Google and Amazon are both loath to discuss security aspects of the cloud services they provide through their joint contract with the Israeli government, known as Project Nimbus. Though both the Ministry of Defense and Israel Defense Forces are Nimbus customers, Google routinely downplays the military elements while Amazon says little at all.

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?”

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The Israeli military has reportedly implemented a facial recognition dragnet across the Gaza Strip, scanning ordinary Palestinians as they move throughout the ravaged territory, attempting to flee the ongoing bombardment and seeking sustenance for their families.

The program relies on two different facial recognition tools, according to the New York Times: one made by the Israeli contractor Corsight, and the other built into the popular consumer image organization platform offered through Google Photos. An anonymous Israeli official told the Times that Google Photos worked better than any of the alternative facial recognition tech, helping the Israelis make a “hit list” of alleged Hamas fighters who participated in the October 7 attack.

The mass surveillance of Palestinian faces resulting from Israel’s efforts to identify Hamas members has caught up thousands of Gaza residents since the October 7 attack. Many of those arrested or imprisoned, often with little or no evidence, later said they had been brutally interrogated or tortured. In its facial recognition story, the Times pointed to Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, whose arrest and beating at the hands of the Israeli military began with its use of facial recognition. Abu Toha, later released without being charged with any crime, told the paper that Israeli soldiers told him his facial recognition-enabled arrest had been a “mistake.”

Putting aside questions of accuracy — facial recognition systems are notorious less accurate on nonwhite faces — the use of Google Photos’s machine learning-powered analysis features to place civilians under military scrutiny, or worse, is at odds with the company’s clearly stated rules. Under the header “Dangerous and Illegal Activities,” Google warns that Google Photos cannot be used “to promote activities, goods, services, or information that cause serious and immediate harm to people.”

“Facial recognition surveillance of this type undermines rights enshrined in international human rights law.”

Asked how a prohibition against using Google Photos to harm people was compatible with the Israel military’s use of Google Photos to create a “hit list,” company spokesperson Joshua Cruz declined to answer, stating only that “Google Photos is a free product which is widely available to the public that helps you organize photos by grouping similar faces, so you can label people to easily find old photos. It does not provide identities for unknown people in photographs.” (Cruz did not respond to repeated subsequent attempts to clarify Google’s position.)

It’s unclear how such prohibitions — or the company’s long-standing public commitments to human rights — are being applied to Israel’s military.

“It depends how Google interprets ‘serious and immediate harm’ and ‘illegal activity’, but facial recognition surveillance of this type undermines rights enshrined in international human rights law — privacy, non-discrimination, expression, assembly rights, and more,” said Anna Bacciarelli, the associate tech director at Human Rights Watch. “Given the context in which this technology is being used by Israeli forces, amid widespread, ongoing, and systematic denial of the human rights of people in Gaza, I would hope that Google would take appropriate action.”

Doing Good or Doing Google?

In addition to its terms of service ban against using Google Photos to cause harm to people, the company has for many years claimed to embrace various global human rights standards.

“Since Google’s founding, we’ve believed in harnessing the power of technology to advance human rights,” wrote Alexandria Walden, the company’s global head of human rights, in a 2022 blog post. “That’s why our products, business operations, and decision-making around emerging technologies are all informed by our Human Rights Program and deep commitment to increase access to information and create new opportunities for people around the world.”

This deep commitment includes, according to the company, upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — which forbids torture — and the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which notes that conflicts over territory produce some of the worst rights abuses.

The Israeli military’s use of a free, publicly available Google product like Photos raises questions about these corporate human rights commitments, and the extent to which the company is willing to actually act upon them. Google says that it endorses and subscribes to the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, a framework that calls on corporations 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.”

Walden also said Google supports the Conflict-Sensitive Human Rights Due Diligence for ICT Companies, a voluntary framework that helps tech companies avoid the misuse of their products and services in war zones. Among the document’s many recommendations are for companies like Google to consider “Use of products and services for government surveillance in violation of international human rights law norms causing immediate privacy and bodily security impacts (i.e., to locate, arrest, and imprison someone).” (Neither JustPeace Labs nor Business for Social Responsibility, which co-authored the due-diligence framework, replied to a request for comment.)

“Google and Corsight both have a responsibility to ensure that their products and services do not cause or contribute to human rights abuses,” said Bacciarelli. “I’d expect Google to take immediate action to end the use of Google Photos in this system, based on this news.”

Google employees taking part in the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, a worker-led protest movement against Project Nimbus, called their employer to prevent the Israeli military from using Photos’s facial recognition to prosecute the war in Gaza.

“That the Israeli military is even weaponizing consumer technology like Google Photos, using the included facial recognition to identify Palestinians as part of their surveillance apparatus, indicates that the Israeli military will use any technology made available to them — unless Google takes steps to ensure their products don’t contribute to ethnic cleansing, occupation, and genocide,” the group said in a statement shared with The Intercept. “As Google workers, we demand that the company drop Project Nimbus immediately, and cease all activity that supports the Israeli government and military’s genocidal agenda to decimate Gaza.”

Project Nimbus

This would not be the first time Google’s purported human rights principles contradict its business practices — even just in Israel. Since 2021, Google has sold the Israeli military advanced cloud computing and machine learning-tools through its controversial “Project Nimbus” contract.

Unlike Google Photos, a free consumer product available to anyone, Project Nimbus is a bespoke software project tailored to the needs of the Israeli state. Both Nimbus and Google Photos’s face-matching prowess, however, are products of the company’s immense machine-learning resources.

The sale of these sophisticated tools to a government so regularly accused of committing human rights abuses and war crimes stands in opposition to Google’s AI Principles. The guidelines forbid AI uses that are likely to cause “harm,” including any application “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

Google has previously suggested its “principles” are in fact far narrower than they appear, applying only to “custom AI work” and not the general use of its products by third parties. “It means that our technology can be used fairly broadly by the military,” a company spokesperson told Defense One in 2022.

How, or if, Google ever turns its executive-blogged assurances into real-world consequences remains unclear. Ariel Koren, a former Google employee who said she was forced out of her job in 2022 after protesting Project Nimbus, placed Google’s silence on the Photos issue in a broader pattern of avoiding responsibility for how its technology is used.

“It is an understatement to say that aiding and abetting a genocide constitutes a violation of Google’s AI principles and terms of service,” Koren, now an organizer with No Tech for Apartheid, told The Intercept. “Even in the absence of public comment, Google’s actions have made it clear that the company’s public AI ethics principles hold no bearing or weight in Google Cloud’s business decisions, and that even complicity in genocide is not a barrier to the company’s ruthless pursuit of profit at any cost.”

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Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, is contemplating stricter rules around discussing Israeli nationalism on its platforms, a major policy change that could stifle criticism and free expression about the war in Gaza and beyond, five civil society sources who were briefed on the potential change told The Intercept.

“Meta is currently revisiting its hate speech policy, specifically in relation to the term ‘Zionist,’” reads a January 30 email sent to civil society groups by Meta policy personnel and reviewed by The Intercept. While the email says Meta has not made a final determination, it is soliciting feedback on a potential policy change from civil society and digital rights groups, according to the sources. The email notes that “Meta is reviewing this policy in light of content that users and stakeholders have recently reported” but does not detail the content in question or name any stakeholders.

“As an anti-Zionist Jewish organization for Palestinian freedom, we are horrified to learn that Meta is considering expanding when they treat ‘Zionism’ — a political ideology — as the same as ‘Jew/Jewish’ — an ethno-religious identity,” said Dani Noble, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the groups Meta has contacted to discuss the possible change. Noble added that such a policy shift “will result in shielding the Israeli government from accountability for its policies and actions that violate Palestinian human rights.”

For years, Meta has allowed its 3 billion users around the world to employ the term “Zionist,” which refers to supporters of the historical movement to create a Jewish state in the Middle East, as well as backers of modern-day nationalism in support of that state and its policies.

Meta’s internal rules around the word “Zionist,” first reported by The Intercept in 2021, show that company moderators are only supposed to delete posts using the term if it’s determined to be a proxy for “Jewish” or “Israeli,” both protected classes under company speech rules. The policy change Meta is now considering would enable the platform’s moderators to more aggressively and expansively enforce this rule, a move that could dramatically increase deletions of posts critical of Israeli nationalism.

