# No Tech for Apartheid | Eslem Demirel, Tobi and Jaya Klara Brekke - Speakers: [Jaya Klara Brekke](https://streameth.org/speakers/jaya-klara-brekke) - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2026-08-09 - Duration: 28:31 - Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-3jFGpXRurYA - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jFGpXRurYA ## Description Right now we are in the midst of the first AI-powered genocide in the history of humankind. There is no longer a separation between Big Tech companies and government. Today, Big Tech is supplying the military with the most advanced tools to optimise surveillance, targeting and killing. The Pentagon proudly presents Palantir's latest 3-point click tool to execute a manual kill-chain. Most of these new systems that are relying on Big Tech are by design not classical dual-use software. These depend on ongoing maintenance and servicing by Big Tech employees. Ordinary software engineers are actively de-bugging code for live systems, effectively rendering them active participants in the battlefield. Importantly, Big Tech employees are not a homogenous group of developers eager to create tools for war. Most Big Tech employees are either being lied to and presented with false ethical standards by their workplace or explicitly censored when questioning the use of their labor. This is why as No Tech for Apartheid, we believe to reclaim tech means to unionise tech workers. It means to actively develop a collective conscience, to build community and to practice empathy and integrity. Together we can reclaim tech to reclaim our agency over the future. Panelists Eslem Demirel — No Tech for Apartheid https://notechforapartheid.com/ Tobi — No Tech for Apartheid https://notechforapartheid.com/ Moderated by Jaya Klara Brekke — Nym https://nym.com/ https://x.com/jayapapaya Follow Web3Privacy Now: 🌐 https://new.web3privacy.info 𝕏 https://x.com/web3privacy 🦋 https://bsky.app/profile/web3privacy.info 📸 https://www.instagram.com/web3privacy_now/ 🎤 Neocypherpunk Summit: https://s26ber.web3privacy.info/ ## Transcript [applause] Hello. >> Hello. One, two. Here we go. Um, great. Uh, yeah, good to be here. My name is, uh, Ja. I, uh, have a job which is working at a company called NIM. Um, where we build privacy software. Um that's kind of where where I spend most of my time. Um I also have the pleasure of um running a series of discussions in London at an institute called Ibraz on technology and power um which I mentioned for the sole reason that I had the pleasure of hosting um someone else from notec from apartheite recently as part of that discussion series um Vicram Subramanayan who was telling um lots of people in London about note for apart height and what brought him to uh be part of the organization um namely its mission to get rid of and abolish project Nimbus um that's run by Google and Amazon um servicing the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Um so today I have two other wonderful wonderful members of no tech for aart for apart height um ELM and uh Toby. Um and we're going to get into a little bit of their own journey um what the organization does and also how um those of you who are keen to who might be keen to get involved um could do that and what it takes to become an activist um and uh achieve this mission of abolishing project Nimbus. Um, I might leave the kind of general intro at that and kind of turn to our wonderful guests. Uh, Eslam, do you want to introduce yourself and maybe talk a little bit about your journey? Um, you used to work in big tech, now you're full-time with NOTA. Um, how did that journey play out? What brought you to that mission? What was your moment of realization? Um, yeah, please do introduce yourself. >> Thank you. Hello. I am Islam Islam de I uh used to work for big tech um and now I am fully organizing with no tech for aparttheide. Um what brought me to this mission is mainly I realized that um big tech is directly deploying us as um big tech workers to the battlefield without our consent. This means that we are complicit in war crimes and genocide, occupation and killing. And I no longer wanted to be complicit in such a system. And I think it was important for me to reclaim my agency and say I no longer want to be part of this and do something about it. And uh Toby, you have been a scientist in the area of AI for about 10 years, but you also have a background working um campaigning in the kind of stop killer robots uh campaign um which is I think a lobby organization, correct? >> Yeah, it's a coalition. It's a coalition. Yeah. >> Yeah. Do you want to go into a little bit that kind of like backdrop and then what led you to become part of because now you're also full-time with NOTA, right? >> Yeah. Sam Topi also a full-time activist with not tech for a parttheide. So I was an AI researcher for about 10 years or for over a decade now I was always worried about some of the negative applications of technology for example autonomous weapons so machines that kill without human intervention. Uh because of this I worked with the campaign to stop kill robots for the last five years or so. So that campaign aims to regulate autonomous weapons internationally. Essentially getting the states to agree on international treaties to regulate these weapons. About