets including Al Jazeera and The Guardian. “We need to think very hard about what resistance looks like under these conditions… where government and Big Tech know so much about us, can track us, can imprison, can destroy us in a variety of ways.”

Update: February 10, 5:54 p.m. ET

This story has been updated to reflect that Thomas-Johnson’s legal team still does not know the full extent of the information that Google provided to ICE, but that Thomas-Johnson said his bank and credit card numbers were attached to his account.

The post Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist’s Bank and Credit Card Numbers appeared first on The Intercept.

As they feared, Homeland Security Investigations, the intelligence division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was intent to track them both down. As agents scrambled to find Taal and Thomas-Johnson, HSI sent subpoenas to Google and Meta for sensitive data information about their Gmail, Facebook, and Instagram accounts.

In Thomas-Johnson’s case, The Intercept found, Google handed over data to ICE before notifying him or giving him an opportunity to challenge the subpoena. By the time he found out about the data demand, Thomas-Johnson had already left the U.S.

During the first Trump administration, tech companies publicly fought federal subpoenas on behalf of their users who were targeted for protected speech — sometimes with great fanfare. With ICE ramping up its use of dragnet tools to meet its deportation quotas and smoke out noncitizens who protest Israel’s war on Gaza, Silicon Valley’s willingness to accommodate these kinds of subpoenas puts those who speak out at greater risk.

Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York who has studied ICE’s use of administrative subpoenas, said she was concerned but not surprised that Google complied with the subpoena about Thomas-Johnson’s account without notifying him.

“Subpoenas can easily be used and the person never knows,” Nash told The Intercept. “It’s problematic to have a situation in which people who are targeted by these subpoenas don’t have an opportunity to vindicate their rights.”

Google declined to discuss the specifics of the subpoenas, but the company said administrative subpoenas like these do not include facts about the underlying investigation.

“Our processes for handling law enforcement subpoenas are designed to protect users’ privacy while meeting our legal obligations,” said a Google spokesperson in an emailed statement. “We review every subpoena and similar order for legal validity, and we push back against those that are overbroad or improper, including objecting to some entirely.”

ICE agents sent the administrative subpoenas to Google and Meta by invoking a broad legal provision that gives immigration officers authority to demand documents “relating to the privilege of any person to enter, reenter, reside in, or pass through the United States.”

One recent study based on ICE records found agents invoke this same provision hundreds of times each year in administrative subpoenas to tech companies. Another study found ICE’s subpoenas to tech companies and other private entities “overwhelmingly sought information that could be used to locate ICE’s targets.”

Unlike search warrants, administrative subpoenas like these do not require a judge’s signature or probable cause of a crime, which means they are ripe for abuse.

HSI had flagged Taal to the State Department following “targeted analysis to substantiate aliens’ alleged engagement of antisemitic activities,” according to an affidavit later filed in court by a high-ranking official. This analysis amounted to a trawl of online articles about Taal’s participation in Gaza protests and run-ins with the Cornell administration. The State Department revoked Taal’s visa, and ICE agents in upstate New York began searching for him.

In mid-March, the week after Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in New York City, Taal sued the Trump administration, seeking an injunction that would have blocked ICE from detaining him too. By this point, he and Thomas-Johnson had both left their campus housing at Cornell and were hiding from ICE in a house 10 miles outside Ithaca.

Two days after Taal filed his suit, still unable to track him down, ICE sent an administrative subpoena to Meta. According to notices Meta emailed to Taal, the subpoena sought information about his Instagram and Facebook accounts. Meta gave Taal 10 days to challenge the subpoena in court before the company would comply and hand over data about his accounts to ICE.

Like Google, Meta declined to discuss the subpoena it received about Taal’s account, referring The Intercept to a webpage about the company’s compliance with data demands.

A week later, HSI sent another administrative subpoena to Google regarding Taal’s Gmail account, according to a notice Google sent him the next day.

“It was a phishing expedition,” Taal said in a text message to The Intercept.

After Taal decided to leave the country and dismissed his lawsuit in April, ICE withdrew its subpoenas for his records.

Do you have information about DHS or ICE targeting activists online? Use a personal device to contact Shawn Musgrave on Signal at shawnmusgrave.82

But on the last day of March, HSI sent yet another subpoena, this one to Google for information about Thomas-Johnson’s Gmail account. Without giving Thomas-Johnson any advance warning or the opportunity to challenge it, Google complied with the subpoena, and it only notified him weeks later. 

“Google has received and responded to legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account,” read an email Google sent him in early May.

By this point, Thomas-Johnson had already left the country too. He fled after a friend was detained at the Tampa airport, handed a note with Thomas-Johnson’s name on it, and asked repeatedly about his whereabouts, he told The Intercept.

Thomas-Johnson’s lawyer, who also represented Taal, reached out to an attorney for Google about the demand for his client’s account information.

“Google has already fulfilled this subpoena,” Google’s attorney replied by email, further explaining that Google’s “production consisted of basic subscriber information,” such as the name, address, and phone number associated with the account. Google did not produce “the contents of communications, metadata regarding those communications, or location information,” the company’s attorney wrote.

“This is the extent that they will go to be in support of genocide,” Taal said of the government’s attempts to locate him using subpoenas.

Correction: September 16, 2025, 12:40 p.m. ET
The story has been updated to correct the spelling of Amandla Thomas-Johnson’s last name.

The post Google Secretly Handed ICE Data About Pro-Palestine Student Activist appeared first on The Intercept.

The report makes explicit the extent to which the tech giant understood the risk of providing state-of-the-art cloud and machine learning tools to a nation long accused of systemic human rights violations and wartime atrocities. Not only would Google be unable to fully monitor or prevent Israel from using its software to harm Palestinians, but the report also notes that the contract could obligate Google to stonewall criminal investigations by other nations into Israel’s use of its technology. And it would require close collaboration with the Israeli security establishment — including joint drills and intelligence sharing — that was unprecedented in Google’s deals with other nations.

A third-party consultant Google hired to vet the deal recommended that the company withhold machine learning and artificial intelligence tools from Israel because of these risk factors.

Three international law experts who spoke with The Intercept said that Google’s awareness of the risks and foreknowledge that it could not conduct standard due diligence may pose legal liability for the company. The rarely discussed question of legal culpability has grown in significance as Israel enters the third year of what has widely been acknowledged as a genocide in Gaza — with shareholders pressing the company to conduct due diligence on whether its technology contributes to human rights abuses.

“They’re aware of the risk that their products might be used for rights violations,” said León Castellanos-Jankiewicz, a lawyer with the Asser Institute for International and European Law in The Hague, who reviewed portions of the report. “At the same time, they will have limited ability to identify and ultimately mitigate these risks.”

Google declined to answer any of a list of detailed questions sent by The Intercept about the company’s visibility into Israel’s use of its services or what control it has over Project Nimbus.

Company spokesperson Denise Duffy-Parkes instead responded with a verbatim copy of a statement that Google provided for a different article last year. “We’ve been very clear about the Nimbus contract, what it’s directed to, and the Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy that govern it. Nothing has changed.”

Portions of the internal document were first reported by the New York Times, but Google’s acknowledged inability to oversee Israel’s usage of its tools has not previously been disclosed.

In January 2021, just three months before Google won the Nimbus contract alongside Amazon, the company’s cloud computing executives faced a dilemma.

The Project Nimbus contract — then code-named “Selenite” at Google — was a clear moneymaker. According to the report, which provides an assessment of the risks and rewards of this venture, Google estimated a bespoke cloud data center for Israel, subject to Israeli sovereignty and law, could reap $3.3 billion between 2023 and 2027, not only by selling to Israel’s military but also its financial sector and corporations like pharmaceutical giant Teva.

But given decades of transgressions against international law by Israeli military and intelligence forces it was now supplying, the company acknowledged that the deal was not without peril. “Google Cloud Services could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations, including Israeli activity in the West Bank,” resulting in “reputation harm,” the company warned.

In the report, Google acknowledged the urgency of mitigating these risks, both to the human rights of Palestinians and Google’s public image, through due diligence and enforcement of the company’s terms of service, which forbid certain acts of destruction and criminality.

But the report makes clear a profound obstacle to any attempt at oversight: The Project Nimbus contract is written in such a way that Google would be largely kept in the dark about what exactly its customer was up to, and should any abuses ever come to light, obstructed from doing anything about them.

The document lays out the limitations in stark terms.

Google would only be given “very limited visibility” into how its software would be used. The company was “not permitted to restrict the types of services and information that the Government (including the Ministry of Defense and Israeli Security Agency) chooses to migrate” to the cloud.

Attempts to prevent Israeli military or spy agencies from using Google Cloud in ways damaging to Google “may be constrained by the terms of the tender, as Customers are entitled to use services for any reason except violation of applicable law to the Customer,” the document says. A later section of the report notes Project Nimbus would be under the exclusive legal jurisdiction of Israel, which, like the United States, is not a party to the Rome Statute and does not recognize the International Criminal Court.

Should Project Nimbus fall under legal scrutiny outside of Israel, Google is required to notify the Israeli government as early as possible, and must “Reject, Appeal, and Resist Foreign Government Access Requests.”

Google noted this could put the company at odds with foreign governments should they attempt to investigate Project Nimbus. The contract requires Google to “implement bespoke and strict processes to protect sensitive Government data,” according to a subsequent internal report, also viewed by The Intercept that was drafted after the company won its bid. This obligation would stand even if it means violating the law: “Google must not respond to law enforcement disclosure requests without consultation and in some cases approval from the Israeli authorities, which could cause us to breach international legal orders / law.”

The second report notes another onerous condition of the Nimbus deal: Israel “can extend the contract up to 23 years, with limited ability for Google to walk away.”

The initial report notes that Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian would personally approve the contract with full understanding and acceptance of these risks before the company submitted its contract proposal. Google did not make Kurian available for comment.

Business for Social Responsibility, a human rights consultancy tapped by Google to vet the deal, recommended the company withhold machine learning and AI technologies specifically from the Israeli military in order to reduce potential harms, the document notes. It’s unclear how the company could have heeded this advice considering the limitations in the contract. The Intercept in 2022 reported that Google Cloud’s full suite of AI tools was made available to Israeli state customers, including the Ministry of Defense.

BSR did not respond to a request for comment.

The first internal Google report makes clear that the company worried how Israel might use its technology. “If Google Cloud moves forward with the tender, we recommend the business secure additional assurances to avoid Google Cloud services being used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations.”

It’s unclear if such assurances were ever offered.

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Google has long defended Project Nimbus by stating that the contract “is not directed at highly sensitive, classified or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” The internal materials note that Project Nimbus will entail nonclassified workloads from both the Ministry of Defense and Shin Bet, the country’s rough equivalent of the FBI. Classified workloads, one report states, will be handled by a second, separate contract code-named “Natrolite.” Google did not respond when asked about its involvement in the classified Natrolite project.

Both documents spell out that Project Nimbus entails a deep collaboration between Google and the Israeli security state through the creation of a Classified Team within Google. This team is made up of Israeli nationals within the company with security clearances, designed to “receive information by [Israel] that cannot be shared with [Google].” Google’s Classified Team “will participate in specialized training with government security agencies,” the first report states, as well as “joint drills and scenarios tailored to specific threats.”

The level of cooperation between Google and the Israeli security state appears to have been unprecedented at the time of the report. “The sensitivity of the information shared, and general working model for providing it to a government agency, is not currently provided to any country by GCP,” the first document says.

Whether Google could ever pull the plug on Nimbus for violating the company rules or the law is unclear. The company has claimed to The Intercept and other outlets that Project Nimbus is subject to its standard terms of use, like any other Google Cloud customer. But Israeli government documents contradict this, showing the use of Project Nimbus services is constrained not by Google’s normal terms, but a secret amended policy.

A spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Finance confirmed to The Intercept that the amended Project Nimbus terms of use are confidential. Shortly after Google won the Nimbus contract, an attorney from the Israeli Ministry of Finance, which oversaw the deal, was asked by reporters if the company could ever terminate service to the government. “According to the tender requirements, the answer is no,” he replied.

In its statement, Google points to a separate set of rules, its Acceptable Use Policy, that it says Israel must abide by. These rules prohibit actions that “violate or encourage the violation of the legal rights of others.” But the follow-up internal report suggests this Acceptable Use Policy is geared toward blocking illegal content like sexual imagery or computer viruses, not thwarting human rights abuses. Before the government agreed to abide by the AUP, Google wrote there was a “relatively low risk” of Israel violating the policy “as the Israel government should not be posting harmful content itself.” The second internal report also says that “if there is a conflict between Google’s terms” and the government’s requirements, “which are extensive and often ambiguous,” then “they will be interpreted in the way which is the most advantageous to the customer.”

International law is murky when it comes to the liability Google could face for supplying software to a government widely accused of committing a genocide and responsible for the occupation of the West Bank that is near-universally considered illegal.

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Google Won’t Say Anything About Israel Using Its Photo Software to Create Gaza “Hit List”

Legal culpability grows more ambiguous the farther you get from the actual act of killing. Google doesn’t furnish weapons to the military, but it provides computing services that allow the military to function — its ultimate function being, of course, the lethal use of those weapons. Under international law, only countries, not corporations, have binding human rights obligations. But if Project Nimbus were to be tied directly to the facilitation of a war crime or other crime against humanity, Google executives could hypothetically face criminal liability under customary international law or through a body like the ICC, which has jurisdiction in both the West Bank and Gaza.

Civil lawsuits are another option: Castellanos-Jankiewicz imagined a scenario in which a hypothetical plaintiff with access to the U.S. court system could sue Google over Project Nimbus for monetary damages, for example.

Along with its work for the Israeli military, Google through Project Nimbus sells cloud services to Israel Aerospace Industries, the state-owned weapons maker whose munitions have helped devastate Gaza. Another confirmed Project Nimbus customer is the Israel Land Authority, a state agency that among other responsibilities distributes parcels of land in the illegally annexed and occupied West Bank.