“We don’t allow people to attack others based on their protected characteristics, such as their nationality or religion. Enforcing this policy requires an understanding of how people use language to reference those characteristics,” Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss told The Intercept. “While the term Zionist often refers to a person’s ideology, which is not a protected characteristic, it can also be used to refer to Jewish or Israeli people. Given the increase in polarized public discourse due to events in the Middle East, we believe it’s important to assess our guidance for reviewing posts that use the term Zionist.”

In the months since October 7, staunchly pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League have openly called for treating anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, pointing out that the word is often used by antisemites as a stand-in for “Jew.” The ADL and American Jewish Committee, another pro-Israel, Zionist advocacy group in the U.S., have both been lobbying Meta to restrict use of the word “Zionist,” according to Yasmine Taeb, legislative and political director at the Muslim grassroots advocacy group MPower Change. In his statement, Chambliss responded, “We did not initiate this policy development at the behest of any outside group.”

Taeb, who spoke to a Meta employee closely involved with the proposed policy change, said it would result in mass censorship of critical mentions of Zionism, restricting, for example, non-hateful, non-violent speech about the ongoing bloodshed in Gaza.

While a statement as general as “I don’t like Zionists” could be uttered by an antisemitic Instagram user as a means of expressing dislike for Jews, civil society advocates point out that there is nothing inherently or necessarily anti-Jewish about the statement. Indeed, much of the fiercest political activism against Israel’s war in Gaza has been organized by anti-Zionist Jews, while American evangelical Christian Zionists are some of Israel’s most hardcore supporters.

“The suppression of pro-Palestinian speech critical of Israel is happening specifically during the genocide in Gaza,” Taeb said in an interview. “Meta should instead be working on implementing policies to make sure political speech is not being suppressed, and they’re doing the exact opposite.”

According to presentation materials reviewed by The Intercept, Meta has been sharing with stakeholders a series of hypothetical posts that could be deleted under a stricter policy, and soliciting feedback as to whether they should be. While one example seemed like a clear case of conspiratorial antisemitic tropes about Jewish control of the news media, others were critical of Israeli state policy or supporters of that policy, not Judaism, said Nadim Nashif, executive director of the Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh, who was briefed this week by Meta via video conference. Meta plans to brief U.S. stakeholder groups on Friday morning, according to its outreach email.

Examples of posts Meta could censor under a new policy included the statements: “Zionists are war criminals, just look at what’s happening in Gaza”; “I don’t like Zionists”; and “No Zionists allowed at tonight’s meeting of the Progressive Student Association.” Nashif said that one example — “Just read the news every day. A coalition of Zionists, Americans and Europeans tries to rule the world.” — was described by Peter Stern, Meta’s director of content policy stakeholder engagement, as possibly hateful because it engaged in conspiratorial thinking about Jews.

In an interview with The Intercept, Nashif disagreed, arguing that criticism of the strategic alliance and foreign policy alignment between the U.S., European states, and Israel should not be conflated with conspiratorial bigotry against Judaism, or collapsed into bigoted delusions of global Jewish influence. In their meeting, Nashif says Stern acknowledged that Zionism is a political ideology, not an ethnic group, despite the prospect of enforcement that would treat it more like the latter. “I think it may actually harm the fight against antisemitism, conflating Zionism and the Israeli government with Judaism,” Nashif told The Intercept.

It will be difficult or impossible to determine whether someone says they “don’t like” Zionists with a hateful intent, Nashif said, adding: “You’d need telepathy.” Meta has yet to share with those it has briefed any kind of general principles, rules, or definitions that would guide this revised policy or help moderators enforce it, Nashif said. But given the company’s systematic censorship of Palestinian and other Arab users of its platforms, Nashif and others familiar with the potential change fear it would make free expression in the Arab world even more perilous.

“As anti-Zionist Jews, we have seen how the Israeli government and its supporters have pushed an agenda that falsely claims that equating ‘Zionist’ with ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’ will somehow keep Jews safe,” added Noble of Jewish Voice for Peace. “Not only does conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism harm all people who fight for human rights in the world by stifling legitimate criticism of a state and military, it also does nothing to actually keep our community safe while undermining our collective efforts to dismantle real antisemitism and all forms of racism, extremism and oppression.”

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Notorious Blackwater founder and perennial mercenary entrepreneur Erik Prince has a new business venture: a cellphone company whose marketing rests atop a pile of muddled and absurd claims of immunity to surveillance. On a recent episode of his podcast, Prince claimed that his special phone’s purported privacy safeguards could have prevented many of the casualties from Hamas’s October 7 attack.

The inaugural episode of “Off Leash with Erik Prince,” the podcast he co-hosts with former Trump campaign adviser Mark Serrano, focused largely on the Hamas massacre and various intelligence failures of the Israeli military. Toward the end of the November 2 episode, following a brief advertisement for Prince’s new phone company, Unplugged, Serrano asked how Hamas had leveraged technology to plan the attack. “I think that when the post-op of this disaster is done, I think the main source of intel for Hamas was cellphone data,” Serrano claimed, without evidence. “How does Gaza access that data? I mean, Hamas?”

Prince answered that location coordinates, commonly leaked from phones via advertising data, were surely crucial to Hamas’s ability to locate Israel Defense Forces installations and kibbutzim.

Serrano, apparently sensing an opportunity to promote Prince’s $949 “double encrypted” phone, continued: “If all of Israel had Unplugged [phones] on October 7, what would that have done to Hamas’s strategy?”

Prince didn’t miss a beat. “I will almost guarantee that whether it’s the people living on kibbutzes, but especially the 19, 20, 21-year-old kids that are serving in the IDF, if they’re not on duty, they’re on their phones and on social media, and that cellphone data was tracked and collected and used for targeting by Hamas,” he said. “This phone, Unplugged, prevents that from happening.”

Unplugged’s product documentation is light on details, privacy researcher Zach Edwards told The Intercept, and the features the company touts can be replicated on most phones just by tinkering with settings. Both Android devices and iPhones, Edwards pointed out, allow users to deactivate their advertising IDs. It’s unclear what makes Unplugged any different, let alone a tool that could have thwarted the Hamas attack. “Folks should wait for proof before accepting those claims,” Edwards said.

“Simply Not True”

This isn’t the first time Prince has used an act of violence as a business opportunity. Following the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School, Prince constructed a mock school building called R U Ready High School where police could pay to train for future shootings. In 2017, he pitched the Trump White House on a plan, modeled after the British East India Company, to privatize the American war in Afghanistan with mercenaries.

With Unplugged, Prince’s main claim seems to be that, unlike most phones, his company’s devices don’t have advertising IDs: unique codes generated by every Android and iOS phone that marketers use to surveil consumer habits, including location. Unplugged claims its phones use a customized version of Android that strips out these IDs. But the notion that Prince’s phone, which is still unavailable for purchase more than a year after it was announced, could have saved lives on October 7 was contradicted by mobile phone security experts, who told The Intercept that just about every aspect of the claim is false, speculative, or too vague to verify.

“That is simply not true and that is not how mobile geolocation works,” said Allan Liska, an intelligence analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. While Prince is correct that the absence of an advertising ID would diminish to some degree the amount of personal data leaked by a phone, it by no means cuts it off entirely. So long as a device is connected to cellular towers — generally considered a key feature for cellphones — it’s susceptible to tracking. “Mobile geolocation is based on tower data triangulation and there is no level of operating system security that that can bypass that,” Liska added.

Unplugged CEO Ryan Paterson told The Intercept that Prince’s statement about how his phone could have minimized Israeli deaths on October 7 “has much to do with the amount of data that the majority of cell phones in the world today create about the users of the device, their locations, patterns of life and behaviors,” citing a 2022 Electronic Frontier Foundation report on how mobile advertising data fuels police surveillance. Indeed, smartphone advertising has created an immeasurably vast global ecosystem of intimate personal data, unregulated and easily bought and sold, that can facilitate state surveillance without judicial oversight.

“Unplugged’s UP Phone has an operating system that does not contain a [mobile advertising ID] that can be passed [on], does not have any Google Mobile Services, and has a built-in firewall that blocks applications from sending any tracker information from the device, and delivering advertisements to the phone,” Paterson added in an email. “Taking these data sources away from the Hamas planners could have seriously disrupted and limited their operations effectiveness.”

Unplugged did not respond to a request for more detailed information about its privacy and security measures.