two three years ago, the big tech companies and the big AI companies one way or another all started building autonomous weapons. So this completely [ __ ] over these attempts to regulate these weapons. Essentially totally destroyed that process. At that point, I realized that even with working in tech, as much as I love proving theorems and writing programs and building robots, um, with my labor there, even doing activism on the side to regulate these things, that simply wasn't going to happen. These weapons were going to be built by these companies. Um, and at that moment, I realized I needed to reclaim agency over my life, the tech, what I was doing. Um and yeah and I needed to directly address the problem here which is the big tech companies and the big AI companies. So that's how I got here. >> Um and uh here we are. Do you want to talk a little bit about um NOTA and some of the actions that um you've been up to and the kind of the state of the coalition so far because it's an open decentralized network effectively um of groups of people that can get involved and reclaim their own agency. Correct. Um do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. Um, so we're up to a variety of things. Um, we do community building. So, we basically get tech workers and the public, other people to show up uh every two weeks in different cities, have conversations together, have a space where they can essentially feel free to speak about um the things that they experience, the things that they care about, and we encourage them to work together on things. Um, so for example, recently we've have some tech workers in Surirk by themselves deciding to map out all the big tech companies in their city and document the corporate crimes that they're complicit in. Make a website so that it's available to everyone just as a as a side project. I don't know, maybe Eston can talk about some of the other things we've been up to. >> Yeah, I mean the main goal of these gatherings is not really the product they bring. like we don't expect some local group to come up with really fancy um solutions to the militarization of technology, but it is actually a practice to reclaim agency on a bi-weekly basis that you go to a space, you talk about the militarization of tech and you do something about it. This is the most important part that people actually reclaim agency to have a say to push back and to organize in a safe environment where they can um get resources from not where we can provide financial and legal support for all these projects. Um some of our projects are also um more accountability actions. Um for example, we are also quite involved in direct action against big tech. Um we have various ways to hold big tech companies accountable. Um we have uh last year uh disrupted the AI for good conference in Geneva where a lot of big tech companies received a platform to kind of ethics wash their tech saying we are doing AI for good and we claimed the space and we claimed the stage and said um how can you talk about AI for good when we are in the midst of the first AI powered genocide in the history of humankind. This is irresponsible and it's ignorant. And I think the important part there is that we take the space. We stop asking for permission or any representation to take action. We just go and do it, fix it ourselves. Can you maybe both speak a little bit more about that kind of um feeling of reclaiming agency and maybe also in the context of um the response that you've been getting so far as you go out and you you're kind of setting up new local branches and so on. Um because you know obviously I think it's kind of fairly well known that the leadership of most big tech companies is very aligned with Israel. Um but it seems like there's a little bit there's quite a big difference between leadership and actual employees. Um so is that true? What's the kind of reactions you've been getting so far? What's the interest? What's the kind of energy that you're feeling around this topic? >> Yeah, I would say that there's two things. I mean there's how it feels on an individual level for me. So having had this experience with activism with essentially expecting governments to solve the problems for us and going out and supporting them in that to just wake up every day and feel see problems and feel fully responsible for solving them directly um feels good. It's a liberating feeling to just do it instead of asking anyone for permission. And then as to the second or as to speaking to people about it, um it's also a very interesting experience. Um sometimes people seem surprised that this is an option that they can just do that. Um and I think this is something that we've really especially with the tech workers. It's something that they've been conditioned to do to just follow orders. They exist within these hierarchies where this is essentially you know this is what they do every day. And it really takes this process of psychologically debugging yourself. It's it's an active process that you have to do every day. Um but people are kind of surprised when we tell them they can just do it and then once they start doing it, they get excited. Um so yeah, this is actually a kind of an overwhelming and inspiring experience to go out and speak about this and to see people reclaiming