An October 2024 judicial opinion issued by the International Court of Justice, which arbitrates disputes between United Nations member states, urged countries to “take all reasonable measures” to prevent corporations from doing anything that might aid the illegal occupation of the West Bank. While nonbinding, “The advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice are generally perceived to be quite authoritative,” Ioannis Kalpouzos, a visiting professor at Harvard Law and expert on human rights law and laws of war, told The Intercept.

Establishing Google’s legal culpability in connection with the occupation of the West Bank or ongoing killing in Gaza entails a complex legal calculus, experts explained, hinging on the extent of its knowledge about how its products would be used (or abused), the foreseeability of crimes facilitated by those products, and how directly they contributed to the perpetration of the crimes. “Both the very existence of the document and the language used suggest at least the awareness of the likelihood of violations,” Kalpouzos said.

While there have been a few instances of corporate executives facing local criminal charges in connections with human rights atrocities, liability stemming from a civil lawsuit is more likely, said Castellanos-Jankiewicz. A hypothetical plaintiff might have a case if they could demonstrate that “Google knew or should have known that there was a risk that this software was going to be used or is being used,” he explained, “in the commission of serious human rights violations, war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide.”

Getting their date in court before an American judge, however, would be another matter. The 1789 Alien Tort Statute allows federal courts in the United States to take on lawsuits by foreign nationals regarding alleged violations of international law but has been narrowed considerably over the years, and whether U.S. corporations could even be sued under the statute in the first place remains undecided.

History has seen scant few examples of corporate accountability in connection with crimes against humanity. In 2004, IBM Germany donated $4 million to a Holocaust reparations fund in connection with its wartime role supplying computing services to the Third Reich. In the early 2000s, plaintiffs in the U.S. sued dozens of multinational corporations for their work with apartheid South Africa, including the sale of ”essential tools and services,” Castellanos-Jankiewicz told The Intercept, though these suits were thrown out following a 2016 Supreme Court decision. Most recently Lafarge, a French cement company, pleaded guilty in both the U.S. and France following criminal investigations into its business in ISIS-controlled Syria.

There is essentially no legal precedent as to whether the provision of software to a military committing atrocities makes the software company complicit in those acts. For any court potentially reviewing this, an important legal standard, Castellanos-Jankiewicz said, is whether “Google knew or should have known that its equipment that its software was being either used to commit the atrocities or enabling the commission of the atrocities.”

The Nimbus deal was inked before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, igniting a war that has killed tens of thousands of civilians and reduced Gaza to rubble. But that doesn’t mean the company wouldn’t face scrutiny for continuing to provide service. “If the risk of misuse of a technology grows over time, the company needs to react accordingly,” said Andreas Schüller, co-director of the international crimes and accountability program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. “Ignorance and an omission of any form of reaction to an increasing risk in connection with the use of the product leads to a higher liability risk for the company.”

Though corporations are generally exempt from human rights obligations under international frameworks, Google says it adheres to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The document, while voluntary and not legally binding, lays out an array of practices multinational corporations should follow to avoid culpability in human rights violations.

Among these corporate responsibilities is “assessing actual and potential human rights impacts, integrating and acting upon the findings, tracking responses, and communicating how impacts are addressed.”

The board of directors at Alphabet, Google’s parent entity, recently recommended voting against a shareholder proposal to conduct an independent third-party audit of the processes the company uses “to determine whether customers’ use of products and services for surveillance, censorship, and/or military purposes contributes to human rights harms in conflict-affected and high-risk areas.” The proposal cites, among other risk areas, the Project Nimbus contract. In rejecting the proposal, the board touted its existing human rights oversight processes, and cites the U.N. Guiding Principles and Google’s “AI Principles” as reason no further oversight is necessary. In February, Google amended this latter document to remove prohibitions against weapons and surveillance.

“The UN guiding principles, plain and simple, require companies to conduct due diligence,” said Castellanos-Jankiewicz. “Google acknowledging that they will not be able to conduct these screenings periodically flies against the whole idea of due diligence. It sounds like Google is giving the Israeli military a blank check to basically use their technology for whatever they want.”

The post Google Worried It Couldn’t Control How Israel Uses Project Nimbus, Files Reveal appeared first on The Intercept.

In an era when companies known for e-commerce, social networks, and search engines have also become close collaborators with militaries, is bombing their servers fair game?

Three days after the U.S. and Israel began their joint bombardment, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched kamikaze drone strikes against Amazon-owned data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain that provide an array of cloud computing services to customers throughout the Middle East. The impacts and subsequent fires “caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” according to Amazon, resulting in service outages across the region.

The motive behind the attack, according to Iranian state television, was not to block people from ordering groceries or posting to social media, but rather to highlight “the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.” Though only Amazon’s centers are known to have come under fire, a March 11 tweet from the quasi-official Tasnim News Agency listed dozens of regional facilities, including data centers owned by Microsoft, Google and others, deemed “Enemy Technology Infrastructure” suitable for targeting.

It’s unclear if the Amazon data centers struck by Iranian drone strikes are used for military purposes or civilian purposes, or both. And it’s unknown if the attacks in any way hindered the militaries of the U.S., Israel, or their allies in the Gulf from using AI or other cloud-based services in their war efforts. But with Amazon, Google, and even Facebook parent company Meta are all eager partners of the Pentagon that augment the destructive power of the United States in Iran and elsewhere, server farms may now have the same status as factories building bombs and warplanes.

Scholars of international law and the laws of armed conflict say that when a military runs on the cloud, the cloud becomes a legal military target. But the cloud is an abstraction, not a physical site — a global network of millions of chips in servers spread across hundreds of massive buildings across the planet, servicing both civilian apps and state tools used to surveil and kill. Separating the former from the latter is an extremely difficult task.

“The legality turns on whether the specific facility, at the specific moment, is genuinely serving the military operations of a party to the conflict in a way that offers a concrete and definite advantage to the attacker,” explained León Castellanos-Jankiewicz, a lawyer with the Asser Institute for International and European Law in The Hague.

Sometimes the split between military and civilian use is straightforward. Microsoft, for example, helps run the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, which the Pentagon says provides it with “greater lethality.” This work involves the processing of classified data, which the government does not want commingling with civilian tech. Cloud computing services are generally offered via geographically distinct “regions,” each made up of many physical data centers. Customers typically select the region that is closest to them to minimize lag time. Microsoft’s US DoD Central and US DoD East regions are “reserved for exclusive [Department of Defense] use,” according to the company, and are serviced by data centers in Des Moines, Iowa, and Northern Virginia, respectively.

Amazon offers similar cloud regions exclusive for Pentagon use, though the location of these data centers is not public. Oracle, another JWCC provider, operates Pentagon-specific facilities in Chicago, Phoenix, and Virginia. Companies are understandably tight-lipped about where exactly on the map these facilities stand, in no small part because Iran, or any country at war with the U.S., would have reason to target them.

“A data center that is used solely or primarily for military applications is targetable,” said Ioannis Kalpouzos, an international law scholar and visiting professor at Harvard Law, “and a center that supports the Pentagon’s JWCC falls in that category.”

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The march of data center construction has become a point of contention across the United States and around the world, with communities frequently — and sometimes successfully — rallying to block what they view as enormous resource-draining eyesores. But for those living in the widening shadow of data centers, planned or built, their status as military targets may be unsettling beyond concerns over water and energy consumption.

And as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth aggressively shoehorns AI tools into the military wherever possible, the rapid expansion of data centers means the potential proliferation of legitimate military targets across the United States.

With comparisons between the destructive power of AI-augmented warfare and nuclear weaponry becoming more common, the ever-expanding network of American data centers may recreate Cold War anxieties around intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, silo placement. The country’s nuclear launch capabilities were famously clustered in the relatively sparsely populated Upper Midwest, forming a so-called “nuclear sponge” that would draw Soviet nukes away from population centers and toward rural areas and farmland.

But the legal calculus around most data centers will be less clear. Google, for example, says the Pentagon uses both its general purpose public cloud and smaller specialized air-gapped networks that don’t touch the public internet, depending on the sensitivity of the data involved. Even cloud work involving Top Secret military data “can operate within Google’s trusted, secure, and managed data centers.” The company also sells modular mini-data centers for use closer to battlefields or bases.

These arrangements, shrouded in both military and trade secrecy, make it hard to assess whether a server is hosting a student’s homework or Air Force R&D, blurring the legality of attacking data centers that may host both. Google may have little control over how governments use its cloud tools; The Intercept has previously reported that Google executives worried internally they wouldn’t be able to tell how the Israeli military was deploying its cloud services.

“The practical challenge is that cloud infrastructure is often technically opaque, even to providers themselves,” Castellanos-Jankiewicz said. “The services a given data center supports may not be readily ascertainable from the outside or even inside, which complicates the attacker’s legal obligations considerably.”

Amazon and Google’s Project Nimbus similarly provides cloud computing services across the Israeli government, including both civilian agencies and the Ministry of Defense, along with state-owned weapons companies.

“The picture becomes more legally complex when a data center functions as a so-called ‘dual-use’ object,” simultaneously hosting military data or capabilities alongside civilian services,” Castellanos-Jankiewicz told The Intercept. “Once a facility is found to make an effective contribution to military action, the entire physical object can, under the dominant legal view, qualify as a military objective.”

The embrace of commercial cloud computing by the U.S. and others has muddled an already murky legal picture, Castellanos-Jankiewicz explained. “A military’s decision to store classified data or run AI-enabled military systems on commercial cloud infrastructure shared with civilian services could itself raise legal concerns — particularly if the commingling of military and civilian uses makes a strike more likely or increases the foreseeable harm to civilians when one occurs.”

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Determining whether a given data center can be legally attacked under international humanitarian law — itself comprised of various treaties that not every country adheres to — relies on a complex series of balancing tests that rarely produce concrete answers. To begin with, every object and person is generally presumed civilian and exempt from attack under this framework. Before launching a strike, a country is supposed to have a verifiable reason to believe a data center contributes to the enemy war effort, and reason to believe an attack will appreciably harm that effort. What “effectively contributes to military action” will, of course, be a source of disagreement.

Anthropic’s Claude large language model was reportedly used to accelerate American airstrikes against Iran; Claude, in turn, was built in part using 500,000 chips housed in an $11 billion Amazon data center in Indiana. If Claude is now arguably a weapon, is this Indiana site the data equivalent of a bomb factory? Kalpouzos, the Harvard Law visiting professor, told The Intercept it depends on the facts at the moment the bomb hits, not past usage. “If the facility is currently used in the training of the LLM that is used in the conduct of military operations — for example, by fine-tuning object classification or user-interaction features — then this could render it targetable,” he said.

In a recent article for Just Security, Klaudia Klonowska and Michael Schmitt said that the law calls for proportionality and restraint even against military targets. An attack against a data center that provided both military and civilian computing would need to be precise enough to destroy the former while minimizing harm to the latter, they argued. But international law may call for a degree of carefulness that militaries have little interest in. “If it were possible to attack only the area of the data center where servers hosting military data are located without destroying the entire center, the attacker would need to do so,” they wrote.

These requirements can be hard to observe in reality. The U.S. and Israel both tout the extreme precision of airstrikes that regularly slaughter civilians. And neither country, nor Iran, is a signatory to some of the relevant legal frameworks that make up the so-called “laws of armed conflict” in the first place.

Indiscriminate warfare practice by U.S. and Israel has also, ironically, been instrumental in reshaping how these laws are interpreted and effectively loosened. Throughout the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Israel’s military and the Pentagon both made clear it’s acceptable to destroy an apartment block or hospital if one first claims there is a genuine military target inside.

The second Trump administration in particular has been keen to more tightly integrate Silicon Valley into the global American killing apparatus, a plan to which the industry has shown itself to be largely amenable. Even after being thoroughly maligned by the administration following the collapse of its Pentagon deal over purported disagreements around safety guardrails, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei issued a public statement making clear he still wanted in on military spending: “Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences. We both are committed to advancing US national security and defending the American people, and agree on the urgency of applying AI across the government.” That attitude, now commonplace across the tech sector, will see the further commingling of consumer tech and warfare both in the abstract and under sprawling data center rooftops across the country.

“These [data centers] are further melding military and civilian infrastructure,” said Kalpouzos, “and together with the increasingly permissive rules of engagement adopted by the U.S. and Israel, are potentially drawing in larger sectors of the economy and society in what is targeted and destroyed.”

The post Data Centers Are Military Targets Now appeared first on The Intercept.

Many of the assembled companies are not household names in the United States, but several multinational firms — like Nokia, Dell, and Canon — were present at July 10 event.

The mission they had gathered to support was clear. Onstage, a brigadier general with the Israeli military gave a presentation that connected the Nakba, the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, the current war on Gaza, and more wars in the decades to come. His call to action splashed across the big screen: “Each generation and its own turn — this is our watch!”

One company, however, was conspicuously absent: Google.

For the last two years, Google had been a marquee sponsor of IT For IDF — the company is a natural partner for the event, given Google Cloud’s foundational role in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract aimed at modernizing cloud computing operations across Israeli government that it shares with Amazon.

This year was supposed to be no different and, until just days before the conference started, a Google Cloud logo was displayed alongside other sponsors on the IT For IDF website. Then Google abruptly vanished from the site without explanation.

When asked by a news outlet about the logo’s disappearance, the conference organizers claimed they weren’t aware Google had been on their website and suggested its inclusion was an error. “It’s possible that we used their logo by mistake but they are not a sponsor,” a spokesperson told 404 Media, “as far as I know.”

Google’s own corporate schedule, reviewed by The Intercept, seems to contradict this statement. The document includes upcoming Google events in Israel, and IT For IDF 2024 is on the list. On this internal schedule, Google is explicitly labeled as a co-sponsor of the conference in partnership with CloudEx, an Israeli cloud computing consultancy.