Neither Erik Prince nor an attorney who represents him responded to questions from The Intercept.

Articles of Faith

“While it’s true that anyone could theoretically find aggregate data on populated areas and possibly more specific data on an individual using mobile advertiser identifiers, it is completely unclear if Hamas used this and the ‘could have’ in the last sentence is doing a lot of work,” William Budington, a security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who regularly scrutinizes Android systems, wrote in an email to The Intercept. “If Hamas was getting access to location information through cell tower triangulation methods (say their targets were connecting to cell towers within Gaza that they had access to), then [Prince’s] phone would be as vulnerable to this as any iOS or Android device.”

The idea of nixing advertising IDs is by no means a privacy silver bullet. “When he is talking about advertising IDs, that is separate from location data,” Budington noted. If a phone’s user gives an app permission to access that phone’s location, there’s little to nothing Prince can do to keep that data private. “Do some apps get location data as well as an advertising ID? Yes. But his claim that Hamas had access to this information, and it was pervasively used in the attack to establish patterns of movement, is far-fetched and extremely speculative,” Budington wrote.

Liska, who previously worked in information security within the U.S. intelligence community, agreed. “I also find the claim that Hamas was purchasing advertising/location data to be a bit preposterous as well,” he said. “Not that they couldn’t do it (I am not familiar with Israeli privacy laws) but that they would have enough intelligence to know who to target with the purchase.”

Hamas’s assault displayed a stunningly sophisticated understanding of the Israeli state security apparatus, but there’s been no evidence that this included the use of commercially obtained mobile phone data.

While it’s possible that Unplugged phones block all apps from requesting location tracking permission in the first place, this would break any location-based features in the phone, rendering something as basic as a mapping app useless. But even this hypothetical is impossible to verify, because the phone has yet to leave Prince’s imagination and reach any actual customers, and its customized version of Android, dubbed “LibertOS,” has never been examined by any third parties.

While Unplugged has released a one-page security audit, conducted by PwC Digital Technology, it applied only to the company’s website and an app it offers, not the phone, making its security and privacy claims largely articles of faith.

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A small group of volunteers from Israel’s tech sector is working tirelessly to remove content it says doesn’t belong on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, tapping personal connections at those and other Big Tech companies to have posts deleted outside official channels, the project’s founder told The Intercept.

The project’s moniker, “Iron Truth,” echoes the Israeli military’s vaunted Iron Dome rocket interception system. The brainchild of Dani Kaganovitch, a Tel Aviv-based software engineer at Google, Iron Truth claims its tech industry back channels have led to the removal of roughly 1,000 posts tagged by its members as false, antisemitic, or “pro-terrorist” across platforms such as X, YouTube, and TikTok.

In an interview, Kaganovitch said he launched the project after the October 7 Hamas attack, when he saw a Facebook video that cast doubt on alleged Hamas atrocities. “It had some elements of disinformation,” he told The Intercept. “The person who made the video said there were no beheaded babies, no women were raped, 200 bodies is a fake. As I saw this video, I was very pissed off. I copied the URL of the video and sent it to a team in [Facebook parent company] Meta, some Israelis that work for Meta, and I told them that this video needs to be removed and actually they removed it after a few days.”

Billed as both a fight against falsehood and a “fight for public opinion,” according to a post announcing the project on Kaganovitch’s LinkedIn profile, Iron Truth vividly illustrates the perils and pitfalls of terms like “misinformation” and “disinformation” in wartime, as well as the mission creep they enable. The project’s public face is a Telegram bot that crowdsources reports of “inflammatory” posts, which Iron Truth’s organizers then forward to sympathetic insiders. “We have direct channels with Israelis who work in the big companies,” Kaganovitch said in an October 13 message to the Iron Truth Telegram group. “There are compassionate ones who take care of a quick removal.” The Intercept used Telegram’s built-in translation feature to review the Hebrew-language chat transcripts.

Iron Truth vividly illustrates the perils and pitfalls of terms like “misinformation” and “disinformation” in wartime.

So far, nearly 2,000 participants have flagged a wide variety of posts for removal, from content that’s clearly racist or false to posts that are merely critical of Israel or sympathetic to Palestinians, according to chat logs reviewed by The Intercept. “In the U.S. there is free speech,” Kaganovitch explained. “Anyone can say anything with disinformation. This is very dangerous, we can see now.”

“The interests of a fact checking or counter-disinformation group working in the context of a war belongs to one belligerent or another. Their job is to look out for the interests of their side,” explained Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “They’re not trying to ensure an open, secure, accessible online space for all, free from disinformation. They’re trying to target and remove information and disinformation that they see as harmful or dangerous to Israelis.”

While Iron Truth appears to have frequently conflated criticism or even mere discussion of Israeli state violence with misinformation or antisemitism, Kaganovitch says his views on this are evolving. “In the beginning of the war, it was anger, most of the reporting was anger,” he told The Intercept. “Anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anything related to this was received as fake, even if it was not.”

The Intercept was unable to independently confirm that sympathetic workers at Big Tech firms are responding to the group’s complaints or verify that the group was behind the removal of the content it has taken credit for having deleted. Iron Truth’s founder declined to share the names of its “insiders,” stating that they did not want to discuss their respective back channels with the press. In general, “they are not from the policy team but they have connections to the policy team,” Kaganovitch told The Intercept, referring to the personnel at social media firms who set rules for permissible speech. “Most of them are product managers, software developers. … They work with the policy teams with an internal set of tools to forward links and explanations about why they need to be removed.” While companies like Meta routinely engage with various civil society groups and NGOs to discuss and remove content, these discussions are typically run through their official content policy teams, not rank-and-file employees.

The Iron Truth Telegram account regularly credits these supposed insiders. “Thanks to the TikTok Israel team who fight for us and for the truth,” read an October 28 post on the group’s Telegram channel. “We work closely with Facebook, today we spoke with more senior managers,” according to another post on October 17. Soon after a Telegram chat member complained that something they’d posted to LinkedIn had attracted “inflammatory commenters,” the Iron Truth account replied, “Kudos to the social network LinkedIn who recruited a special team and have so far removed 60% of the content we reported on.”

Kaganovitch said the project has allies outside Israel’s Silicon Valley annexes as well. Iron Truth’s organizers met with the director of a controversial Israeli government cyber unit, he said, and its core team of more than 50 volunteers and 10 programmers includes a former member of the Israeli Parliament.

“Eventually our main goal is to get the tech companies to differentiate between freedom of speech and posts that their only goal is to harm Israel and to interfere with the relationship between Israel and Palestine to make the war even worse,” Inbar Bezek, the former Knesset member working with Iron Truth, told The Intercept in a WhatsApp message.

“Across our products, we have policies in place to mitigate abuse, prevent harmful content and help keep users safe. We enforce them consistently and without bias,” Google spokesperson Christa Muldoon told The Intercept. “If a user or employee believes they’ve found content that violates these policies, we encourage them to report it through the dedicated online channels.” Muldoon added that Google “encourages employees to use their time and skills to volunteer for causes they care about.” In interviews with The Intercept, Kaganovitch emphasized that he works on Iron Truth only in his free time, and said the project is entirely distinct from his day job at Google.

Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels pushed back on the notion that Iron Truth was able to get content taken down outside the platform’s official processes, but declined to comment on Iron Truth’s underlying claim of a back channel to company employees. “Multiple pieces of content this group claims to have gotten removed from Facebook and Instagram are still live and visible today because they don’t violate our policies,” Daniels told The Intercept in an emailed statement. “The idea that we remove content based on someone’s personal beliefs, religion, or ethnicity is simply inaccurate.” Daniels added, “We receive feedback about potentially violating content from a variety of people, including employees, and we encourage anyone who sees this type of content to report it so we can investigate and take action according to our policies,” noting that Meta employees have access to internal content reporting tools, but that this system can only be used to remove posts that violate the company’s public Community Standards.

Neither TikTok nor LinkedIn responded to questions about Iron Truth. X could not be reached for comment.

“Keep Bombing!”

Though confusion and recrimination are natural byproducts of any armed conflict, Iron Truth has routinely used the fog of war as evidence of anti-Israeli disinformation.