agency over their own tech and their own lives. >> Yeah. One interesting example for example was we were flying at Google in Zurich and it was a lot of Google engineers also part taking part in flying and so we had the permit from the union to just stand there. I mean we just asked hey can we go and they said yeah sure and first uh the security of Google showed up. They were like hey what are you doing this is political and we were like hey your property is until here and I'm standing here so you have no say. And then they called the police and the police showed up and hey, what are you do? Do you have a permit? And we said, yeah, we're from the union. And they said, oh [ __ ] we would have loved to arrest you. And then they left. But it's funny because so many Googlers come and they have a really like pre-made opinion about the group. Um, it seems like no tech for apart got really public and is known. So a lot of Googlers are like, "Yeah, I know your I know your group. Yeah, I'm going to join the next meeting. But some are like really like angry. They're like, "So who's going to so if we are not going to produce tech for defense, do you are we going to let China do it?" And we're like, "Okay, if that's your biggest concern, that's like nice." But essentially, the most interesting part is that big tech doesn't want their employees to have this political debate. And you can see this by all the content moderation. Like if there was this thread in Google that was like a meme channel kind of and there was just a post where somebody had a black background and they just put the words genocide is bad and it got censored immediately. It's not even a political state. It's international law. It's like common sense. Genocide is bad. Um but somehow there this triggered somebody and they just deleted it or like another person posted like uh the research of Franchesca Albanza on the occupation of at the economy of occupation um to the economy of genocide and literally the co-founder of Google like Sergey bringing he just shows up in a random small chat and he's like hey the UN is publicly anti-sem anti semi we shouldn't we shouldn't talk about the like this is funny and the amount of censorship just shows how important the opinion of tech workers are like it is the level of censorship is so ridiculous that you can tell they they are actually in power the tech workers are in power and their opinion matters >> yeah I think that's a really essential point here because that I think in the in the public imagination There's a little bit this idea that, you know, you have people that build software and then you have these semi-autonomous, you know, weapons that then go off and do things on their own and really, you know, what power do we have to stop them because the the weapons are just out there doing their thing. But the point that I've been hearing both of you make over and over again today is that like the workers do have the power and in fact these systems require a lot of maintenance. Um, I'm wondering if like it's worth going into the systems at all. We want to kind of talk about um what project Nimbus actually is and um how it kind of has powered for example Lavender and where is Daddy um AI targeting uh systems that you know led to you know I think 57,000 killings in the first couple weeks alone of the genocide. Um I'm I'm I'm sure probably a lot of the audience actually is aware of these systems already, but it might be worth kind of um just talking through them. Yeah, >> I mean um so project Nimbus is a joint project by Amazon, Google and now also Anthropic. Um it's 1.2 billion worth and it's running since 2021. It was signed in Dublin on the side of Google at least and essentially um this project um has been running and since October 2023 there has been more and more requests of these of um Israel to get access to Google and uh Amazon clouds especially um to store surveillance data on Palestinians and to optimize targeting and killing. And um essentially what uh project Nimbus is doing is uh providing cloud and AI services to the Israeli occupation forces and by um providing this amount of storage and computation. Um, the Israeli occupation forces are the first kind of group of people that ever have this amount of data and technology um to actually commit a genocide at this scale. In the beginning, I said we are in the first AI powered genocide in the history of humankind. What does this mean? It means that we have insanely evolved um technology that is given to the hands of people that are ready to commit war crimes, genocide. And these war crimes and genocides are being carried out with technology that the tech workers didn't sign up for. This is technology that's being misused. like I think at the tech no at the last IDF conference in the 2025 um they admitted that they used Google photos uh to uh target associates of uh targets and this is do you think anyone that worked on Google photos ever thought they will be complicit in a genocide like this entire pitch of Google Photos was to have your photos stored somewhere and you can have a category with your cat, your mom, your sister and then you have a good overview of your photos and like the idea of it was to be practical and very useful and everyone that worked on Google photos had like this assurance that