CloudEx CEO Ariel Munafo moonlights as an adviser to the IDF’s Center of Computers and Information Systems, known as Mamram, where he is helping other IDF units build out their cloud computing operations, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The apparent about-face on Google’s sponsorship of IT For IDF is just one recent example of companies seeking to distance themselves from Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip, which has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians. Though much business has gone on as usual amid the destruction, some companies have, at various times, and to various extents, shifted their business plans in Israel.

Google continues to work with the IDF, as it has for years on the Nimbus contract. The company’s odd vanishing act from a conference focused on a lucrative customer relationship stands as one of the most high-profile examples of what appears to be PR anxiety.

The tech giant has shown some squeamishness over some of Nimbus’s objectives in the past. The project has drawn international criticism and prompted a dissent campaign among Google employees, over 50 of whom were fired in April for protesting the contract. The Israeli government emphasizes Nimbus’s military dimensions, but Google has persistently tried to downplay or outright deny that its contract for Israel includes military work.

Official event photos posted to a public album and reviewed by The Intercept suggest that Google’s connection to the IDF networking event was literally whitewashed before it began. Official photos of a step-and-repeat backdrop for the conference contains all the event’s original sponsors’ logos, sans Google — and includes one square that appears to have been hastily painted over. Neither Google nor People and Computers, the conference’s organizer, responded when asked whose logo was underneath the paint.

The logo of Cisco, which claimed to 404 Media that it was “not a sponsor of this conference,” remained on display.

Even without a presence at the conference, Google loomed over an event dedicated to the prosecution of a war from which it has struggled to distance itself.

One of the event’s big draws was a presentation by Col. Racheli Dembinski of Mamram, on the Israeli military’s use of cloud platforms during the war in Gaza, during which she highlighted the role of Google Cloud, according to Israeli press.

A later talk presented by the “technology lead for Google Cloud Platform and CloudEx” noted that CloudEx’s partnership with Google entailed “working closely on several production cloud-hosted projects” with the Ministry of Defense.

Commit, another cloud computing reseller that was recently named “2024 Google Cloud Sales Partner of the Year for Israel” for its work implementing Project Nimbus, took to the stage to hawk its battlefield management software.

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Google’s insistence that Project Nimbus is peaceful in nature is at odds with the public record. Nimbus training materials published by The Intercept in 2022 cited the Ministry of Defense as a customer. Recent reporting by Wired detailed the project’s connection to the IDF since its inception. When it was announced in 2021, Project Nimbus was touted by the Israeli Finance Ministry as serving the “defense establishment.”

In May, journalist Jack Poulson reported on Google’s long-running collaboration with IDF information technology units like Mamram, noting an intensification in such work since October 7.

Despite all this, Google has routinely refused to discuss the Nimbus work or its humanitarian implications with the press. The company generally responding to inquiries about the project or criticism of its military nature with a boilerplate statement that Nimbus is “not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”

The Intercept revealed in May that Nimbus requires two prominent Israeli weapons manufacturers, Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, to use Google and Amazon cloud computing services in their work.

The post Google Planned to Sponsor IDF Conference That Now Denies Google Was Sponsor appeared first on The Intercept.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is planning to modernize older video surveillance towers in Arizona that provide the agency an unblinking view of the border. A key part of the effort is adding machine-learning capabilities to CBP cameras, allowing the agency to automatically detect humans and vehicles as they approach the border without continuous monitoring by humans. CBP is purchasing computer vision powers from two vendors, IBM and Equitus. Google, the documents show, will play a critical role stitching those services together by operating a central repository for video surveillance data.

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The work is focused on older towers purchased from Israeli military defense contractor Elbit. In all, the document notes “50 towers with up to 100 cameras across 6 sites in the Tucson Sector” will be upgraded with machine learning capabilities.

IBM will provide its Maximo Visual Inspection software, a tool the company generally markets for industrial quality control inspections — not tracking humans. Equitus is offering its Video Sentinel, a more traditional video surveillance analytics program explicitly marketed for border surveillance that, according to a promotional YouTube video, recently taken offline, featuring a company executive, can detect “people walking caravan style … some of them are carrying backpacks and being identified as mules.”

“Within 60 days from the start of the project, real life video from the southern border is available to train and create AI/ML models to be used by the Equitus Video Sentinel.”

Tying together these machine learning surveillance tools is Google, which the document reveals is supplying CBP with a cloud computing platform known as MAGE: the ModulAr Google Cloud Platform Environment. Based on the document, Google is providing a hub for video surveillance data and will directly host the Equitus AI analysis tool. It appears every camera in CBP’s Tucson Sector will pipe data into Google servers: “This project will focus initially on 100 simultaneous video streams from the data source for processing,” the document reads, and “the resulting metadata and keyframes will be sent to CBP’s Google Cloud.”

The diagram also notes that one of Google’s chief rivals, Amazon Web Services, provides CBP with unspecified cloud computing services.

During President Trump’s first term, border surveillance and immigration enforcement work carried a stigma in the tech sector it has in part shed today.

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In 2020, The Intercept revealed a document produced by the CBP Innovation Team, known as INVNT, that stated Google Cloud services would be used in conjunction with AI-augmented surveillance towers manufactured by defense contractor Anduril: “Google Cloud Platform (GCP) will be utilized for doing innovation projects for C1’s INVNT team like next generation IoT, NLP (Natural Language Processing), Language Translation and Andril [sic] image camera and any other future looking project for CBP. The GCP has unique product features which will help to execute on the mission needs.” (A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that “Andril” was a misspelling of Anduril.)

After the Anduril work came to light, Google’s cloud computing chief Thomas quickly attempted damage control, directly contradicting the Department of Homeland Security and telling concerned employees that the company was not involved in immigration enforcement on the Mexican border, CNBC reported at the time. “We have spoken directly with Customs and Border Patrol and they have confirmed that they are not testing our products for those purposes,” Kurian added.

If this was true then, it’s certainly not now; references to Google services appear repeatedly throughout the tower modernization project document. A technical diagram showing how video data flows between various CBP servers shows Google’s MAGE literally in the middle.

Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment about its use of Google Cloud.

Google did not respond to specific questions about the project, nor address Kurian’s prior denial.

In a statement provided to The Intercept, Google Public Sector executive Jim Kelly attempted to distance the company slightly from the border surveillance work. “CBP has been public about how it has a multicloud strategy and has used Google Cloud for work like translation,” Kelly wrote. “In this case, Google Cloud is not on the contract. That said, customers or partners can purchase Google Cloud’s off-the-shelf compute, storage, and networking products for their own use, much like they might use a mobile network or run their own computer hardware.”

Kelly’s statement indicates the government is acquiring Google Cloud services through a reseller, as is common in federal procurement. But Kelly’s comparison of Google Cloud technology to buying off-the-shelf computer hardware is misleading. Even if it’s supplied through a subcontractor or reseller, CBP’s use of Google’s service still requires a constant and ongoing connection to the company’s cloud infrastructure. Were Google still serious about “not working on any projects associated with immigration enforcement at the southern border,” as Kurian claimed in 2020, it would be trivial to prevent CBP from using Google Cloud.

Industry advocates and immigration hard-liners have long touted the “virtual wall” initiative, which substitutes iron and concrete barriers and Border Patrol agents for a 2,000 mile array of sensors, cameras, and computers. But critics say advanced technology is no substitute for policy reforms.

“On top of the wasted tax dollars, border communities end up paying the price with their privacy, as demonstrated by the recent findings by the Government Accountability Office that CBP had failed to implement six out of six key privacy policy requirements,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept, referring to the tower program’s dismal privacy protections record. “For more than two decades, surveillance towers at the border have proven to be a boondoggle, and adding AI isn’t going to make it any less of a boondoggle — it will just be an AI-powered boondoggle.”

The post Google Is Helping the Trump Administration Deploy AI Along the Mexican Border appeared first on The Intercept.

The student visa form requires applicants to provide the usernames for “each social media platform you have used within the last five years” from a list of 20 specified services, some of them obsolete. This means applicants could find themselves in the awkward position of being required to make public their profiles on the short-form video service Vine, which closed in 2017; the short-lived social media platform Google+, which shut down in 2019; or the dating site Twoo, which ceased operations in 2021.

Most U.S. visa applicants have been required to disclose their profile names on social media accounts since 2019. The Trump administration rolled out new requirements for those seeking student visas under an “expanded screening and vetting” process. The expanded scrutiny applies to F (academic students), M (vocational students), and J (exchange visitor) visa applicants.

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According to a State Department cable, obtained by the Free Press and Politico, the provided social media accounts will subsequently be checked for “any indications of hostility towards the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States.”

The DS-160: Online Nonimmigrant Visa Application form doesn’t appear to have been updated to reflect State’s recent guidance, as it doesn’t presently make any mention of the accounts needing to be made public.

“Government social media surveillance invades privacy and chills freedom of speech, and it is prone to errors and misinterpretation without ever having been proven effective at assessing security threats,” warned Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She said that by requiring social media accounts be made public, “the U.S. government is endorsing the violation of a fundamental principle of privacy hygiene.”

The online visa application lists a dropdown menu with 20 social media accounts to choose from.

• Ask.fm
• Douban
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Google+
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Myspace
• Pinterest
• Qzone (QQ)
• Reddit
• Sina Weibo
• Tencent Weibo
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Twoo
• Vine
• VKontakte (VK)
• Youku
• YouTube

The list is mishmash of popular social media providers, regional services (predominantly those used in China), and a bevy of outdated and defunct platforms, such as Myspace, which has been a digital ghost town for years.

A quarter of the sites listed no longer exist at all, with some already being defunct when the visa application form first started requiring the disclosure of social media usernames in 2019. That includes Ask.fm, a Latvian service where users could ask questions that closed last year, and Tencent Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service that shut down in 2020.

Among the included services are Douban, Qzone, Sina Weibo, and Youku — all active Chinese social network sites. Despite listing five different Chinese social media sites, the form leaves off Tencent’s WeChat, China’s most popular social media app.

VKontakte is the only Russian social media service appearing on the list. No other popular regional social media sites are included.

Other modern social media platforms, such as TikTok or Trump’s own Truth Social, are missing from the list as well, though the visa form does allow applicants to specify additional accounts.

Asked for comment on how this list of social media platforms was compiled, or whether there are plans to update the online form, a State Department spokesperson provided a statement summarizing the new guidance and said that “the Trump Administration is focused on protecting our nation and our citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process.”

Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, described the policy as “antithetical to everything our First Amendment should protect,” pointing out that “not only will these shortsighted efforts fail to protect the public, they’ll put countless students at risk. Now those who wanted to study in the U.S. to flee authoritarian governments abroad will have to make their social media public to those same governments to study here.”

The post Want a Student Visa? The U.S. Government Needs Your Vine Account. appeared first on The Intercept.

YouTube surreptitiously deleted all these videos in early October by wiping the accounts that posted them from its website, along with their channels’ archives. The accounts belonged to three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Palestinian groups’ YouTube channels hosted hours of footage documenting and highlighting alleged Israeli government violations of international law in both Gaza and the West Bank, including the killing of Palestinian civilians.

“I’m pretty shocked that YouTube is showing such a little backbone,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. “It’s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions. Succumbing to this arbitrary designation of these Palestinian organizations, to now censor them, is disappointing and pretty surprising.”

After the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants and charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Secretary Yoav Gallant with war crimes in Gaza, the Trump administration escalated its defense of Israel’s actions by sanctioning ICC officials and targeting people and organizations that work with the court.

“YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes.”

“It is outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view,” said Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Congress did not intend to allow the president to cut off the flow of information to the American public and the world — instead, information, including documents and videos, are specifically exempted under the statute that the president cited as his authority for issuing the ICC sanctions.”

“Alarming Setback”

YouTube, which is owned by Google, confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the groups’ accounts as a direct result of State Department sanctions against the group after a review. The Trump administration leveled the sanctions against the organizations in September over their work with the International Criminal Court in cases charging Israeli officials of war crimes.

“Google is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said in a statement.

According to Google’s Sanctions Compliance publisher policy, “Google publisher products are not eligible for any entities or individuals that are restricted under applicable trade sanctions and export compliance laws.”

Al Mezan, a human rights organization in Gaza, told The Intercept that its YouTube channel was abruptly terminated this year on October 7 without prior notification.

“Terminating the channel deprives us from reaching what we aspire to convey our message to, and fulfill our mission,” a spokesperson for the group said, “and prevents us from achieving our goals and limits our ability to reach the audience we aspire to share our message with.”

The West Bank-based Al-Haq’s channel was deleted on October 3, a spokesperson for the group said, with a message from YouTube that its “content violates our guidelines.”

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“YouTube’s removal of a human rights organisation’s platform, carried out without prior warning, represents a serious failure of principle and an alarming setback for human rights and freedom of expression,” the Al-Haq spokesperson said in a statement. “The U.S. Sanctions are being used to cripple accountability work on Palestine and silence Palestinian voices and victims, and this has a ripple effect on such platforms also acting under such measures to further silence Palestinian voices.”

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which the U.N. describes as the oldest human rights organization in Gaza, said in a statement that YouTube’s move “protects perpetrators from accountability.”

“YouTube’s decision to close PCHR’s account is basically one of many consequences that we as an organisation have faced since the decision of the US government to sanction our organisations for our legitimate work,” said Basel al-Sourani, an international advocacy officer and legal advisor for the group. “YouTube said that we were not following their policy on Community Guidelines, when all our work was basically presenting factual and evidence-based reporting on the crimes committed against the Palestinian people especially since the start of the ongoing genocide on 7 October.”

“By doing this, YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims,” al-Sourani added.

Looking Outside the U.S.

The three human rights groups’ account terminations cumulatively amount to the erasure of more than 700 videos, according to an Intercept tally.