At the start of the project in the week after Hamas’s attack, for example, Iron Truth volunteers were encouraged to find and report posts expressing skepticism about claims of the mass decapitation of babies in an Israeli kibbutz. They quickly surfaced posts casting doubt on reports of “40 beheaded babies” during the Hamas attack, tagging them “fake news” and “disinformation” and sending them to platforms for removal. Among a list of LinkedIn content that Iron Truth told its Telegram followers it had passed along to the company was a post demanding evidence for the beheaded baby claim, categorized by the project as “Terror/Fake.”

But the skepticism they were attacking proved warranted. While many of Hamas’s atrocities against Israelis on October 7 are indisputable, the Israeli government itself ultimately said it couldn’t verify the horrific claim about beheaded babies. Similarly, Iron Truth’s early efforts to take down “disinformation” about Israel bombing hospitals now contrast with weeks of well-documented airstrikes against multiple hospitals and the deaths of hundreds of doctors from Israeli bombs.

On October 16, Iron Truth shared a list of Facebook and Instagram posts it claimed responsibility for removing, writing on Telegram, “Significant things reported today and deleted. Good job! Keep bombing! ”

While most of the links no longer work, several are still active. One is a video of grievously wounded Palestinians in a hospital, including young children, with a caption accusing Israel of crimes against humanity. Another is a video from Mohamed El-Attar, a Canadian social media personality who posts under the name “That Muslim Guy.” In the post, shared the day after the Hamas attack, El-Attar argued the October 7 assault was not an act of terror, but of armed resistance to Israeli occupation. While this statement is no doubt inflammatory to many, particularly in Israel, Meta is supposed to allow for this sort of discussion, according to internal policy guidance previously reported by The Intercept. The internal language, which detailed the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, lists this sentence among examples of permitted speech: “The IRA were pushed towards violence by the brutal practices of the British government in Ireland.”

While it’s possible for Meta posts to be deleted by moderators and later reinstated, Daniels, the spokesperson, disputed Iron Truth’s claim, saying links from the list that remain active had never been taken down in the first place. Daniels added that other links on the list had indeed been removed because they violated Meta policy but declined to comment on specific posts.

Under their own rules, the major social platforms aren’t supposed to remove content simply because it is controversial. While content moderation trigger-happiness around mere mentions of designated terror organizations has led to undue censorship of Palestinian and other Middle Eastern users, Big Tech policies on misinformation are, on paper, much more conservative. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, for example, only prohibit misinformation when it might cause physical harm, like snake oil cures for Covid-19, or posts meant to interfere with civic functions such as elections. None of the platforms targeted by Iron Truth prohibit merely “inflammatory” speech; indeed, such a policy would likely be the end of social media as we know it.

Still, content moderation rules are known to be vaguely conceived and erratically enforced. Meta for instance, says it categorically prohibits violent incitement, and touts various machine learning-based technologies to detect and remove such speech. Last month, however, The Intercept reported that the company had approved Facebook ads calling for the assassination of a prominent Palestinian rights advocate, along with explicit calls for the murder of civilians in Gaza. On Instagram, users leaving comments with Palestinian flag emojis have seen these responses inexplicably vanished. 7amleh, a Palestinian digital rights organization that formally partners with Meta on speech issues, has documented over 800 reports of undue social media censorship since the war’s start, according to its public database.

Disinformation in the Eye of the Beholder

“It’s really hard to identify disinformation,” Kaganovitch acknowledged in an interview, conceding that what’s considered a conspiracy today might be corroborated tomorrow, and pointing to a recent Haaretz report that an Israel Defense Forces helicopter may have inadvertently killed Israelis on October 7 in the course of firing at Hamas.

Throughout October, Iron Truth provided a list of suggested keywords for volunteers in the project’s Telegram group to use when searching for content to report to the bot. Some of these terms, like “Kill Jewish” and “Kill Israelis,” pertained to content flagrantly against the rules of major social media platforms, which uniformly ban explicit violent incitement. Others reflected stances that might understandably offend Israeli social media users still reeling from the Hamas attack, like “Nazi flag israel.”

But many other suggestions included terms commonly found in news coverage or general discussion of the war, particularly in reference to Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza. Some of those phrases — including “Israel bomb hospital”; “Israel bomb churches”; “Israel bomb humanitarian”; and “Israel committing genocide” — were suggested as disinformation keywords as the Israeli military was being credibly accused of doing those very things. While some allegations against both Hamas and the IDF were and continue to be bitterly disputed — notably who bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on October 17 — Iron Truth routinely treated contested claims as “fake news,” siding against the sort of analysis or discussion often necessary to reach the truth.

“This post must be taken down, he is a really annoying liar and the amount of exposure he has is crazy.”

Even the words “Israel lied” were suggested to Iron Truth volunteers on the grounds that they could be used in “false posts.” On October 16, two days after an Israeli airstrike killed 70 Palestinians evacuating from northern Gaza, one Telegram group member shared a TikTok containing imagery of one of the bombed convoys. “This post must be taken down, he is a really annoying liar and the amount of exposure he has is crazy,” the member added. A minute later, the Iron Truth administrator account encouraged this member to report the post to the Iron Truth bot.

Although The Intercept is unable to see which links have been submitted to the bot, Telegram transcripts show the group’s administrator frequently encouraged users to flag posts accusing Israel of genocide or other war crimes. When a chat member shared a link to an Instagram post arguing “It has BEEN a genocide since the Nakba in 1948 when Palestinians were forcibly removed from their land by Israel with Britain’s support and it has continued for the past 75 years with US tax payer dollars,” the group administrator encouraged them to report the post to the bot three minutes later. Links to similar allegations of Israeli war crimes from figures such as popular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker; Colombian President Gustavo Petro; psychologist Gabor Maté; and a variety of obscure, ordinary social media users have received the same treatment.

Iron Truth has acknowledged its alleged back channel has limits: “It’s not immediate unfortunately, things go through a chain of people on the way,” Kaganovitch explained to one Telegram group member who complained a post they’d reported was still online. “There are companies that implement faster and there are companies that work more slowly. There is internal pressure from the Israelis in the big companies to speed up the reports and removal of the content. We are in constant contact with them 24/7.”

Since the war began, social media users in Gaza and beyond have complained that content has been censored without any clear violation of a given company’s policies, a well-documented phenomenon long before the current conflict. But Brooking, of the Atlantic Council, cautioned that it can be difficult to determine the process that led to the removal of a given social media post. “There are almost certainly people from tech companies who are receptive to and will work with a civil society organization like this,” he said. “But there’s a considerable gulf between claiming those tech company contacts and having a major influence on tech company decision making.”

Iron Truth has found targets outside social media too. On November 27, one volunteer shared a link to NoThanks, an Android app that helps users boycott companies related to Israel. The Iron Truth administrator account quickly noted that the complaint had been forwarded to Google. Days later, Google pulled NoThanks from its app store, though it was later reinstated.

The group has also gone after efforts to fundraise for Gaza. “These cuties are raising money,” said one volunteer, sharing a link to the Instagram account of Medical Aid for Palestinians. Again, the Iron Truth admin quickly followed up, saying the post had been “transferred” accordingly.

But Kaganovitch says his thinking around the topic of Israeli genocide has shifted. “I changed my thoughts a bit during the war,” he explained. Though he doesn’t agree that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, where the death toll has exceeded 20,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, he understands how others might. “The genocide, I stopped reporting it in about the third week [of the war].”

Several weeks after its launch, Iron Truth shared an infographic in its Telegram channel asking its followers not to pass along posts that were simply anti-Zionist. But OCT7, an Israeli group that “monitors the social web in real-time … and guides digital warriors,” lists Iron Truth as one of its partner organizations, alongside the Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs, and cites “anti-Zionist bias” as part of the “challenge” it’s “battling against.”

Despite Iron Truth’s occasional attempts to rein in its volunteers and focus them on finding posts that might actually violate platform rules, getting everyone on board has proven difficult. Chat transcripts show many Iron Truth volunteers conflating Palestinian advocacy with material support for Hamas or characterizing news coverage as “misinformation” or “disinformation,” perennially vague terms whose meaning is further diluted in times of war and crisis.

“By the way, it would not be bad to go through the profiles of [United Nations] employees, the majority are local there and they are all supporters of terrorists,” recommended one follower in October. “Friends, report a profile of someone who is raising funds for Gaza!” said another Telegram group member, linking to the Instagram account of a New York-based beauty influencer. “Report this profile, it’s someone I met on a trip and it turns out she’s completely pro-Palestinian!” the same user added later that day. Social media accounts of Palestinian journalist Yara Eid; Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza; and many others involved in Palestinian human rights advocacy were similarly flagged by Iron Truth volunteers for allegedly spreading “false information.”