there's a code of conduct and you are doing this so you improve society and everyone has more access to their folders. But this being misused is a violation and I can go more into the details of this violation but maybe you can talk more about lavender and gospel over studying. >> Yeah. Right. So the lavender the gospel system was a system essentially for target generation. So in the beginning of the genocide very quickly the IDF, the Israeli military found themselves in the situation where they had more weapons to deploy than they had targets to deploy those weapons against. So they came up with an AI system essentially based on surveillance on tracking people's phones. The AI system would then say the owner of this phone is a Hamas operative with um a score of 0.7 where for example where one means for sure Hamas operative zero means civilian. They would then basically just adjust the threshold to whatever it was just a number being spat out by the machine. It would then generate targets and then these targets would then be approved by a human and then set down the kill chain essentially meaning that the mobile phone would be bombed um with where's daddy it would even be bombed when the phone was at a residential building. So after this person returned home they would bomb the home of the person taking out their families as well. Now, due to whistleblowers within the Israeli military, we know that this critical decision in the middle where a human approved the target that was generated by the AI system took on average 10 seconds and amounted to listening to a call on the surveiled phone. Is the voice male? It's male. Okay. Kill. So, this is a system. This is not even an autonomous weapon, but it's one of these examples of AI enabled sort of surveillance-l like systems. AI a AI AI powered weapon systems that are that dehumanize essentially and make humans do things that they wouldn't otherwise do or at least make the thing the horrible things that they want to do more scalable, more efficient. >> Um yeah, so that's what we're up against. Uh and again to come back to the kind of power and agency that there exists to resist these systems. Um do you want to talk a little bit about the coalitions that have been built across workers in other sectors as well? >> Yeah. Like uh >> Oh yeah. Yeah. Um so we have now our first big coalition with the dock workers in Italy. The dock workers have blocked the successfully blocked the shipment of um war material to Israel uh last year at the historic blockyamotuto strike. So there was a a a call for action after the Sumud Flotilla, this humanitarian aid mission got intercepted and there was a call by the dock workers to block all shipment uh of uh war material to Israel and uh they were extremely successful because there were um fallouts and we have now successfully started a coalition um with the dock workers to also reclaim blame our agency over technology and stop the providing of and the servicing of uh tech for apartheid. >> I would maybe also add to that of why does it matter that these big tech workers go on strike. So for example in sururk where this is the main hub basically for the cloud Google's cloud you have a thousand cloud engineers that go to work every day the cloud is not something that just is there and just just runs on these machines and always works. It breaks constantly. The IDF requires this cloud in order to operate. If just 200 of these engineers don't go to work, the IDF cannot continue their genocide. It continuously breaks. Of course, they will replace the tech worker. Tech workers are a little bit harder to replace than many other workers, but not impossible. But it takes a week to found find a new engineer. So, if we can actually organize these tech workers to strike, it actually makes a tangible difference. it actually stops Israel from doing what it's doing in Rasa. >> Um so we are gonna start thinking if you guys could think about questions that you might want to ask um as Lemon and Toby. Um I have one last question um which is uh how can people get involved? How does one become an activist? Um and uh and if not an activist in terms of direct action, how can people support anchor for a parttheid at this point? Yeah, I mean just stop like if [laughter] you if you are in an industry that is actively involved and you know or you have a feeling and you want to talk about it just go to a not meeting launch not in your city contact us we have a website no techchforaparttheide.eu EU it's the European group or in if you're in the US there's an European American branch but join no tech for aparttheide um anyone can join the entire concept is that the people the entire public reclaims agency over the militarization of technology. So this means everyone has a say and there will be big tech employees, there will be artists, there will be designers, writers. The point is that everyone comes together at a table and says okay I have these skills I have identified these five cards I have on me. Now I'm going to use these five cards to the best of my ability to counter this to identify the the the most um tangible action in your city. For example, I don't know I go Berlin there's a Amazon tower. you can go flyer or like you can go inform do awareness events or like in some way to do community