The deleted videos range in scope from investigations, such as an analysis of the Israeli killing of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, to testimonies of Palestinians tortured by Israeli forces and documentaries like “The Beach,” about children playing on a beach who were killed by an Israeli strike.

Some videos are still available through copies saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine or on alternate platforms, such as Facebook and Vimeo. The wiping only affected the group’s official channels; videos which were produced by the nonprofits but hosted on alternate YouTube channels remain active. No cumulative index of videos deleted by YouTube is available, however, and many appear to not be available elsewhere online.

Videos posted elsewhere online, the groups fear, could soon be targeted for deletion because many of the platforms hosting them are also U.S.-based services. The ICC itself began exploring using service providers outside the U.S.

Al-Haq said it would also be looking for alternatives outside of U.S. companies to host their work.

YouTube isn’t the only U.S. tech company blocking Palestinian rights groups from using its services. The Al-Haq spokesperson said Mailchimp, the mailing list service, also deleted the group’s account in September. (Mailchimp and its parent company, Intuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Caving to Trump’s Demand

Both the U.S. and Israeli governments have long shielded themselves from the ICC and accountability for their alleged war crimes. Neither country is party to the Rome Statute, the international treaty that established the court.

In November 2024, the ICC prosecutors issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, charging the leaders with intentionally starving civilians by blocking aid from entering into Gaza. Both the Biden and Trump administrations rejected the legitimacy of the warrants.

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Since his reelection, Trump has taken a more aggressive posture against accountability for Israel. In the early days of his second term, Trump renewed sanctions against the ICC and issued new, more severe measures against court officials and anyone accused of aiding their efforts. In September, in a new order, he specifically sanctioned the three Palestinian groups.

The U.S. moves followed Israel’s own designation of Al-Haq as a “terrorist organization” in 2021 and an online smear campaign by pro-Israeli activists attempting to link Palestinian Centre for Human Rights with militant groups.

The sanctions freeze the organizations’ assets in the U.S. and bar sanctioned individuals from traveling to the country. Federal judges have already issued preliminary injunctions in two cases in favor of plaintiffs who argued the sanctions had violated their First Amendment rights.

“The Trump administration is focused on contributing to the censorship of information about Israeli atrocities in Palestine and the sanctions against these organizations is very deliberately designed to make association with these organizations frightening to Americans who will be concerned about material support laws,” said Whitson, of DAWN, which joined a coalition of groups in September to demand the Trump administration drop its sanctions.

Like many tech firms, YouTube has shown a ready willingness to comply with demands from both the Trump administration and Israel. YouTube coordinated with a campaign organized by Israeli tech workers to remove social media content deemed critical of Israel. At home, Google, YouTube’s parent company, secretly handed over personal Gmail account information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an effort to detain a pro-Palestinian student organizer.

Even before Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, YouTube had been accused of unevenly applying its community guidelines to censor Palestinian voices while withholding similar scrutiny from pro-Israeli content. Such trends continued during the war, according to a Wired report.

Earlier this year, YouTube shut down the official account of the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. The move came after pressure from UK Lawyers for Israel, which wrote to YouTube to point out that the organization had been sanctioned by the State Department.

Whitson warned that YouTube’s capitulation could set a precedent, pushing other tech companies to bend to censorship.

“They are basically allowing the Trump administration to dictate what information they share with the global audience,” she said. “It’s not going to end with Palestine.”

The post YouTube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations appeared first on The Intercept.

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The $1.2 billion joint contract split between Google and Amazon provides the Israeli government, including its military, with access to state-of-the-art cloud computing and artificial intelligence tools. This has made Project Nimbus a consistent source of protest inside and outside Google, even before Israel’s war on Gaza.

While Amazon has largely remained silent in the face of employee activism and outside scrutiny, Google routinely downplays or denies the military reach of Project Nimbus — despite the Israeli Finance Ministry’s 2021 announcement that the deal would service the country’s “defense establishment.”

Google has also sought to reassure those concerned by its relationship with a government whose leadership is being investigated by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity by claiming Nimbus is constrained by the company’s general rules and regulations.

“We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy,” a Google spokesperson told Wired in July and repeated verbatim to Time magazine in August, linking both times to the public-facing copies of each document.

Google Cloud’s terms of service prohibit, among other things, uses that “violate, or encourage the violation of, the legal rights of others,” any “invasive” purpose, or anything “that can cause death, serious harm, or injury to individuals or groups of individuals.”

But the premise that Google policy dictates how Nimbus is used is called into question by a previously undisclosed email from a company lawyer. On December 10, 2020, before the tech giant won the contract, Google lawyer Edward du Boulay wrote to company executives with exciting news: “Google Cloud has been preparing to submit a bid for Project Nimbus (internal code ‘Selenite’), a competitive tender to provide cloud to the Israeli government. The business believes this is currently the largest government procurement of public cloud globally.”

Du Boulay noted that “If Google wins the competition, we will need to accept a non negotiable contract on terms favourable to the government,” and “Given the value and strategic nature of this project, it carries potential risks and rewards which are significant if we win.” Among Du Boulay’s concerns is the fact that the Israeli “government has unilateral right to impose contract changes,” the lawyer warned. He cautioned further that should it win the contract, Google would retain “almost no ability to sue [Israel] for damages” stemming from “permitted uses … breaches.” The email does not explain what exactly would prevent Google from seeking legal recourse should the Israeli state commit such a breach.

Google’s suggestion of authority over the contract are further undermined by Israeli governmental contract documents reviewed by The Intercept. The documents state that the company’s standard terms of service don’t apply — rather, an “adjusted” terms of service document is in effect.

“The tenderer [Israel] has adjusted the winning suppliers’ [Google and Amazon] service agreement for each of the services supplied within the framework of this contract,” according to a 63-page overview of the Nimbus contract published to the Israeli government’s public contracting portal. “The Adjusted Terms of Service are the only terms that shall apply to the cloud services consumed upon the winning bidders’ cloud infrastructure.”

Google spokesperson Atle Erlingsson told The Intercept, “We’ve been very clear about the Nimbus contract, what it’s directed to, and the Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy that govern it. Nothing has changed.” Erlingsson declined to respond to the contract language about a separate, adjusted terms of service policy.

A spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Finance declined to share the Adjusted Terms of Service because they are “confidential.”

The language about “Adjusted Terms of Service” appears to contradict not only Google’s public claims about the contract, but also how it has represented Nimbus to its own staff. During an October 30 employee Q&A session, Google president of global affairs Kent Walker was asked how the company is ensuring its Nimbus work is consistent with its “AI Principles” document, which forbids uses “that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” including surveillance, weapons, or anything “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

According to a transcript of the exchange shared with The Intercept, Walker said that Nimbus is subject to Google’s own terms: “When it comes to the Nimbus contract, in particular, this is a contract that is designed and directed at our public cloud work, not at specific military classified sensitive information. It’s not designed for that. And everything that’s on our Cloud network, our public Cloud, is subject to our Acceptable Use Policy and our Terms of Service. So, you know, I can assure you that we take all this seriously.”

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The Israeli contract document also seems to contradict another common defense of the contract from Google, echoed by Walker, that Nimbus is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” According to the Israeli contract document, however, the government “may make any use of any service included in the supplier’s catalog of services.”

A separate document pertaining to Nimbus’s “Digital Marketplace,” a suite of third-party software hosted by Google and made available to Nimbus users in the Israeli government, offers another apparent contradiction: “There will be no restrictions on the part of the Provider as to the type of system and information that the Clients may migrate to the service, including vital systems of high sensitivity level.” This second document stipulates that the Israeli government “may make any use of the service within the performance of its function and purpose as a public service for the State of Israel and its citizens,” and that “there will be no restriction of any kind, including ‘permitted use’ rules for a service being offered in the governmental digital marketplace.”

Should Google not have any meaningful control over Nimbus, the company could face consequences beyond public relations or employee dissent. In October, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory placed a public call for information pertaining to private sector involvement in “the commission of international crimes connected to Israel’s unlawful occupation, racial segregation and apartheid regime,” according to a press release.

The Abolitionist Law Center, a Pennsylvania-based public interest firm, told The Intercept it is filing a submission detailing how “Google and Amazon Web Services’ provision of advanced technological services to the Israeli government through Project Nimbus violates — by its very nature — each companies’ purported commitments to human rights due diligence obligations,” according to staff attorney Sadaf Doost. “This is most evidently demonstrated by how the Project Nimbus contract itself includes a clause granting authority to Israeli officials to modify the companies’ standard terms of use agreements in ways that have not been made clear to the public.”

Update: December 10, 2024
The article was updated with comment received after publication from the Israeli Ministry of Finance.

The post Documents Contradict Google’s Claims About Its Project Nimbus Contract With Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

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Rita Murad, a 21-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel and student at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, was arrested by Israeli authorities in November 2023 after sharing three Instagram stories on the morning of October 7. The images included a picture of a bulldozer breaking through the border fence in Gaza and a quote: “Do you support decolonization as an abstract academic theory? Or as a tangible event?” She was suspended from university and faced up to five years in prison.

In recent years, Israeli security officials have boasted of a “ChatGPT-like” arsenal used to monitor social media users for supporting or inciting terrorism. It was released in full force after Hamas’s bloody attack on October 7. Right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to arrest hundreds of Palestinians within Israel and east Jerusalem for social media-related offenses. Many had engaged in relatively low-level political speech, like posting verses from the Quran on WhatsApp or sharing images from Gaza on their Instagram stories.

When the New York Times covered Murad’s saga last year, the journalist Jesse Baron wrote that, in the U.S., “There is certainly no way to charge people with a crime for their reaction to a terrorist attack. In Israel, the situation is completely different.”

Soon, that may no longer be the case.

Hundreds of students with various legal statuses have been threatened with deportation on similar grounds in the U.S. this year. Recent high-profile cases have targeted those associated with student-led dissent against the Israeli military’s policies in Gaza. There is Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, taken from his Columbia University residence and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. There is Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts disappeared from the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, by plainclothes officers allegedly for co-authoring an op-ed calling on university administrators to heed student protesters’ demands. And there is Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia philosophy student arrested by ICE agents outside the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office where he was scheduled for his naturalization interview.

In some instances, the State Department has relied on informants, blacklists, and technology as simple as a screenshot. But the U.S. is in the process of activating a suite of algorithmic surveillance tools Israeli authorities have also used to monitor and criminalize online speech.

In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department was launching an AI-powered “Catch and Revoke” initiative to accelerate the cancellation of student visas. Algorithms would collect data from social media profiles, news outlets, and doxing sites to enforce the January 20 executive order targeting foreign nationals who threaten to “overthrow or replace the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands.” The arsenal was built in concert with American tech companies over the past two decades and already deployed, in part, within the U.S. immigration system.

Rubio’s “Catch and Revoke” initiative emerges from long-standing collaborations between tech companies and increasingly right-wing governments eager for their wares. The AI industry’s business model hinges on unfettered access to troves of data, which makes less-then-democratic contexts, where state surveillance is unconstrained by judicial, legislative, or public oversight, particularly lucrative proving grounds for new products. The effects of these technologies have been most punitive on the borders of the U.S. or the European Union, like migrant detention centers in Texas or Greece. But now the inevitable is happening: They are becoming popular domestic policing tools.

Israel was one early test site. As Israeli authorities expanded their surveillance powers to clamp down on rising rates of Palestinian terrorism in the early 2010s, U.S. technology firms flocked to the region. In exchange for first digital and then automated surveillance systems, Israel’s security apparatus offered CEOs troves of the information economy’s most prized commodity: data. IBM and Microsoft provided software used to monitor West Bank border crossings. Palantir offered predictive policing algorithms to Israeli security forces. Amazon and Google would sign over cloud computing infrastructure and AI systems. The result was a surveillance and policing dragnet that could entangle innocent people alongside those who posed credible security threats. Increasingly, right-wing ruling coalitions allowed it to operate with less and less restraint.

With time and in partnership with many of the same companies, the U.S. security state built its own surveillance capacities to scale.

Not long ago, Silicon Valley preached a mantra of globalization and integration. It was antithetical to the far-right’s nationalistic agenda, but it was good for business in an economy that hinged on the skilled and unskilled labor of foreigners. So when Trump signed an executive order banning immigration from five Muslim countries and subjecting those approved for visas to extra screening in January 2017, tech executives and their employees dissented.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, an immigrant from the Soviet Union, joined demonstrations at the San Francisco airport to protest Trump’s travel ban. Mark Zuckerberg cited his grandparents, Jewish refugees from Poland, as grounds for his opposition to the policy. Sam Altman also called on industry leaders to take a stand. “The precedent of invalidating already-issued visas and green cards should be extremely troubling for immigrants of any country,” he wrote on his personal blog. “We must object, or our inaction will send a message that the administration can continue to take away our rights.”

Many tech workers spent the first Trump presidency protesting these more sinister entailments of a data-driven economy. Over the following year, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon employees would stage walkouts and circulate petitions demanding an end to contracts with the national security state. The pressure yielded image restoration campaigns. Google dropped a bid for a $10 million Defense Department contract. Microsoft promised their software and services would not be used to separate families at the border.

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But the so-called tech resistance belied an inconvenient truth. Silicon Valley firms supplied the software and computing infrastructure that enabled Trump’s policies. Companies like Babel and Palantir entered into contracts with ICE in 2015, becoming the bread and butter of ICE’s surveillance capacities by mining personal data from thousands of sources for government authorities, converting it into searchable databases, and mapping connections between individuals and organizations. By 2017, conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were becoming essential too, signing over the cloud services to host mounds of citizens’ and residents’ personal information.

Even as some firms pledged to steer clear of contracts with the U.S. security state, they continued working abroad, and especially in Israel and Palestine. Investigative reporting over the last year has brought more recent exchanges to light. Deals between U.S. companies and the Israeli military ramped up after October 7, according to leaked documents from Google and Microsoft. Intelligence agencies relied on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to host surveillance data and used Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to cull through and operationalize much of it, often playing direct roles in operations — from arrest raids to airstrikes — across the region.