Iron Truth has at times struggled with its own followers. When one proposed reporting a link about Israeli airstrikes at the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, the administrator account pointed out that the IDF had indeed conducted the attacks, urging the group: “Let’s focus on disinformation, we are not fighting media organizations.” On another occasion, the administrator discouraged a user from reporting a page belonging to a news organization: “What’s the problem with that?” the administrator asked, noting that the outlet was “not pro-Israel, but is there fake news?”

But Iron Truth’s standards often seem muddled or contradictory. When one volunteer suggested going after B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization that advocates against the country’s military occupation and broader repression of Palestinians, the administrator account replied: “With all due respect, B’Tselem does publish pro-Palestinian content and this was also reported to us and passed on to the appropriate person. But B’Tselem is not Hamas bots or terrorist supporters, we have tens of thousands of posts to deal with.”

Friends in High Places

Though Iron Truth is largely a byproduct of Israel’s thriving tech economy — the country is home to many regional offices of American tech giants — it also claims support from the Israeli government.

The group’s founder says that Iron Truth leadership have met with Haim Wismonsky, director of the controversial Cyber Unit of the Israeli State Attorney’s Office. While the Cyber Unit purports to combat terrorism and miscellaneous cybercrime, critics say it’s used to censor unwanted criticism and Palestinian perspectives, relaying thousands upon thousands of content takedown demands. American Big Tech has proven largely willing to play ball with these demands: A 2018 report from the Israeli Ministry of Justice claimed a 90 percent compliance rate across social media platforms.

Following an in-person presentation to the Cyber Unit, Iron Truth’s organizers have remained in contact, and sometimes forward the office links they need help removing, Kaganovitch said. “We showed them the presentation, they asked us also to monitor Reddit and Discord, but Reddit is not really popular here in Israel, so we focus on the big platforms right now.”

Wismonsky did not respond to a request for comment.

Kaganovitch noted that Bezek, the former Knesset member, “helps us with diplomatic and government relationships.” In an interview, Bezek confirmed her role and corroborated the group’s claims, saying that while Iron Truth had contacts with “many other employees” at social media firms, she is not involved in that aspect of the group’s work, adding, “I took on myself to be more like the legislation and legal connection.”

“What we’re doing on a daily basis is that we have a few groups of people who have social media profiles in different medias — LinkedIn, X, Meta, etc. — and if one of us is finding content that is antisemitic or content that is hate claims against Israel or against Jews, we are informing the other people in the group, and few people at the same time are reporting to the tech companies,” Bezek explained.

Bezek’s governmental outreach has so far included organizing meetings with Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and “European ambassadors in Israel.” Bezek declined to name the Israeli politicians or European diplomatic personnel involved because their communications are ongoing. These meetings have included allegations of foreign, state-sponsored “antisemitic campaigns and anti-Israeli campaigns,” which Bezek says Iron Truth is collecting evidence about in the hope of pressuring the United Nations to act.

Iron Truth has also collaborated with Digital Dome, a similar volunteer effort spearheaded by the Israeli anti-disinformation organization FakeReporter, which helps coordinate the mass reporting of unwanted social media content. Israeli American investment fund J-Ventures, which has reportedly worked directly with the IDF to advance Israeli military interests, has promoted both Iron Truth and Digital Dome.

FakeReporter did not respond to a request for comment.

While most counter-misinformation efforts betray some geopolitical loyalty, Iron Truth is openly nationalistic. An October 28 write-up in the popular Israeli news website Ynet — “Want to Help With Public Diplomacy? This is How You Start”— cited the Telegram bot as an example of how ordinary Israelis could help their country, noting: “In the absence of a functioning Information Ministry, Israeli men and women hope to be able to influence even a little bit the sounding board on the net.” A mention in the Israeli financial news website BizPortal described Iron Truth as fighting “false and inciting content against Israel.”

Iron Truth is “a powerful reminder that it’s still people who run these companies at the end of the day,” said Brooking. “I think it’s natural to try to create these coordinated reporting groups when you feel that your country is at war in or in danger, and it’s natural to use every tool at your disposal, including the language of disinformation or fact checking, to try to remove as much content as possible if you think it’s harmful to you or people you love.”

The real risk, Brooking said, lies not in the back channel, but in the extent to which companies that control the speech of billions around the world are receptive to insiders arbitrarily policing expression. “If it’s elevating content for review that gets around trust and safety teams, standing policy, policy [into] which these companies put a lot of work,” he said, “then that’s a problem.”

The post Israeli Group Claims It’s Using Big Tech Back Channels to Censor “Inflammatory” Wartime Content appeared first on The Intercept.

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A Google employee protesting the tech giant’s business with the Israeli government was questioned by Google’s human resources department over allegations that he endorsed terrorism, The Intercept has learned. The employee said he was the only Muslim and Middle Easterner who circulated the letter and also the only one who was confronted by HR about it.

The employee was objecting to Project Nimbus, Google’s controversial $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and its military to provide state-of-the-art cloud computing and machine learning tools.

Since its announcement two years ago, Project Nimbus has drawn widespread criticism both inside and outside Google, spurring employee-led protests and warnings from human rights groups and surveillance experts that it could bolster state repression of Palestinians.

Mohammad Khatami, a Google software engineer, sent an email to two internal listservs on October 18 saying Project Nimbus was implicated in human rights abuses against Palestinians — abuses that fit a 75-year pattern that had brought the conflict to the October 7 Hamas massacre of some 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians. The letter, distributed internally by anti-Nimbus Google workers through company email lists, went on to say that Google could become “complicit in what history will remember as a genocide.”

“Strangely enough, I was the only one of us who was sent to HR over people saying I was supporting terrorism or justifying terrorism.”

Twelve days later, Google HR told Khatami they were scheduling a meeting with him, during which he says he was questioned about whether the letter was “justifying the terrorism on October 7th.”

In an interview, Khatami told The Intercept he was not only disturbed by what he considers an attempt by Google to stifle dissent on Nimbus, but also believes he was left feeling singled out because of his religion and ethnicity. The letter was drafted and internally circulated by a group of anti-Nimbus Google employees, but none of them other than Khatami were called by HR, according to Khatami and Josh Marxen, another anti-Nimbus organizer at Google who helped spread the letter. Though he declined to comment on the outcome of the HR meeting, Khatami said it left him shaken.

“It was very emotionally taxing,” Khatami said. “I was crying by the end of it.”

“I’m the only Muslim or Middle Eastern organizer who sent out that email,” he told The Intercept. “Strangely enough, I was the only one of us who was sent to HR over people saying I was supporting terrorism or justifying terrorism.”

Marxen shared a screenshot of the virtually identical email he sent, also on October 18, with The Intercept. Though there are a few small changes — Marxen’s email refers to “a seige [sic] upon all of Gaza” whereas Khamati’s cites “the complete destitution of Gaza” — both contain verbatim language connecting the October 7 attack to Israel’s past treatment of Palestinians.

Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini told The Intercept, “We follow up on every concern raised, and in this case, dozens of employees reported this individual’s email – not the sharing of the petition itself – for including language that did not follow our workplace policies.” Mencini declined to say which workplace policies Khatami’s email allegedly violated, whether other organizers had gotten HR calls, or if any other company personnel had been approached by Employee Relations for comments made about the war.

The incident comes just one year after former Google employee Ariel Koren said the company attempted to force her to relocate to Brazil in retaliation for her early anti-Nimbus organizing. Koren later quit in protest and remains active in advocating against the contract. Project Nimbus, despite the dissent, remains in place, in part because of contractual terms put in place by Israel forbidding Google from cutting off service in response to political pressure or boycott campaigns.

Dark Clouds Over Nimbus

Dissent at Google is neither rare nor ineffective. Employee opposition to controversial military contracts has previously pushed the company to drop plans to help with the Pentagon’s drone warfare program and a planned Chinese version of Google Search that would filter out results unwanted by the Chinese government. Nimbus, however, has managed to survive.

In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks against Israel and resulting Israeli counteroffensive, now in its second month of airstrikes and a more recent ground invasion, Project Nimbus is again a flashpoint within the company.

With the rank and file disturbed by the company’s role as a defense contractor, Google has attempted to downplay the military nature of the contract.