building because um there's not many third spaces outside of home and work where people can go to and also most big tech employees in Europe are on a work visa basis. So they usually just come to the city for work and they don't have any other idea of their rights or their any any any social connect their laws. They don't know their they have no concept. So they usually are depending on locally established groups. So to do community building is actually the biggest thing you can do against big tech. And as we know, the biggest fear that big tech has is um that their own employees develop a conscience and uh empathy and integrity and have compassion with the targets or the the people that are being targeted by the tools that they produce. Because when big tech employees ask questions, this lie starts to shatter and they start to get active and ask questions and then maybe they even are ready to act. Do you want to add anything to that, Toby? >> I think it was a pretty good ending. Maybe we should take the questions now. [applause] >> Take one. >> Yeah. First of all, thanks a lot for your work. Uh, it really means a lot. Uh, like so I'm also Palestinian, so for me it really means a lot. And I was wondering um do you have faced any like repercussions in your like um I mean in your career for sure but like in your private life did you have to deal with any attacks like cyber attacks like like [laughter] anything like that? >> First of all and second um yeah I mean they try to hack us but we have the best hackers in the world. [laughter] Maybe just a funny anecdote there, not to spend too much time on it. So there was a case in um in Switzerland in burn where the Swiss police were doxing Palestine protesters. So after a protest, they released a bunch of pixelated photos of the protesters. They said, "You have one or two weeks, 10 days. You have 10 days to turn yourselves in. Otherwise, we released the unpixelated photos." So at the same time as they launched their their website, two days later we launched our own website with all the heads of the the burn police pixelated and then 10 days later we also unpixelated it and then we just did some you know open publicly available information outlining basically how these what the opinions of these heads of police were the ties they had to the Zionist lobby and so on. Um, at some point after I think two weeks, we saw that we had about 20,000 failed login attempts to our website to the to the SSH. Um, then we put up an Instagram post with some clown music, you know, D like try harder. And the next day the number of login attempts had doubled. [laughter] >> Yeah. I mean, we have like people that are angry at our work, but we also have the best lawyers. [laughter] And if you want to support us and in our work um this I forgot to mention um we are currently trying to fund raise 2 million Swiss Franks um to be able to free capacities of people to do full-time note tech for apart height. So if you have any concept of financial like support or anything uh you can meet us after the event. >> Yes. [applause] There's >> one more. Okay, one last question then. >> Um, thank you again for your talk. I wanted to ask regarding when you're talking about lavender, if you're talking about gospel, it's really jarring to me to see like the role that algorithms and numbers can play in the rationalization of the justification of things like war crimes and genocide. So I just wanted to ask you people with more tech inside right than the average person. What problems and what challenges do you encounter when you're trying to explain and communicate that this is how you can manipulate the numbers because in the target show these are the numbers that the IDF is publishing and that the general public for example in Germany will be given. So yes that's my question. What challenges do you encounter maybe also with tech workers? >> I mean the fundamental problem with this is that the numbers are kind of arbitrary. When you really look at these AI systems, the numbers are actually not particularly meaningful. Somebody made a decision to build a certain kind of system. A lot of values, worldviews, beliefs went into that action of building a system like Lavender. I don't think the numbers matter a lot. Um, I would say mostly they're a distraction. Even of course the stats can matter. Okay, they scaled up from having a few th maybe 500 targets to 5,000 targets and they killed all those people. I mean, of course in in sort of the scale of numbers, we forget that these are human lives. But those numbers matter. I think a lot of the sort of numbers around the AI models, they're just a distraction in my opinion. I think also like if you build an AI that's called where's daddy, it's kind of something wrong with your head. Like why are you calling it where's daddy? Like are you okay? This means literally that you are targeting parents like you're targeting a father of somebody of a loved one and that this person is going to ask where's daddy because your daddy's phone got just targeted. Like I think it's also like the cynicism is so open. Like at least the Nazis had some propaganda machine or something and like they had some concept but the Israelis are like so bland with it. I'm like wow. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. [applause]