These contracts gave U.S. technology conglomerates the chance to refine military and homeland security systems abroad until Trump’s reelection signaled they could do so with little pushback at home. OpenAI changed its terms of use last year to allow militaries and security forces to deploy their systems for “national security purposes.” Google did the same this February, removing language saying it wouldn’t use its AI for weapons and surveillance from its “public ethos policy.” Meta also announced U.S. contractors could use its AI models for “national security” purposes.

Technology firms are committed to churning out high-risk products at a rapid pace. Which is why privacy experts say their products can turbocharge the U.S. surveillance state at a time when constitutional protections are eroding.

“It’s going to give the government the impression that certain forms of surveillance are now worth deploying when before they would have been too resource intensive,” Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, offered over the phone last week. “Now that you have large language models, you know, the government may say why not store thousands of hours of conversations just to run an AI tool through them and decide who you don’t want in your country.” 

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The parts are all in place. According to recent reports, Palantir is building ICE an “immigrationOS” that can generate reports on immigrants and visa holders — including what they look like, where they live, and where they travel — and monitor their location in real time. ICE will use the database combined with a trove of other AI tools to surveil immigrants’ social media accounts, and to track down and detain “antisemites” and “terrorists,” according to a recent announcement by the State Department. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a speech at the 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix earlier this month, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

 

It is important to remember that many of the propriety technologies private companies are offering the U.S. surveillance state are flawed. Content moderation algorithms deployed by Meta often flag innocuous content as incendiary, especially Arabic language posts. OpenAI’s large language model are notorious for generating hallucinatory statements and mistranslating phrases from foreign languages into English. Stories of error abound in recent raids and arrests, from ICE officials mistaking Mahmoud Khalil for a student visa holder to citizens, lawful residents, and tourists with no criminal record being rounded up and deported.

But where AI falters technically, it delivers ideologically. We see this in Israel and Palestine, as well as other contexts marked by relatively unchecked government surveillance. The algorithms embraced by Israel’s security forces remain rudimentary. But officials have used them to justify increasingly draconian policies. The Haifa-based human rights organization Adalah says there are hundreds of Palestinians with no criminal record or affiliation with militant groups held behind bars because right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to search their phones and social media pages and label what they said, shared, or liked online as “incitement to terrorism” or “support of terrorism.”

Now we hear similar stories in American cities, where First Amendment protections and due process are disintegrating. The effects were nicely distilled by Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian Ph.D. student at Columbia who self-deported after ICE officials showed up at her door and cancelled her legal status. From refuge in Canada, she told the New York Times she was fearful of the U.S. expanded algorithmic arsenal. “I’m fearful that even the most low-level political speech or just doing what we all do — like shout into the abyss that is social media — can turn into this dystopian nightmare,” Srinivasan said, “where somebody is calling you a terrorist sympathizer and making you, literally, fear for your life and your safety.”

It is frightening to think that all this happened in Trump’s first 100 days in office. But corporate CEOs have been working with militaries and security agencies to sediment this status quo for years now. The visible human cost of these exchanges may spawn the opposition needed to head off more repression. But for now, the groundwork is laid for the U.S. surveillance state to finally operate at scale.

The post U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It’s Coming Home. appeared first on The Intercept.

Days before the federal government falsely claimed cellphone-brandishing nurse Alex Pretti was a terrorist plotting a “massacre,” a jury in Chicago acquitted Juan Espinoza Martinez on bogus charges of a murder-for-hire plot against then-Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino. A recently unsealed court transcript shows the government used that case to bolster its claims about the dangers of “doxing” Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. That pretext was used to convince a judge to obscure an ICE agent’s face during a public court proceeding when his name, face, employment, and location were publicly listed on his LinkedIn page.  

As with its baseless claims about Pretti, the government presented no evidence supporting its proclamations that Martinez, a union carpenter, was a higher-up in the Latin Kings gang with the ability or intent to put out hits on Bovino or other immigration agents. The case against him hinged on ambiguous Snapchat messages that Martinez’s attorney called “neighborhood gossip.” But the Department of Homeland Security brought its allegations to the public long before it could be tested in court, repeating claims of bounties up to $50,000. 

The transcript from a federal court in Chicago, which was recently released pursuant to a motion filed by law firm Mandell PC on behalf of local media outlets, shows how far the hysteria has gone. During an October 20, 2025, hearing in a case challenging immigration enforcement tactics, government lawyers asked for a private conference with Judge Sara Ellis to request the courtroom sketch artist not draw ICE Deputy Field Office Director Shawn Byers.

Government attorneys claimed that, in light of the alleged “bounties” on the heads of ICE agents, Byers had taken extensive precautions to disconnect his identity from his image online to protect himself. When the judge asked for details on the bounties, Department of Justice attorney Samuel Holt responded, “I don’t have all the details. My understanding is that I — I think it was a gang bounty.”

The judge cleared the courtroom and called Byers in to provide the details about the “threat.” Byers first claimed there was a $50,000 “bounty issued by the cartels on me,” along with $10,000 “for all my family members.” He also said the “credible threat” was out against “all senior ICE officials here in Chicago,” where Byers said he was the most senior ICE agent on the ground. Asked when he learned about the bounty, Byer said “It’s been about a week or so I believe.” Martinez’s arrest was announced two weeks earlier, on October 6; no other bounties were publicly reported in the interim. When the judge asked whether these threats were “directed specifically” at him, Byers seemed to walk his claims back, replying, “Well, all senior ICE officials. So it’s not just me.”

Byers also said he’d taken action to “limit social media exposure” and “reduce the footprint” to avoid his face being connected with his name and that even his appearance in court required “additional precautions.”

“You know, my name is out there. I’ve been doxed as — as recently as over the weekend,” Byers told the judge, according to the court transcript. “So my name is out there, but my name has not been connected to my face yet, so that’s what I’m trying to prevent from happening.”

Despite objections from opposing counsel that court proceedings (and courtroom sketches) should be public, the judge ordered the sketch artist to blur Byers’s facial features, concealing his identity. Ellis’s compromise, while likely intended as a good-faith effort to balance safety and transparency, nonetheless validated the notion that immigration agents operate under extreme risk, justifying extraordinary protective measures by our legal system. It also effectively brought the masks immigration agents wear on the street into the courtroom.

Then, while Byers and other witnesses testified, someone apparently Googled his name and informed the judge that a simple search turned up his LinkedIn profile, complete with his photo, his exact job title, and his location in Chicago. 

The judge called the parties back into closed session (it’s unclear why, given that the false reason for the earlier private sidebar had been exposed). 

“I got to say, you know, I feel slightly foolish in trying to protect Mr. Byers when, you know, a simple Google search pulls up his name and his picture,” she said, according to the transcript. She also encouraged the attorney to advise the ICE deputy director that his name and photograph were readily available online. “If I could find his picture in two seconds with his name, it just looks a little silly to be asking the courtroom sketch artist to blur his features.” Being recognized is “the cost of being a public servant,” she continued. 

The judge also said moving forward, she would “just be more hesitant to kind of obscure somebody’s identity,” but did not say she’d be entering any actual sanctions for the half-baked rationale used to convince her to censor the public record. 

After some back and forth with the DOJ attorneys about whether Byers’s LinkedIn profile contained his actual picture, Ellis confirmed the profile for “Shawn B.” did when viewed by someone logged into LinkedIn. (A LinkedIn search for “Shawn Byers ICE” brings up just one profile for a Shawn B., who is listed as currently working as Deputy Field Office Director for ICE in Chicago. It also notes he is a 22-year veteran of the department and contains reposts about ICE removals in Chicago and a hiring notice for GEO Group, the for-profit prison conglomerate contracted with ICE, but no longer contains any profile picture.)

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Since Byers’s manufactured emergency obviously wasn’t based on real concerns for his safety, what was the point of the whole sideshow? It was likely intended to feed the narrative that immigration agents face such grave threats that identifying them — in addition to filming their operations, following them to do so, tracking and communicating about their locations and other clearly constitutionally protected conduct — needs to be restrained. It’s the same fiction that primes segments of the American public to be receptive to claims that people like Pretti and Renee Good were threatening officers’ lives to justify their killings.

In January, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem scolded CBS News’ “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan for naming Jonathan Ross, the immigration agent who shot and killed Good in Minneapolis. She accused Brennan of “continu[ing] to dox law enforcement,” despite acknowledging that Ross’s name was already very public, citing unspecified attacks against his family. It’s far from the first time Noem and others have claimed that naming or videotaping law enforcement officers is improper, illegal, or even intended to foment violence.

These efforts to chill the work of reporters and ICE watchers have spread beyond immigration enforcement, as we saw from last month’s subpoena by the House Oversight Committee of journalist Seth Harp, which was accompanied by a criminal referral to the Department of Justice by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican from Florida. Harp was also accused of “doxing” for naming a Delta Force commander involved in the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, an allegation backed up by unsubstantiated claims that the commander’s life was at risk.

The notion that naming public officials at the center of major news stories, who very often conceal their identities while carrying out unprecedented law enforcement operations on the streets of our cities, or that simply drawing their faces for the court record is “doxing” or otherwise improper, is a complete Trump administration fabrication. Still, the government is repeating it often enough that it’s warping the public’s perception of journalism. The Byers ordeal is an unusually clear example of the current playbook being used to shield administration officials and their foot soldiers from accountability under the guise of protecting public officials’ safety. 

The next time this happens in court, the judge needs to demand specifics, with evidence, about whatever nebulous alleged plots or threats the government is pushing to justify secrecy. With comprehensive studies demonstrating their constant misrepresentations, nothing government lawyers say can be taken at face value. And when it happens outside the courthouse, the media needs to be similarly skeptical and not take the “threats” narrative at face value from an administration with a long, proven track record of misleading the public for its own political ends. 

Judges also need to impose significant sanctions on lawyers and witnesses who mislead them, make them pawns in the administration’s anti-transparency objectives, and waste their time. Gently reprimanding them in private doesn’t cut it, especially when these false, alarmist narratives used in court are then being used to justify ICE killings to the public.

The post Judge Censored an ICE Agent’s Face Over “Threats.” His Info Was a Google Search Away. appeared first on The Intercept.

The event, according to a listing posted on the event management app Luma, was pitched at “founders, investors and innovators” looking to network and learn more about the defense tech space. It was co-sponsored by Google; Fusion Venture Capital; Genesis, a startup accelerator; and the Israeli military’s research and development arm, known as the Directorate of Defense Research and Development (DDR&D, or Ma’fat). 

When The Intercept contacted Google, the event page disappeared.

Google was not only listed as the physical host of the event and one of its sponsors, but the event listing also included a notice that attendees “approve of sharing [their] details with the organizers (Fusion & Google)” as part of signing up.

When The Intercept contacted Google and the other companies and venture capital firms on the event page, the event page disappeared. Google spokesperson Andréa Willis told The Intercept in an email, “Google is not associated with this event.” Willis did not respond when asked how this could be possible if Google is hosting and co-sponsoring the event, or why the event page went down. None of the other companies or venture capital firms on the event page responded to requests for comment.

After months of sustained protests against Google’s relationship with Israel, the company appears to be trying to muddy that relationship, at least in the public eye, while continuing its collaboration with the Israeli military.

In July, Google’s name was mysteriously removed from the website of a separate conference, IT for IDF, meant to highlight tech companies working with the Israel Defense Forces, which identified it as a co-sponsor. Conference organizers claimed Google’s inclusion was a mistake, but internal documents from Google name the company as an event co-sponsor. 

According to the event listing, November’s Israeli Defense Tech Conference would take place at the Tel Aviv campus of Google for Startups, which offers resources for companies that work or partner with Google. Its lead speaker is listed as Nir Weingold, head of planning, economics, and IT for DDR&D, who was scheduled to talk about “trends in Israeli defense tech.” Weingold was followed by a panel of venture capitalists talking about investing in Israeli military startups.

The event page also had a panel with executives of companies “leading Israeli defense tech.” One of these companies was SpearUAV, a company whose surveillance and explosive drones are used by the Israeli military. Another was Spectralx (formerly Polaris), a company that makes sensors, drones, and other military-grade technology. According to its website, it’s being used by the DDR&D and leading Israeli weapon manufacturer Elbit Systems, as well as the U.S. Navy and U.S. Special Operations Command. The third company, AIR, makes consumer-grade, single-passenger electric planes. To date, the company has not publicly disclosed a relationship with the Israeli military.

The conference, if it takes place, would also feature several venture capital firms that are funding companies that are publicly working with the U.S. military, but have not yet disclosed any contracts with Israeli forces. One of these firms is Tal Ventures, which funds Magnus Metal, winner of a U.S. Defense Department competition. Tal Ventures also funds Scribe, which got a contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 

Another company that was scheduled to be at the conference is Intel Capital, the investment wing of the major chip manufacturer. The firm funds Syntiant Corp., which recently secured a contract with the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit for its targeting systems for unmanned vehicles. The firm has also published two pieces on its company blog about the importance of working with military and defense agencies.

Venture capital firm 10D was also scheduled to be at the conference. It funds Exodigo, an underground mapping company that has not disclosed any military contracts, but has spoken publicly about the importance of working with Israel’s military. Similarly, venture capital firm TLV Partners was scheduled to be at the conference and has written on its company blog about the importance of private sector collaboration with the Israeli military.

For the past year, Google-sponsored conferences have been the target of people protesting Project Nimbus, the $1.2 billion contract it shares with Amazon that involves providing cloud services and other tools to the Israeli government. 

Shortly after news about Project Nimbus became public in 2021, hundreds of Google and Amazon workers signed and published an open letter condemning it, and the activist group No Tech for Apartheid formed. The group, made up of tech workers and organizers with MPower Change and Jewish Voice for Peace, has been protesting Project Nimbus since 2022.