Mencini, the Google spokesperson, said that anti-Nimbus organizers were “misrepresenting” the contract’s military role.

“This is part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google,” Mencini said. “We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education. Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”

Nimbus training documents published by The Intercept last year, however, show the company was pitching its use for the Ministry of Defense. Moreover, the Israeli government itself is open about the military applications of Project Nimbus: A 2023 press release by the Israeli Ministry of Finance specifically names the Israel Defense Forces as a beneficiary, while an overview written by the country’s National Digital Agency describes the contract as “a comprehensive and in-depth solution to the provision of public cloud services to the Government, the defense establishment and other public organizations.”

“If we do not speak out now, we are complicit in what history will remember as a genocide.”

Against this backdrop, Khatami, in coordination with others in the worker-led anti-Nimbus campaign, sent his October 18 note to internal Arab and Middle Eastern affinity groups laying out their argument against the project and asking like-minded colleagues to sign an employee petition.

“Through Project Nimbus, Google is complicit in the mass surveillance and other human rights abuses which Palestinians have been subject to daily for the past 75 years, and which is the root cause of the violence initiated on October 7th,” the letter said. “If we do not speak out now, we are complicit in what history will remember as a genocide.”

On October 30, Khatami received an email from Google’s Employee Relations division informing him that he would soon be questioned by company representatives regarding “a concern about your conduct that has been brought to our attention.”

According to Khatami, in the ensuing phone call, Google HR pressed him about the portion of his email that made a historical connection between the October 7 Hamas attack and the 75 years of Israeli rights abuses that preceded it, claiming some of his co-workers believed he was endorsing violence. Khatami recalled being asked, “Can you see how people are thinking you’re justifying the terrorism on October 7th?”

Khatami said he and his fellow anti-Nimbus organizers were in no way endorsing the violence against Israeli civilians — just as they now oppose the deaths of more than 10,000 Palestinians, according to the latest figures from Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Rather, the Google employees wanted to provide sociopolitical context for Project Nimbus, part of a broader employee-led effort of “demilitarizing our company that was never meant to be militarized.” To point out the relevant background leading to the October 7 attack, he said, is not to approve it.

“We wrote that the root cause of the violence is the occupation,” Khatami explained. “Analysis is not justification.”

Double Standard

Khatami also objects to what he said is a double standard within Google about what speech about the war is tolerated, a source of ongoing turmoil at the company. The day after his original email, a Google employee responded angrily to the email chain: “Accusing Israel of genocide and Google of being complicit is a grave accusation!” This employee, who works at the company’s cloud computing division, itself at the core of Project Nimbus, continued:

To break it down for you, project nimbus contributes to Israel’s security. Therefore, any calls to drop it are meant to weaken Israel’s security. If Israel’s security is weak, then the prospect of more terrorist attacks, like the one we saw on October 7, is high. Terrorist attacks will result in casualties that will affect YOUR Israeli colleagues and their family. Attacks will be retaliated by Israel which will result in casualties that will affect your Palestinian colleagues and their family (because they are used as shields by the terrorists)…bottom line, a secured Israel means less lives lost! Therefore if you have the good intention to preserve human lives then you MUST support project Nimbus!

While Khatami disagrees strongly with the overall argument in the response email, he objected in particular to the co-worker’s claim that Israel is killing Palestinians “because they are used as shields by the terrorists” — a justification of violence far more explicit than the one he was accused of, he said. Khatami questioned whether widespread references to the inviolability of Israeli self-defense by Google employees have provoked treatment from HR similar to what he received after his email about Nimbus.

Internal employee communications viewed by The Intercept show tensions within Google over the Israeli–Palestinian conflict aren’t limited to debates over Project Nimbus. A screenshots viewed by The Intercept shows an Israeli Google employee repeatedly asking Middle Eastern colleagues if they support Hamas, while another shows a Google engineer suggesting Palestinians worried about the welfare of their children should simply stop having kids. Another lamented “friends and family [who] are slaughtered by the Gaza-grown group of bloodthirsty animals.”

According to a recent New York Times report, which found “at least one” instance of “overtly antisemitic” content posted through internal Google channels, “one worker had been fired after writing in an internal company message board that Israelis living near Gaza ‘deserved to be impacted.’”

Another screenshot reviewed by The Intercept, taken from an email group for Israeli Google staff, shows employees discussing a post by a colleague criticizing the Israeli occupation and encouraging donations to a Gaza relief fund.

“During this time we all need to stay strong as a nation and united,” one Google employee replied in the email group. “As if we are not going through enough suffering, we will unfortunately see many emails, comments either internally or on social media that are pro Hamas and clearly anti semitic. report immediately!” Another added: “People like that make me sick. But she is a lost cause.” A third chimed in to say they had internally reported the colleague soliciting donations. A separate post soliciting donations for the same Gaza relief fund was downvoted 139 times on an internal message board, according to another screenshot, while a post stating only “Killing civilians is indefensible” received 51 downvotes.

While Khatami says he was unnerved and disheartened by the HR grilling, he’s still committed to organizing against Project Nimbus.

“It definitely emotionally affected me, it definitely made me significantly more fearful or organizing in this space,” he said. “But I think knowing that people are dying right now and slaughtered in a genocide that’s aided and abetted by my company, remembering that makes the fear go away.”

The post Google Activists Circulated Internal Petition on Israel Ties. Only the Muslim Got a Call from HR. appeared first on The Intercept.

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As Israel imposed an internet blackout in Gaza on Friday, social media users posting about the grim conditions have contended with erratic and often unexplained censorship of content related to Palestine on Instagram and Facebook.

Since Israel launched retaliatory airstrikes in Gaza after the October 7 Hamas attack, Facebook and Instagram users have reported widespread deletions of their content, translations inserting the word “terrorist” into Palestinian Instagram profiles, and suppressed hashtags. Instagram comments containing the Palestinian flag emoji have also been hidden, according to 7amleh, a Palestinian digital rights group that formally collaborates with Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, on regional speech issues.

Numerous users have reported to 7amleh that their comments were moved to the bottom of the comments section and require a click to display. Many of the remarks have something in common: “It often seemed to coincide with having a Palestinian flag in the comment,” 7amleh spokesperson Eric Sype told The Intercept.

Users report that Instagram had flagged and hidden comments containing the emoji as “potentially offensive,” TechCrunch first reported last week. Meta has routinely attributed similar instances of alleged censorship to technical glitches. Meta confirmed to The Intercept that the company has been hiding comments that contain the Palestinian flag emoji in certain “offensive” contexts that violate the company’s rules.

“The notion of finding a flag offensive is deeply distressing for Palestinians,” Mona Shtaya, a nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy who follows Meta’s policymaking on speech, told The Intercept.

“The notion of finding a flag offensive is deeply distressing for Palestinians.”

Asked about the contexts in which Meta hides the flag, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone pointed to the Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which designates Hamas as a terrorist organization, and cited a section of the Community Standards rulebook that prohibits any content “praising, celebrating or mocking anyone’s death.”

It remains unclear, however, precisely how Meta determines whether the use of the flag emoji is offensive enough to suppress. The Intercept reviewed several hidden comments containing the Palestinian flag emoji that had no reference to Hamas or any other banned group. The Palestinian flag itself has no formal association with Hamas and predates the militant group by decades.

Some of the hidden comments reviewed by The Intercept only contained emojis and no other text. In one, a user commented on an Instagram video of a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Jordan with green, white, and black heart emojis corresponding to the colors of the Palestinian flag, along with emojis of the Moroccan and Palestinian flags. In another, a user posted just three Palestinian flag emojis. Another screenshot seen by The Intercept shows two hidden comments consisting only of the hashtags #Gaza, #gazaunderattack, #freepalestine, and #ceasefirenow.

“Throughout our long history, we’ve endured moments where our right to display the Palestinian flag has been denied by Israeli authorities. Decades ago, Palestinian artists Nabil Anani and Suleiman Mansour ingeniously used a watermelon as a symbol of our flag,” Shtaya said. “When Meta engages in such practices, it echoes the oppressive measures imposed on Palestinians.”

Faulty Content Moderation

Instagram and Facebook users have taken to other social media platforms to report other instances of censorship. On X, formerly known as Twitter, one user posted that Facebook blocked a screenshot of a popular Palestinian Instagram account he tried to share with a friend via private message. The message was flagged as containing nonconsensual sexual images, and his account was suspended.

On Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram users reported that attempts to share national security reporter Spencer Ackerman’s recent article criticizing President Joe Biden’s support of Israel were blocked and flagged as cybersecurity risks.

On Friday, the news site Mondoweiss tweeted a screenshot of an Instagram video about Israeli arrests of Palestinians in the West Bank that was removed because it violated the dangerous organizations policy.

Meta’s increasing reliance on automated, software-based content moderation may prevent people from having to sort through extremely disturbing and potentially traumatizing images. The technology, however, relies on opaque, unaccountable algorithms that introduce the potential to misfire, censoring content without explanation. The issue appears to extend to posts related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

An independent audit commissioned by Meta last year determined that the company’s moderation practices amounted to a violation of Palestinian users’ human rights. The audit also concluded that the Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy — which speech advocates have criticized for its opacity and overrepresentation of Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asians — was “more likely to impact Palestinian and Arabic-speaking users, both based upon Meta’s interpretation of legal obligations, and in error.”

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta recently dialed down the level of confidence its automated systems require before suppressing “hostile speech” to 25 percent for the Palestinian market, a significant decrease from the standard threshold of 80 percent.

The audit also faulted Meta for implementing a software scanning tool to detect violent or racist incitement in Arabic, but not for posts in Hebrew. “Arabic classifiers are likely less accurate for Palestinian Arabic than other dialects … due to lack of linguistic and cultural competence,” the report found.

“Since the beginning of this crisis, we have received hundreds of submissions documenting incitement to violence in Hebrew.”

Despite Meta’s claim that the company developed a speech classifier for Hebrew in response to the audit, hostile speech and violent incitement in Hebrew are rampant on Instagram and Facebook, according to 7amleh.

“Based on our monitoring and documentation, it seems to be very ineffective,” 7amleh executive director and co-founder Nadim Nashif said of the Hebrew classifier. “Since the beginning of this crisis, we have received hundreds of submissions documenting incitement to violence in Hebrew, that clearly violate Meta’s policies, but are still on the platforms.”

An Instagram search for a Hebrew-language hashtag roughly meaning “erase Gaza” produced dozens of results at the time of publication. Meta could not be immediately reached for comment on the accuracy of its Hebrew speech classifier.

The Wall Street Journal shed light on why hostile speech in Hebrew still appears on Instagram. “Earlier this month,” the paper reported, “the company internally acknowledged that it hadn’t been using its Hebrew hostile speech classifier on Instagram comments because it didn’t have enough data for the system to function adequately.”

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Instagram and Facebook users attempting to share scenes of devastation from a crowded hospital in Gaza City claim their posts are being suppressed, despite previous company policies protecting the publication of violent, newsworthy scenes of civilian death.

Late Tuesday, amid a 10-day bombing campaign by Israel, the Gaza Strip’s al-Ahli Hospital was rocked by an explosion that left hundreds of civilians killed and wounded. Footage of the flaming exterior of the hospital, as well as dead and wounded civilians, including children, quickly emerged on social media in the aftermath of the attack.

While the Palestinian Ministry of Health in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip blamed the explosion on an Israeli airstrike, the Israeli military later said the blast was caused by an errant rocket misfired by militants from the Gaza-based group Islamic Jihad.

While widespread electrical outages and Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure have made getting documentation out of the besieged territory difficult, some purported imagery of the hospital attack making its way to the internet appears to be activating the censorship tripwires of Meta, the social media giant that owns Instagram and Facebook.

Since Hamas’s surprise attack against Israel on October 7 and amid the resulting Israeli bombardment of Gaza, groups monitoring regional social media activity say censorship of Palestinian users is at a level not seen since May 2021, when violence flared between Israel and Gaza following Israeli police incursions into Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.

Two years ago, Meta blamed the abrupt deletion of Instagram posts about Israeli military violence on a technical glitch. On October 15, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone again attributed claims of wartime censorship on a “bug” affecting Instagram. (Meta could not be immediately reached for comment.)

“It’s censorship mayhem like 2021. But it’s more sinister given the internet shutdown in Gaza.”

Since the latest war began, Instagram and Facebook users inside and outside of the Gaza Strip have complained of deleted posts, locked accounts, blocked searches, and other impediments to sharing timely information about the Israeli bombardment and general conditions on the ground. 7amleh, a Palestinian digital rights group that collaborates directly with Meta on speech issues, has documented over hundreds user complaints of censored posts about the war, according to spokesperson Eric Sype, far outpacing deletion levels seen two years ago.

“It’s censorship mayhem like 2021,” Marwa Fatafta, a policy analyst with the digital rights group Access Now, told The Intercept. “But it’s more sinister given the internet shutdown in Gaza.”

In other cases, users have successfully uploaded graphic imagery from al-Ahli to Instagram, suggesting that takedowns are not due to any formal policy on Meta’s end, but a product of the company’s at times erratic combination of outsourced human moderation and automated image-flagging software.

Alleged Photo of Gaza Hospital Bombing

One image rapidly circulating social media platforms following the blast depicts what appears to be the flaming exterior of the hospital, where a clothed man is lying beside a pool of blood, his torso bloodied.

According to screenshots shared with The Intercept by Fatafta, Meta platform users who shared this image had their posts removed or were prompted to remove them themselves because the picture violated policies forbidding “nudity or sexual activity.” Mona Shtaya, nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, confirmed she had also gotten reports of two instances of this same image deleted. (The Intercept could not independently verify that the image was of al-Ahli Hospital.)

One screenshot shows a user notified that Instagram had removed their upload of the photo, noting that the platform forbids “showing someone’s genitals or buttocks” or “implying sexual activity.” The underlying photo does not appear to show anything resembling either category of image.

In another screenshot, a Facebook user who shared the same image was told their post had been uploaded, “but it looks similar to other posts that were removed because they don’t follow our standards on nudity or sexual activity.” The user was prompted to delete the post. The language in the notification suggests the image may have triggered one of the company’s automated, software-based content moderation systems, as opposed to a human review.

Meta has previously distributed internal policy language instructing its moderators to not remove gruesome documentation of Russian airstrikes against Ukrainian civilians, though no such carveout is known to have been provided for Palestinians, whether today or in the past. Last year, a third-party audit commissioned by Meta found that systemic, unwarranted censorship of Palestinian users amounted to a violation of their human rights.

The post Instagram Censored Image of Gaza Hospital Bombing, Claims It’s Too Sexual appeared first on The Intercept.

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Amid a heavy retaliatory air and artillery assault by Israel against the Gaza Strip on October 10, Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted a message on Facebook to residents of the al-Daraj neighborhood, urging them to leave their homes in advance of impending airstrikes.

It’s not clear how most people in al-Daraj were supposed to see the warning: Intense fighting and electrical shortages have strangled Palestinian access to the internet, putting besieged civilians at even greater risk.

Following Hamas’s grisly surprise attack across the Gaza border on October 7, the Israeli counterattack — a widespread and indiscriminate bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip — left the two million Palestinians who call the area home struggling to connect to the internet at a time when access to current information is crucial and potentially lifesaving.

“Shutting down the internet in armed conflict is putting civilians at risk.”

“Shutting down the internet in armed conflict is putting civilians at risk,” Deborah Brown, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Intercept. “It could help contribute to injury or death because people communicate around what are safe places and conditions.”

According to companies and research organizations that monitor the global flow of internet traffic, Gazan access to the internet has dramatically dropped since Israeli strikes began, with data service cut entirely for some customers.

“My sense is that very few people in Gaza have internet service,” Doug Madory of the internet monitoring firm Kentik told The Intercept. Madory said he spoke to a contact working with an internet service provider, or ISP, in Gaza who told him that internet access has been reduced by 80 to 90 percent because of a lack of fuel and power, and airstrikes.

As causes of the outages, Marwa Fatafta, a policy analyst with the digital rights group Access Now, cited Israeli strikes against office buildings housing Gazan telecommunications firms, such as the now-demolished Al-Watan Tower, as a major factor, in addition to damage to the electrical grid.

Fatafta told The Intercept, “There is a near complete information blackout from Gaza.”

Most Gaza ISPs Are Gone

With communications infrastructure left in rubble, Gazans now increasingly find themselves in a digital void at a time when data access is most crucial.