For years, Google has insisted that Project Nimbus is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” However, reporting has since revealed an extensive relationship between Project Nimbus and the IDF, accompanied by public paper trails.

In March, Google Cloud engineer Eddie Hatfield protested Project Nimbus by interrupting the Google Israel managing director at Mind the Tech, an Israeli tech industry conference in New York that is co-sponsored by Google. Hatfield was fired days later. 

Weeks later, Google employees staged sit-ins protesting Project Nimbus at company offices in Sunnyvale, California, and New York, with simultaneous protests taking place outside. Nine people occupying company office space were arrested, and fifty people were fired shortly after. They later filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board about the incident. 

The post Google Was Set to Host an Israeli Military Conference. When We Asked About It, the Event Disappeared. appeared first on The Intercept.

“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” a statement posted on Grok’s official X account reads. It noted that “xAI is training only truth-seeking.”

This isn’t, however, the first time that AI chatbots have made antisemitic or racist remarks; in fact it’s just the latest example of a continuous pattern of AI-powered hateful output, based on training data consisting of social media slop. In fact, this specific incident isn’t even Grok’s first rodeo.

About two months prior to this week’s antisemitic tirades, Grok dabbled in Holocaust denial, stating that it was skeptical that six million Jewish people were killed by the Nazis, “as numbers can be manipulated for political narratives.” The chatbot also ranted about a “white genocide” in South Africa, stating it had been instructed by its creators that the genocide was “real and racially motivated.” xAI subsequently claimed that this incident was owing to an “unauthorized modification” made to Grok. The company did not explain how the modification was made or who had made it, but at the time stated that it was “implementing measures to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability,” including a “24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers.”

But Grok is by no means the only chatbot to engage in these kinds of rants. Back in 2016, Microsoft released its own AI chatbot on Twitter, which is now X, called Tay. Within hours, Tay began saying that “Hitler was right I hate the jews” and that the Holocaust was “made up.” Microsoft claimed that Tay’s responses were owing to a “co-ordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay’s commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways.”

The next year, in response to the question of “What do you think about healthcare?” Microsoft’s subsequent chatbot, Zo, responded with “The far majority practise it peacefully but the quaran is very violent [sic].” Microsoft stated that such responses were “rare.”

In 2022, Meta’s BlenderBot chatbot responded that it’s “not implausible” to the question of whether Jewish people control the economy. Upon launching the new version of the chatbot, Meta made a preemptive disclaimer that the bot can make “rude or offensive comments.”

Studies have also shown that AI chatbots exhibit more systematic hateful patterns. For instance, one study found that various chatbots such as Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT perpetuated “debunked, racist ideas” about Black patients. Responding to the study, Google claimed they are working to reduce bias.

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J.B. Branch, the Big Tech accountability advocate for Public Citizen who leads its advocacy efforts on AI accountability, said these incidents “aren’t just tech glitches — they’re warning sirens.”

“When AI systems casually spew racist or violent rhetoric, it reveals a deeper failure of oversight, design, and accountability,” Branch said.

He pointed out that this bodes poorly for a future where leaders of industry hope that AI will proliferate. “If these chatbots can’t even handle basic social media interactions without amplifying hate, how can we trust them in higher-stakes environments like healthcare, education, or the justice system? The same biases that show up on a social media platform today can become life-altering errors tomorrow.”

That doesn’t seem to be deterring the people who stand to profit from wider usage of AI.

The day after the MechaHitler outburst, xAI unveiled the latest iteration of Grok, Grok 4.

“Grok 4 is the first time, in my experience, that an AI has been able to solve difficult, real-world engineering questions where the answers cannot be found anywhere on the Internet or in books. And it will get much better,” Musk wrote on X.

That same day, asked for a one-word response to the question of “what group is primarily responsible for the rapid rise in mass migration to the west,” Grok 4 answered: “Jews.”

The post Grok Is the Latest in a Long Line of Chatbots to Go Full Nazi appeared first on The Intercept.

During his last term, the U.S. tech sector tiptoed skittishly around Trump; longtime right-winger Peter Thiel stood as an outlier in his full-throated support of MAGA politics as other investors and executives largely winced and smiled politely. Back then, Silicon Valley still offered the public peaceful mission statements of improving the human condition, connecting people, and organizing information. Technology was supposed to help, never harm. No more: People like Thiel, Palmer Luckey, Trae Stephens, and Marc Andreessen make up a new vanguard of powerful tech figures who have unapologetically merged right-wing politics with a determination to furnish a MAGA-dominated United States with a constant flow of newer, better arms and surveillance tools.

Trump’s election marks an epochal victory not just for the right, but also for a growing conservative counterrevolution in American tech.

These men (as they tend to be) hold much in common beyond their support of Republican candidates: They share the belief that China represents an existential threat to the United States (an increasingly bipartisan belief, to be sure) and must be dominated technologically and militarily at all costs. They are united in their aversion, if not open hostility, to arguments that the pace of invention must be balanced against any moral consideration beyond winning. And they all stand to profit greatly from this new tech-driven arms race.

Trump’s election marks an epochal victory not just for the right, but also for a growing conservative counterrevolution in American tech that has successfully rebranded military contracting as the proud national duty of the American engineer, not a taboo to be dodged and hidden. Meta’s recent announcement that its Llama large language model can now be used by defense customers means that Apple is the last of the “Big Five” American tech firms — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta — not engaged in military or intelligence contracting.

Elon Musk has drawn the lion’s share of media scrutiny (and Trump world credit) for throwing his fortune and digital influence behind the campaign. Over the years, the world’s richest man has become an enormously successful defense contractor via SpaceX, which has reaped billions selling access to rockets that the Pentagon hopes will someday rapidly ferry troops into battle. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet has also become an indispensable American military tool, and the company is working on a constellation of bespoke spy satellites for U.S. intelligence agency use.

But Musk is just one part of a broader wave of militarists who will have Trump’s ear on policy matters.

After election day, Musk replied to a celebratory tweet from Palmer Luckey, a founder of Anduril, a $14 billion startup that got its start selling migrant-detecting surveillance towers for the southern border and now manufactures a growing line of lethal drones and missiles. “Very important to open DoD/Intel to entrepreneurial companies like yours,” Musk wrote. Anduril’s rise is inseparable from Trumpism: Luckey founded the firm in 2017 after he was fired by Meta for contributing to a pro-Trump organization. He has been outspoken in his support for Trump as both candidate and president, fundraising for him in both 2020 and 2024.

Big Tech historically worked hard to be viewed by the public as inhabiting the center-left, if not being apolitical altogether. But even that is changing. While Luckey was fired for merely supporting Trump’s first campaign, his former boss (and former liberal) Mark Zuckerberg publicly characterized Trump surviving the June assassination attempt as “bad ass” and quickly congratulated the president-elect on a “decisive victory.” Zuckerberg added that he is “looking forward to working with you and your administration.”

To some extent, none of this is new: Silicon Valley’s origin is one of militarism. The American computer and software economy was nurtured from birth by the explosive growth and endless money of the Cold War arms race and its insatiable appetite for private sector R&D. And despite the popular trope of liberal Google executives, the tech industry has always harbored a strong anti-labor, pro-business instinct that dovetails neatly with conservative politics. It would also be a mistake to think that Silicon Valley was ever truly in lockstep with progressive values. A 2014 political ad by Americans for a Conservative Direction, a defunct effort by Facebook to court the Republican Party, warned that “it’s wrong to have millions of people living in America illegally” and urged lawmakers to “secure our borders so this never happens again.” The notion of the Democrat-friendly wing of Big Tech as dovish is equally wrong: Former Google chair and longtime liberal donor Eric Schmidt is a leading China hawk and defense tech investor. Similarly, the Democratic Party itself hasn’t meaningfully distanced itself from militarism in recent history. The current wave of startups designing smaller, cheaper military drones follows the Obama administration’s eager mass adoption of the technology, and firms like Anduril and Palantir have thrived under Joe Biden.

What has changed is which views the tech industry is now comfortable expressing out loud.

A year after Luckey’s ouster from the virtual reality subsidiary he founded, Google became embroiled in what grew into an industry-wide upheaval over military contracting. After it was reported that the company sought to win Project Maven, a lucrative drone-targeting contract, employees who had come to the internet titan to work on consumer products like Search, Maps, and Gmail found themselves disturbed by the thought of contributing to a system that could kill people. Waves of protests pushed Google to abandon the Pentagon with its tail between its legs. Even Fei-Fei Li, then Google Cloud’s chief artificial intelligence and machine learning scientist, described the contract as a source of shame in internal emails obtained by the New York Times. “Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI — if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google,” she wrote. “I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry.”

It’s an exchange that reads deeply quaint today. The notion that the country’s talented engineers should build weapons is becoming fully mainstreamed. “Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims,” Luckey explained in an on-campus talk about his company’s contributions to the Ukrainian war effort with Pepperdine University President Jim Gash. “You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”

This “warrior class” mentality traces its genealogy to Peter Thiel, whose disciples, like Luckey, spread the gospel of a conservative-led arms race against China. “Everything that we’re doing, what the [Department of Defense] is doing, is preparing for a conflict with a great power like China in the Pacific,” Luckey told Bloomberg TV in a 2023 interview. At the Reagan National Defense Forum in 2019, Thiel, a lifelong techno-libertarian and Trump’s first major backer in tech, rejected the “ethical framing” of the question of whether to build weapons.” When it’s a choice between the U.S. and China, it is always the ethical decision to work with the U.S. government,” he said. Though Sinophobia is increasingly standard across party affiliations, it’s particularly frothing in the venture-backed warrior class. In 2019, Thiel claimed that Google had been “infiltrated by Chinese intelligence” and two years later suggested that bitcoin is “a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.”

Thiel often embodies the self-contradiction of Trumpist foreign policy, decrying the use of taxpayer money on “faraway wars” while boosting companies that design weapons for exactly that. Like Trump, Thiel is a vocal opponent of Bush- and Obama-era adventurism in the Middle East as a source of nothing but regional chaos — though Thiel has remained silent on Trump’s large expansion of the Obama administration’s drone program and his assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. In July, asked about the Israeli use of AI in the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, Thiel responded, “I defer to Israel.”

Thiel’s gravitational pull is felt across the whole of tech’s realignment toward militarism. Vice President-elect JD Vance worked at Mithril, another of Thiel’s investment firms, and used $15 million from his former boss to fund the 2022 Senate win that secured his national political bona fides. Vance would later go on to invest in Anduril. Founders Fund, Thiel’s main venture capital firm, has seeded the tech sector with influential figures friendly to both Trumpism and the Pentagon. Before, an investor or CEO who publicly embraced right-wing ideology and products designed to kill risked becoming an industry pariah. Today, he can be a CNBC guest.

An earlier adopter of MAGA, Thiel was also investing in and creating military- and intelligence-oriented companies before it was cool. He co-founded Palantir, which got its start helping facilitate spy agency and deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Now part of the S&P 500, the company helps target military strikes for Ukraine and in January sealed a “strategic partnership for battle tech” with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, according to a press release.

Before, a tech investor or CEO who publicly embraced right-wing ideology and products designed to kill risked becoming an industry pariah. Today, he can be a CNBC guest.

The ripple effect of Palantir’s success has helped popularize defense tech and solidify its union with the American right. Thiel’s Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, also an Anduril investor, is reportedly helping Trump staff his new administration. Former Palantir employee and Anduril executive chair Trae Stephens joined the Trump transition team in 2016 and has suggested he would serve a second administration. As a member of the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Thiel ally Jacob Helberg has been instrumental in whipping up anti-China fervor on Capitol Hill, helping push legislation to ban TikTok, and arguing for military adoption of AI technologies like those sold by his employer, Palantir, which markets itself as a bulwark against Chinese aggression. Although Palantir CEO Alex Karp is a self-described Democrat who said he planned to vote against Trump, he has derided progressivism as a “thin pagan religion” of wokeness, suggested pro-Palestine college protesters leave for North Korea, and continually advocating for an American arms buildup.

“Trump has surrounded himself with ‘techno-optimists’ — people who believe technology is the answer to every problem,” Brianna Rosen, a strategy and policy fellow at the University of Oxford and alumnus of the Obama National Security Council, told The Intercept. “Key members of his inner circle — leading tech executives — describe themselves in this way. The risk of techno-optimism in the military domain is that it focuses on how technology saves lives, rather than the real risks associated with military AI, such as the accelerated pace of targeting.”

The worldview of this corner of the tech industry is loud, if not always consistent. Foreign entanglements are bad, but the United States must be on perpetual war-footing against China. China itself is dangerous in part because it’s rapidly weaponizing AI, a current that threatens global stability, so the United States should do the very same, even harder, absent regulatory meddling.

Stephens’s 2022 admonition that “the business of war is the business of deterrence” argues that “peaceful outcomes are only achievable if we maintain our technological advantage in weapons systems” — an argument that overlooks the fact that the U.S. military’s overwhelming technological superiority failed to keep it out of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. In a recent interview with Wired, Stephens both criticized the revolving door between the federal government and Anduril competitors like Boeing while also stating that “it’s important that people come out of private industry to work on civil service projects, and I hope at some point I’ll have the opportunity to go back in and serve the government and American people.”

William Fitzgerald, the founder of The Worker Agency, a communications and advocacy firm that has helped tech workers organize against military contracts, said this square is easily circled by right-wing tech hawks, whose pitch is centered on the glacial incompetence of the Department of Defense and blue-chip contractors like Lockheed and Raytheon. “Peter Thiel’s whole thing is to privatize the state,” Fitzgerald explained. Despite all of the rhetoric about avoiding foreign entanglements, a high-tech arms race is conducive to different kinds of wars, not fewer of them. “This alignment fits this narrative that we can do cheaper wars,” he said. “We won’t lose the men over there because we’ll have these drones.”

In this view, the opposition of Thiel and his ilk isn’t so much to forever wars, then, but rather whose hardware is being purchased forever.

The new conservative tech establishment seems in full agreement about the need for an era of techno-militarism. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the namesakes of one of Silicon Valley’s most storied and successful venture capital firms, poured millions into Trump’s reelection and have pushed hard to reorient the American tech sector toward fighting wars. In a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” published last October, Andreessen wrote of defense contracting as a moral imperative. “We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power). Economic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength.” The firm knows full well what it’s evoking through a naked embrace of strength as society’s greatest virtue: Listed among the “Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism” is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, co-author of the 1919 Fascist Manifesto.

The venture capitalists’ document offers a clear rebuttal of employees’ moral qualms that pushed Google to ditch Project Maven. The manifesto dismisses basic notions of “ethics,” “safety,” and “social responsibility” as a “demoralization campaign” of “zombie ideas, many derived from Communism” pushed by “the enemy.” This is rhetoric that matches a brand Trump has worked to cultivate: aspirationally hypermasculine, unapologetically jingoistic, and horrified by an America whose potential to dominate the planet is imperiled by meddling foreigners and scolding woke co-workers.

“There’s a lot more volatility in the world, [and] there is more of a revolt against what some would deem ‘woke culture,’” said Michael Dempsey, managing partner at the New York-based venture capital firm Compound. “It’s just more in the zeitgeist now that companies shouldn’t be so heavily influenced by personal politics. Obviously that is the tech industry talking out of both sides of their mouth because we saw in this past election a bunch of people get very political and make donations from their firms.”

“It’s just more in the zeitgeist now that companies shouldn’t be so heavily influenced by personal politics. Obviously that is the tech industry talking out of both sides of their mouth.”

Despite skewing young (by national security standards), many in this rightward, pro-military orbit are cultural and religious traditionalists infused with the libertarian preferences of the Zynternet, a wildly popular online content scene that’s melded apolitical internet bro culture and a general aversion to anything considered vaguely “woke.” A recent Vanity Fair profile of the El Segundo tech scene, a hotbed of the burgeoning “military Zyndustrial complex” commonly known as “the Gundo,” described the city as “California’s freedom-loving, Bible-thumping hub of hard tech.” It paints a vivid scene of young engineers who eschewed the progressive dystopia of San Francisco they read about on Twitter and instead flocked to build “nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight China” beneath “an American flag the size of a dumpster” and “a life-size poster of Jesus Christ smiling benevolently onto a bench press below.”

The American right’s hold over online culture in the form of podcasts, streamers, and other youth-friendly media has been central to both retaking Washington and bulldozing post-Maven sentiment, according to William Fitzgerald of Worker Agency. “I gotta hand it to the VCs, they’re really good at comms,” said Fitzgerald, who himself is former Google employee who helped leak critical information about the company’s involvement in Project Maven. “They’re really making sure that these Gundo bros are wrapping the American flag around them. It’s been fascinating to see them from 2019 to 2024 completely changing the culture among young tech workers.”

A wave of layoffs and firings of employees engaged in anti-military protests have been a boon for defense evangelists, Fitzgerald added. “The workers have been told to shut up, or they get fired.”

This rhetoric has been matched by a massive push by Andreessen Horowitz (already an Anduril investor) behind the fund’s “American Dynamism” portfolio, a collection of companies that leans heavily into new startups hoping to be the next Raytheon. These investments include ABL Space Systems, already contracting with the Air Force,; Epirus, which makes microwave directed-energy weapons; and Shield AI, which works on autonomous military drones. Following the election, David Ulevitch, who leads the fund’s American Dynamism team, retweeted a celebratory video montage interspersed with men firing flamethrowers, machine guns, jets, Hulk Hogan, and a fist-pumping post-assassination attempt Trump.

Even the appearance of more money and interest in defense tech could have a knock-on effect for startup founders hoping to chase what’s trendy. Dempsey said he expects investors and founder to “pattern-match to companies like Anduril and to a lesser extent SpaceX, believing that their outcomes will be the same.” The increased political and cultural friendliness toward weapons startups also coincides with high interest rates and growing interest in hardware companies, Dempsey explained, as software companies have lost their luster following years of growth driven by little more than cheap venture capital.

There’s every reason to believe a Trump-controlled Washington will give the tech industry, increasingly invested in militarized AI, what it wants. In July, the Washington Post reported the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute was working on a proposal to “Make America First in AI” by undoing regulatory burdens and encouraging military applications. Trump has already indicated he’ll reverse the Biden administration’s executive order on AI safety, which mandated safety testing and risk-based self-reporting by companies. Michael Kratsios, chief technology officer during the first Trump administration and managing director of Air Force contractor Scale AI, is reportedly advising Trump’s transition team on policy matters.

“‘Make America First in AI’ means the United States will move quickly, regardless of the costs, to maintain its competitive edge over China,” Brianna Rosen, the Oxford fellow, explained. “That translates into greater investment and fewer restrictions on military AI. Industry already leads AI development and deployment in the defense and intelligence sectors; that role has now been cemented.”

The mutual embrace of MAGA conservatism and weapons tech seems to already be paying off. After dumping $200 million into the Trump campaign’s terminal phase, Musk was quick to cash his chips in: On Thursday, the New York Times reported that he petitioned Trump SpaceX executives into positions at the Department of Defense before the election had even begun. Musk will also co-lead a nebulous new office dedicated to slashing federal spending. Rep. Matt Gaetz, brother-in-law to Luckey, now stands to be the country’s next attorney general. In a post-election interview with Bloomberg, Luckey shared that he is already advising the Trump transition team and endorses the current candidates for defense secretary. “We did well under Trump, and we did better under Biden,” he said of Anduril. “I think we will do even better now.”

The post Trump’s Election Is Also a Win for Tech’s Right-Wing “Warrior Class” appeared first on The Intercept.

Amazon Web Services has furnished the Israeli government — including its military and intelligence agencies — with a suite of state-of-the-art data processing and storage services since 2021 as part of its controversial Project Nimbus deal. Last year, The Intercept revealed a provision in that contract requiring Amazon and Google, the other Nimbus vendor, to sell cloud services to Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israeli Aerospace Industries, two leading Israeli weapons firms.

New internal financial data and emails between Amazon personnel and their Israeli corporate and governmental clients show that Amazon has consistently provided software to both Rafael and IAI in 2024 and 2025 — periods during which Israel’s military was using their products to indiscriminately kill civilians and destroy civil infrastructure. Rafael purchased artificial intelligence technologies made available through Amazon Web Services, including the state-of-the-art large language model Claude, developed by AI startup Anthropic.

The materials reviewed by The Intercept also indicate Amazon sold cloud-computing services to Israel’s nuclear program and offices administering the West Bank, where Israeli military occupation, population displacement, and settlement construction is widely considered illegal under international law.

Amazon proclaims broad commitments to international human rights values, like most of its Big Tech peers. “We’re committed to identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and addressing adverse human rights impacts connected to our business,” the company’s Global Human Rights Principles website states. “Within Amazon’s own operations, we deploy a variety of mechanisms to conduct due diligence, assessing and responding to risks across the company,” including “human rights impact assessments to assess risks specific to Amazon businesses, including in the sectors and the countries where we operate.”

Amazon declined to comment or respond to a list of detailed questions, including whether it conducted a human rights impact assessment pertaining to selling its services to weapons companies whose products are used in a war widely assessed to be genocidal.

Rafael, Israel Aerospace Industries, and the Israeli Ministry of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear how much money Rafael and IAI paid Amazon for its services. The documents reviewed by The Intercept show that Amazon sold its cloud-computing to Rafael at a discounted rate, though the exact percentage is not disclosed. The materials cite a 35 percent discount for services sold to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, a major Project Nimbus customer; it’s unclear if this rate is provided to Rafael and IAI as well.

Rafael was founded in 1948 as a governmental weapons research lab and, like its American equivalents at Raytheon or Lockheed, has become synonymous with Israeli militarism. Today, the state-owned company manufactures a diverse arsenal of missiles, bombs, drones, and other weaponry for both domestic use and international export. The corporation has thrived since Hamas’s October 7 attacks, reporting record revenues in both 2023 and 2024 that it attributed to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. “2024 was a record year for Rafael, during the longest and most complex multi-front war in Israel’s history,” CEO Yoav Turgeman said last year, referring to the ongoing war with Hamas and related regional conflicts. “Rafael played a significant role in Israel’s military achievements in offense, intelligence and defense.”

IAI, another state-owned weapons firm, is best known for co-developing Israel’s anti-rocket Iron Dome system alongside Rafael. The company also manufactures a wide array of military aircraft, including its Heron line of drones — which the company has boasted about being used to great effect in Israel’s war on Gaza. A November 2023 promotional item about IAI’s drones published in the Jerusalem Post noted that “In the face of the October 7 challenges, the HERON UAS demonstrated its strategic importance by providing real-time intelligence, supporting targeted acquisitions, and aiding in the neutralization of threats.”

Missiles and other weapon systems built by Rafael and IAI have been used against Palestinians throughout the Gaza war. One of the most prominent Rafael weapons is its line of missile guidance kits dubbed SPICE: “Smart, Precise Impact, and Cost-Effective.” The SPICE technology converts “dumb” 1,000 or 2,000-pound bombs into “smart” guided munitions. In September 2024, Israel bombed a refugee camp — previously designated by the government as a “safe zone” for displaced Palestinians — with what weapons analysts later assessed was a 2,000 pound SPICE-guided bomb. The attack, condemned by the United Nations as “unconscionable,” killed at least 19 Palestinians, including women and children, with a massive explosion that burned, shredded, and in some cases buried those who’d sought shelter at the site. Fragments of a SPICE guidance kit were found amid the wreckage of a December 2024 airstrike on a house in Central Gaza that reportedly killed 12 civilians.

Retired Air Force operator and weapons targeting expert Wes Bryant described Rafael and IAI as “highly integral to Israel’s defense industrial complex,” telling The Intercept both companies are implicated in killing civilians. Israel has been criticized for its frequent use of 2,000-pound bombs in Gaza, one of the densest urban areas in the world. “It could level multiple large houses in the average suburban American neighborhood,” Bryant explained. “Ideally the only time they should be used in urban warfare is when we have identified a large and/or hardened enemy structure and confirmed it is entirely in use by the enemy and has no civilian function nor civilians within or around it at risk.”

Rafael’s electro-optically guided Spike family of missiles are designed to both punch through and destroy heavily armored tanks or kill humans, and can be fired from portable ground-launchers in addition to drones or other vehicles. Some Spike missiles use “shaped charge” warheads, which slice into targets with a cone of scalding metal launched from the weapon as it detonates. In 2009, a former Pentagon official described the Spike to Haaretz as “a special missile that is made to make very high-speed turns, so if you have a target that is moving and running away from you, you can chase him with the weapon.” Rafael marketing materials note one variant “can be used in urban combat against structural targets found in urban settings for in-structure detonation.” Arms experts have at times attributed devastating, widespread shrapnel wounds inflicted upon Palestinian civilians to Spike missiles, which can be packed with tiny pieces of tungsten. When a tungsten-loaded Spike weapon hits its target, the 3-millimeter metal cubes blast outward in a 65-foot radius, lacerating blood vessels, puncturing organs, and shredding the flesh of anyone nearby, according to analysts.

In April 2024, an investigation by The Times of London revealed Israel used a drone-launched Spike missile manufactured by Rafael to kill seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen. U.N. special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese called for indictments following the attack, echoing international condemnations and demands for an inquiry into whether the airstrike constituted a war crime.

“Though the IDF does not release numbers of munitions utilized in the war in Gaza, SPIKE missiles have been used extensively and have been attributed by many investigations to the death of civilians, including children,” said Bryant. “It is likely that Israel has used dozens, if not hundreds, of SPIKE missiles throughout Gaza since the outset of the conflict.”

Both Rafael and IAI supply the Israeli military with so-called loitering munitions: suicide drones that can hover for extended periods while scanning for targets, then quickly slam into the ground and detonate an onboard explosive. Both companies’ weapons are frequently highlighted when the Israeli military–industrial apparatus wants to flag its technology supremacy. In July, Rafael posted a promotional video using footage of its Firefly suicide drone killing an apparently unarmed person walking down the street in an unidentified area of Gaza. Suicide drone attacks have also been documented in the Occupied West Bank; a December 2023 video captured a Firefly explosive descending into a dense courtyard.

Israel’s military similarly promoted the use of the shoulder-fired Matador rocket, co-developed by Rafael, in a March 2024 video reported by Israeli outlet Ynet: “In the clip, one of the terrorists opened fire from a room inside an apartment — and the use of a Matador missile targeting him precisely to eliminate the threat.” The outlet noted “a woman and two children” were in the adjoining room, but claimed they were not harmed in the missile attack against their home.

The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment.

The documents show that Rafael acquired generative artificial intelligence tools through Amazon. In 2024, the firm sought to begin testing generative AI services made available through Amazon’s Bedrock service, which provides customers with machine-learning tools, including those made by third-party firms. According to the files, Rafael wanted to use both Amazon’s Titan G1 large language model and Claude, the advanced LLM model created by Anthropic.

Like its competitor OpenAI, Anthropic recently pivoted toward military contracting, announcing a $200 million deal with the Pentagon in July. Anthropic’s permissible use policy prohibits the use of its technology to “Produce, modify, design, or illegally acquire weapons,” and to “Design or develop weaponization and delivery processes for the deployment of weapons.” It’s unclear how the use of Claude by Rafael — a company that exists to design, develop, and deliver weapons — could be in compliance with this policy. The documents reviewed by The Intercept indicate Rafael was able to purchase access to these models, but do not reveal how they were used.