“People in Gaza need access to the internet and telecommunications to check on their family and loved ones, seek life-saving information amidst the ongoing Israeli barrage on the strip; it’s crucial to document the war crimes and human rights abuses committed by Israeli forces at a time when disinformation is going haywire on social media,” Fatafta said.

“There is some slight connectivity,” Alp Toker of the internet outage monitoring firm NetBlocks told The Intercept, but “most of the ISPs based inside of Gaza are gone.”

Though it’s difficult to be certain whether these outages are due to electrical shortages, Israeli ordnance, or both, Toker said that, based on reports he has received from Gazan internet providers, the root cause is the Israeli destruction of fiber optic cables connecting Gaza. The ISPs are generally aware of where their infrastructure is damaged or destroyed, Toker said, but ongoing Israeli airstrikes will make sending a crew to patch them too dangerous to attempt. Still, one popular Gazan internet provider, Fusion, wrote in a Facebook post to its customers that efforts to repair damaged infrastructure were ongoing.

That Gazan internet access remains in place at all, Toker said, is probably due to the use of backup generators that could soon run out of fuel in the face of an intensified Israeli military blockade. (Toker also said that, while it’s unclear if it was due to damage from Hamas rockets or a manual blackout, NetBlocks detected an internet service disruption inside Israel at the start of the attack, but that it quickly subsided.)

Amanda Meng, a research scientist at Georgia Tech who works on the university’s Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project, or IODA, estimated Gazan internet connectivity has dropped by around 55 percent in the recent days, meaning over half the networks inside Gaza have gone dark and no longer respond to the outside internet. Meng compared this level of access disruption to what’s been previously observed in Ukraine and Sudan during recent warfare in those countries. In Gaza, Border Gateway Protocol activity, an obscure system that routes data from one computer to another and undergirds the entire internet, has also seen disruptions.

“On the ground, this looks like people not being able to use networked communication devices that rely on the Internet,” Meng explained.

Organizations like NetBlocks and IODA all used varying techniques to measure internet traffic, and their results tend to vary. It’s also nearly impossible to tell from the other side of the world whether a sudden dip in service is due to an explosion or something else. In addition to methodological differences and the fog of war, however, is an added wrinkle: Like almost everything else in Gaza, ISPs connect to the broader internet through Israeli infrastructure.

“By law, Gaza internet connectivity must go through Israeli infrastructure to connect to the outside world, so there is a possibility that the Israelis could leave it up because they are able to intercept communications,” said Madory of Kentik.

Fatafta, the policy analyst, also cited Israel’s power to keep Gaza offline — but both in this war and in general. “Israel’s full control of Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure and long-standing ban on technology upgrades” is an immense impediment, she said. With the wider internet blockaded, she said, “people in Gaza can only access slow and unreliable 2G services” — a cellular standard from 1991.

While Israel is reportedly also using analog means to warn Palestinians, their effectiveness is not always clear: “Palestinian residents of the city of Beit Lahiya in the northern region of the Gaza Strip said Thursday that Israeli planes dropped flyers warning them to evacuate their homes,” according to the Associated Press. “The area had already been heavily struck by the time the flyers were dropped.”

The post Israel Warns Palestinians on Facebook — But Bombings Decimated Gaza Internet Access appeared first on The Intercept.

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A program spearheaded by the World Bank that uses algorithmic decision-making to means-test poverty relief money is failing the very people it’s intended to protect, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch. The anti-poverty program in question, known as the Unified Cash Transfer Program, was put in place by the Jordanian government.

Having software systems make important choices is often billed as a means of making those choices more rational, fair, and effective. In the case of the poverty relief program, however, the Human Rights Watch investigation found the algorithm relies on stereotypes and faulty assumptions about poverty.

“Its formula also flattens the economic complexity of people’s lives into a crude ranking.”

“The problem is not merely that the algorithm relies on inaccurate and unreliable data about people’s finances,” the report found. “Its formula also flattens the economic complexity of people’s lives into a crude ranking that pits one household against another, fueling social tension and perceptions of unfairness.”

The program, known in Jordan as Takaful, is meant to solve a real problem: The World Bank provided the Jordanian state with a multibillion-dollar poverty relief loan, but it’s impossible for the loan to cover all of Jordan’s needs.  

Without enough cash to cut every needy Jordanian a check, Takaful works by analyzing the household income and expenses of every applicant, along with nearly 60 socioeconomic factors like electricity use, car ownership, business licenses, employment history, illness, and gender. These responses are then ranked — using a secret algorithm — to automatically determine who are the poorest and most deserving of relief. The idea is that such a sorting algorithm would direct cash to the most vulnerable Jordanians who are in most dire need of it. According to Human Rights Watch, the algorithm is broken.

The rights group’s investigation found that car ownership seems to be a disqualifying factor for many Takaful applicants, even if they are too poor to buy gas to drive the car.

Similarly, applicants are penalized for using electricity and water based on the presumption that their ability to afford utility payments is evidence that they are not as destitute as those who can’t. The Human Rights Watch report, however, explains that sometimes electricity usage is high precisely for poverty-related reasons. “For example, a 2020 study of housing sustainability in Amman found that almost 75 percent of low-to-middle income households surveyed lived in apartments with poor thermal insulation, making them more expensive to heat.”

In other cases, one Jordanian household may be using more electricity than their neighbors because they are stuck with old, energy-inefficient home appliances.

Beyond the technical problems with Takaful itself are the knock-on effects of digital means-testing. The report notes that many people in dire need of relief money lack the internet access to even apply for it, requiring them to find, or pay for, a ride to an internet café, where they are subject to further fees and charges to get online.

“Who needs money?” asked one 29-year-old Jordanian Takaful recipient who spoke to Human Rights Watch. “The people who really don’t know how [to apply] or don’t have internet or computer access.”

Human Rights Watch also faulted Takaful’s insistence that applicants’ self-reported income match up exactly with their self-reported household expenses, which “fails to recognize how people struggle to make ends meet, or their reliance on credit, support from family, and other ad hoc measures to bridge the gap.”

The report found that the rigidity of this step forced people to simply fudge the numbers so that their applications would even be processed, undermining the algorithm’s illusion of objectivity. “Forcing people to mold their hardships to fit the algorithm’s calculus of need,” the report said, “undermines Takaful’s targeting accuracy, and claims by the government and the World Bank that this is the most effective way to maximize limited resources.”

The report, based on 70 interviews with Takaful applicants, Jordanian government workers, and World Bank personnel, emphasizes that the system is part of a broader trend by the World Bank to popularize algorithmically means-tested social benefits over universal programs throughout the developing economies in the so-called Global South.

Confounding the dysfunction of an algorithmic program like Takaful is the increasingly held naïve assumption that automated decision-making software is so sophisticated that its results are less likely to be faulty. Just as dazzled ChatGPT users often accept nonsense outputs from the chatbot because the concept of a convincing chatbot is so inherently impressive, artificial intelligence ethicists warn the veneer of automated intelligence surrounding automated welfare distribution leads to a similar myopia.

The Jordanian government’s official statement to Human Rights Watch defending Takaful’s underlying technology provides a perfect example: “The methodology categorizes poor households to 10 layers, starting from the poorest to the least poor, then each layer includes 100 sub-layers, using statistical analysis. Thus, resulting in 1,000 readings that differentiate amongst households’ unique welfare status and needs.”

“These are technical words that don’t make any sense together.”

When Human Rights Watch asked the Distributed AI Research Institute to review these remarks, Alex Hanna, the group’s director of research, concluded, “These are technical words that don’t make any sense together.” DAIR senior researcher Nyalleng Moorosi added, “I think they are using this language as technical obfuscation.”

As is the case with virtually all automated decision-making systems, while the people who designed Takaful insist on its fairness and functionality, they refuse to let anyone look under the hood. Though it’s known Takaful uses 57 different criteria to rank poorness, the report notes that the Jordanian National Aid Fund, which administers the system, “declined to disclose the full list of indicators and the specific weights assigned, saying that these were for internal purposes only and ‘constantly changing.’”

While fantastical visions of “Terminator”-like artificial intelligences have come to dominate public fears around automated decision-making, other technologists argue civil society ought to focus on real, current harms caused by systems like Takaful, not nightmare scenarios drawn from science fiction.

So long as the functionality of Takaful and its ilk remain government and corporate secrets, the extent of those risks will remain unknown.

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