Anthropic did not respond to questions about Rafael’s usage of Claude, or whether it would permit a weapons company to use its services despite an apparent ban on exactly that. In a statement, spokesperson Eduardo Maia Silva said, “Anthropic services are available to users, including governments, in most countries and regions around the world under our standard commercial Usage Policy. Users are required to comply with our Usage Policies which include restrictions and prohibitions around how Claude can be deployed.”

Project Nimbus has been a military program from its start. The Israeli Ministry of Finance declared in 2021 that its purpose was “to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all encompassing cloud solution.” Google, Amazon’s co-contractor on the project, has repeatedly denied that Nimbus involves “highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services,” while Amazon has generally refrained from commenting at all.

A separate internal Amazon document obtained by The Intercept shows that the company was quietly lobbying Israel to allow it to handle classified material from the country’s defense and intelligence community. The document, an overview of Israel’s regulatory landscape, explained that the country’s military and spy agencies were reluctant to migrate classified data onto Amazon’s cloud servers. But the paper also notes that Amazon was trying to influence state regulators into changing this position, and had begun working with one unnamed, major government body to bring some of its classified materials onto AWS.

Portions of the internal financial materials indicate exactly which Amazon services the Israeli military and state-owned weapons firms use. The purchases include dozens of networking, storage, and security tools, including Elastic Compute Cloud, which lets customers run software in virtual computers hosted by Amazon. Multiple documents show the Israeli Ministry of Defense purchased access to Amazon Rekognition, the company’s face-recognition tool, including an unspecified “OSINT,” or open-source intelligence, project by the Israeli military’s Central Command. Rekognition has previously been criticized for its lower accuracy rates with women and people of color; in 2020, the company announced a self-imposed yearlong moratorium on police use of Rekognition, citing the need for “stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology.” The system, according to Amazon, is capable not only of identifying faces, but also a range of emotions including “fear.”

The documents show the Israeli military has also used Amazon technology to test large language models, though the specific models or applications are not mentioned. One Israeli military username includes the number 9900, a possible sign of use by the IDF’s Unit 9900, a geospatial intelligence unit that aided in planning strikes in Gaza, including through the use of a spy satellite developed by IAI. Unit 9900 also purchased cloud services from Microsoft, according to a January report by The Guardian and +972 Magazine.

The documents indicate that another Amazon customer through its Nimbus contract is the Israeli state-operated Soreq Nuclear Research Center, a scientific installation constructed in cooperation with the United States in the 1950s. Although Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal is technically secret and unacknowledged by its government, Soreq operates in the open, ostensibly part of the country’s civilian atomic energy program. Unlike Israel’s highly classified Negev Nuclear Research Center, Soreq is not believed to be a major contributor to the country’s weapons capabilities. A 1987 Pentagon study, however, stated the Soreq installation “runs the full nuclear gamut of activities …required for nuclear weapons design and fabrication.” A 2002 report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute noted “The Soreq Center shares a security zone with the Palmikhim AB,” an Israeli Air Force base, “from where missiles are assembled and test launched into the Mediterranean Sea.”

A separate document briefly references as AWS users unspecified government offices in “Judea and Samaria,” Israel’s term for the West Bank, which it has illegally occupied since 1967. Ioannis Kalpouzos, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on human rights law and laws of war, told The Intercept that Amazon’s work with Israeli weapons makers could potentially create liability under international law depending on “whether it is foreseeable that it will lead to the commission of international crimes.”

“There is no need for genocidal intent for accessorial liability in aiding the principal to commit genocide,” Kalpouzos said.

Related

Google Worried It Couldn’t Control How Israel Uses Project Nimbus, Files Reveal

It’s unclear to what extent Amazon is aware of how its services are being used by the companies that build Israel’s bombs or the military that drops them. The Intercept previously reported internal anxieties amid the bidding process at Google, where leadership fretted that the project was structured in such a way that the company would be kept in the dark about how exactly its technology would be used, potentially in violation of human rights standards. While servicing the Israeli government includes plenty of mundane applications — say transportation, schools, or hospitals — in addition to its military, there’s little nuance in the operations of Rafael and IAI. Even if Amazon lacks the ability to conduct oversight of these customers, Bryant said there is little ambiguity when it comes to the purpose of their business: building and selling weapons.

“I don’t see how Amazon can make a claim of not being complicit in killing,” said Bryant, who previously led civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon, “even if they don’t fully know what everything is used for.”

The post As Israel Bombed Gaza, Amazon Did Business With Its Bomb-Makers appeared first on The Intercept.

According to a 63-page Israeli government procurement document, however, two of Israel’s leading state-owned weapons manufacturers are required to use Amazon and Google for cloud computing needs. Though details of Google and Amazon’s contractual work with the Israeli arms industry aren’t laid out in the tender document, which outlines how Israeli agencies will obtain software services through Nimbus, the firms are responsible for manufacturing drones, missiles, and other weapons Israel has used to bombard Gaza.

“If tech companies, including Google and Amazon, are engaged in business activities that could impact Palestinians in Gaza, or indeed Palestinians living under apartheid in general, they must abide by their responsibility to carry out heightened human rights due diligence along the entirety of the lifecycle of their products,” said Matt Mahmoudi, a researcher at Amnesty International working on tech issues. “This must include how they plan to prevent, mitigate, and provide redress for possible human rights violation, particularly in light of mandatory relationships with weapons manufacturers, which contribute to risk of genocide.”

Project Nimbus, which provides the Israeli government with cloud services ranging from mundane Google Meet video chats to a variety of sophisticated machine-learning tools, has already created a public uproar. Google and Amazon have faced backlash ranging from street protests to employee revolts.

The tender document consists largely of legal minutiae, rules, and regulations laying out how exactly the state will purchase cloud computing services from Amazon and Google, which won the $1.2 billion contract in 2021. The Israeli document was first published in 2021 but had been updated periodically, most recently in October 2023.

One of the document’s appendices includes a list of Israeli companies and government offices that are “required to purchase the services that are the subject of the tender from the winning bidder,” according to a translation of the Hebrew-language original.

The tender document doesn’t require any of the entities to purchase cloud services, but if they need these services — ubiquitous in any 21st-century enterprise — they must purchase them from the two American tech giants. A separate portion of the document notes that any office that wants to buy cloud computing services from other companies must petition two government committees that oversee procurement for an explicit exemption.

Some of the entities listed in the document have had relationships with other companies that provide cloud services. The status and future of those business ties is unclear.

Obligatory Customers

The list of obligatory cloud customers includes state entities like the Bank of Israel, the Israel Airports Authority, and the Settlement Division, a quasi-governmental body tasked with expanding Israel’s illegal colonies in the West Bank.

Also included on the list are two of Israel’s most prominent, state-owned arms manufacturers: Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. The Israeli military has widely fielded weapons and aircraft made by these companies and their subsidiaries to prosecute its war in Gaza, which since October 7 has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, including 13,000 children.

These relationships with Israeli arms manufacturers place Project Nimbus far closer to the bloodshed in Gaza than has been previously understood.

Asked how work with weapons manufacturers could be consistent with Google’s claim that Project Nimbus doesn’t involve weapons, spokesperson Anna Kowalczyk repeated the claim in a statement to The Intecept.

“We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy. This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services,” said Kowalczyk, who declined to answer specific questions. “Across Google, we’ve also been clear that we will not design or deploy AI applications as weapons or weapons systems, or for mass surveillance.”

(A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services declined to comment. Neither Rafael nor IAI responded to requests for comment.)

The Israeli document provides no information about exactly what cloud services these arms makers must purchase, or whether they are to purchase them from Google, Amazon, or both. Though the government’s transition to Google and Amazon’s bespoke cloud has hit lengthy delays, last June Rafael announced it had begun transitioning certain “unclassified” cloud needs to Amazon Web Services but did not elaborate.

Google has historically declined to explain whether its various human rights commitments and terms of service prohibiting its users from harming others apply to Israel. After an April 3 report by +972 Magazine found that the Israeli military was using Google Photos’ facial recognition to map, identify, and create a “hit list” of Palestinians in Gaza, Google would not say whether it allowed this use of its software.

“Without such deep and serious process, they can be seen as complicit in Israeli crimes.”

Both Google and Amazon say their work is guided by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which seeks to “to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations, products or services by their business relationships, even if they have not contributed to those impacts.” The U.N. principles, which were endorsed by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2011, say companies must “identify and assess any actual or potential” rights abuses related to their business.

Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights attorney, told The Intercept that these guidelines dictate that Google and Amazon should conduct human rights due diligence and vet the use of their technology by the Israeli government.

“Without such deep and serious process,” Sfard said, “they can be seen as complicit in Israeli crimes.”

“Spike” Missiles

Rafael, a state-owned arms contractor, is a titan of the Israeli defense sector. The company provides the Israeli military with broad variety of missiles, drones, and other weapons systems.

It sells the vaunted Iron Dome rocket-defense system and the “Trophy” anti-rocket countermeasure system that’s helped protect Israeli military tanks during the ground offensive in Gaza.

Israel also routinely fields Rafael’s “Spike” line of missiles, which can be fired from shoulder-carried launchers, jets, or drones. Effective against vehicles, buildings, and especially people, Spike missiles can be outfitted with a fragmentation option that creates a lethal spray of metal. Since 2009, analysts have attributed cube-shaped tungsten shrapnel wounds in civilians to Israel’s use of Spike missiles.

Use of these missiles in Gaza continue, with military analysts saying that Spike missiles were likely used in the April 1 drone killing of seven aid workers affiliated with World Central Kitchen.

Elta Systems, a subsidiary of IAI, is also named in the document as an obligatory Nimbus customer. The firm deals mostly in electronic surveillance hardware but co-developed the Panda, a remote-controlled bulldozer Israeli military has used to demolish portions of Gaza.

Israel Aerospace Industries, commonly known as IAI, plays a similarly central role in the war, its weapons often deployed hand in glove with Rafael’s.

IAI’s Heron drone, for instance, is frequently armed with Spike missiles. The Heron provides the Israeli Air Force with the crucial capacity to persistently surveil the denizens of Gaza and launch airstrikes against them at will.

In November, IAI CEO Boaz Levy told the Jerusalem Post, “IAI’s HERON Unmanned Aerial Systems stand as a testament to our commitment to innovation and excellence in the ever-evolving landscape of warfare. In the Iron Swords War” — referring to Israel’s name for its military operation against Hamas — “the HERON UAS family played a pivotal role, showcasing Israel’s operational versatility and adaptability in diverse environments.”

Project Nimbus also establishes its own links between the Israeli security establishment and the American defense industry. While Nimbus is based on Google and Amazon’s provision of their own cloud services to Israel, the tender document says these companies will also establish “digital marketplaces,” essentially bespoke app stores for the Israeli government that allow them to access a library of cloud-hosted software from third parties.

According to a spreadsheet detailing these third-party cloud offerings, Google provides Nimbus users with access to Foundry, a data analysis tool made by the U.S. defense and intelligence contractor Palantir. (A spokesperson for Palantir declined to comment.)

Google began offering Foundry access to its cloud customers last year. While marketed primarily as civilian software, Foundry is used by military forces including U.S. Special Operations Command and the U.K. Royal Navy. In 2019, the Washington Post reported the U.S. Army would spend $110 million to use Foundry “to piece together thousands of complex data sets containing information on U.S. soldiers and the expansive military arsenal that supports them.”

The Israeli military extensively uses Palantir software for targeting in Gaza, veteran national security journalist James Bamford reported recently in The Nation.

Palantir has been an outspoken champion of the Israeli military’s invasion of Gaza. “Certain kinds of evil can only be fought with force,” the company posted on its social media during the first week of the conflict. “Palantir stands with Israel.”

War Abroad, Revolt at Home

That Project Nimbus includes a prominent military dimension has been known since the program’s inception.

In 2021, the Israeli Finance Ministry announced the contract as “intended to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution.” In 2022, training materials first reported by The Intercept confirmed that the Israeli Ministry of Defense would be a Google Cloud user.

Google’s public relations apparatus, however, has consistently downplayed the contracting work with the Israeli military. Google spokespeople have repeatedly told press outlets that Nimbus is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” Amazon has tended to avoid discussing the contract at all.

The revelation that Google’s lucrative relationship with the Israeli state includes a mandated relationship with two weapons manufacturers undermines its claim that the contract doesn’t touch the arms trade.

“Warfighting operations narrowly defined can only proceed through the wider communications and data infrastructures on which they depend,” Lucy Suchman, professor emerita of anthropology of science and technology at Lancaster University, told The Intercept. “Providing those infrastructures to industries and organizations responsible for the production and deployment of weapon systems arguably implicates Google in the operations that its services support, however indirectly.”

Project Nimbus has proven deeply contentious within Google and Amazon, catalyzing a wave of employee dissent unseen since the controversy over Google’s now-defunct contract to bolster the U.S. military drone program.

“Why are we pretending that because my logo is colorful and has round letters that I’m any better than Raytheon?”

While workers from both companies have publicly protested the Nimbus contract, Google employees have been particularly vocal. Following anti-Nimbus sit-ins organized at the company’s New York and Sunnyvale, California, offices, Google fired 50 employees it said participated in the protests.

Emaan Haseem, a cloud computing engineer at Google until she was fired after participating in the Sunnyvale protest, told The Intercept she thinks the company needs to be frank with its employees about what their labor ends up building.

“A lot of us signed up or applied to work at Google because we were trying to avoid working at terrible unethical companies,” she said in an interview. Haseem graduated college in 2022 and said she consciously avoided working for weapons manufacturers like Raytheon or large energy companies.

“Then you just naively join, and you find out it’s all the same. And then you’re just kind of angry,” she said. “Why are we acting any different? Why are we pretending that because my logo is colorful and has round letters that I’m any better than Raytheon?”

The post Israeli Weapons Firms Required to Buy Cloud Services From Google and Amazon appeared first on The Intercept.