No AI for genocide: Queer Swiss activists for Palestine arrested at UN conference

In the early morning of July 8 hacker and activist maia arson crimew posted a video of itself and No Tech for Apartheid advocate Freya on BlueSky revealing that the two “have most likely been arrested protesting the UN AI for Good summit in Geneva, the birthplace of the Geneva Conventions.”

The event, hosted by the Swiss government in conjunction with the United Nations,  partnered with numerous technology corporations complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. These companies – among many others – were named by the United Nations itself as aiding the Israeli regime’s relentless attacks on Gaza.

“While the US and Europe provide the financial backing, Big Tech infrastructure actively enables the surveillance, the targeting and strategic erasure of the Palestinian people. This would not be possible without their assistance,” Freya says in the video. “With this hypocritical event, the UN not only contradicts its own reports, but actively enables violations of international law. 

“By now hosting and platforming parties that are complicit in the Palestinian genocide, Switzerland is actively positioning itself contradicting its neutrality position,” they continue. “We will not be silent in a genocide. You cannot be neutral in a genocide.”

Health officials in Gaza say that over 55,000 people have been murdered since the genocide escalated in 2023, and over 120,000 have been subject to severe physical injury. But many experts and independent organizations regard this as a massive undercount. 

An independent survey by University of London researchers, reported in Nature, found that at least over 80,000 Gazans have been murdered, with many more injured. These estimates do not account for the hundreds of thousands of displaced refugees, deaths this year and Gazans subject to starvation and disease owing to Israel’s blockade on aid.

While companies like Microsoft deny having a role in this genocide, independent investigations reveal that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon  provided direct aid to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in developing new weaponry and surveillance technology used in its atrocities. The BDS Movement’s website details additional companies that have profited from the deaths of countless Palestinians.

Independent journalist — and occasional editor for Free Radical — Ryan Fae showed a recording of the protest at the UN summit shortly after it happened. During a speech presented by Thomas Gürber, Swiss Deputy State Secretary of Foreign Affairs, crimew and Freya went on stage with a sign saying “no tech for genocide,” chanting “you are all complicit “and “free, free Palestine.” The event cut the recording shortly after, and both activists were promptly arrested.

Fortunately crimew and Freya were both released within hours. “We are out, safe and alive,” crimew wrote on BlueSky hours later. Both activists were also promoting a larger protest outside the summit led by pro-Palestinian action group BDS, at which they also spoke, as revealed in Fae’s BlueSky thread.

Freya and crimew were not the only voices advocating for Gaza at this summit. Adeba Birhane, a researcher focusing on artificial intelligence, spoke out directly at the summit podium against Israel for its genocide against Palestine, advocating  for BDS, drawing applause. She then revealed on BlueSky that she was censored leading up to the event, with organizers threatening her whole speech and career if she didn’t remove any mentions of Gaza and genocide from her slide show.

Speaking to Geneva Solutions about her experience, she said that she “had uploaded my slides a week in advance. They had plenty of time to raise concerns. But instead, they waited until right before my keynote. It felt extremely stressful to experience censorship in real time.”

Birhane provided more detail about her censorship, the risks to her career , and her commitment to justice in an interview with The Bulletin earlier this week.

“Our industry is facing an extreme moral and ethical crisis with regards to application of our AI technologies. The most egregious of this is the use of our Cloud and AI technologies from Google, Amazon and Microsoft in supporting the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” Vikram Subramanian, No Tech for Apartheid organizer and former Google employee, said in a detailed speech outside the summit. “These tech company executives have not only ignored calls for human rights due diligence as required by UN guiding principles, but also taken extreme steps of firing large number of employees who raised these issues.

“They have also completely curtailed any discussions around this issue by censorship of terms like Palestine and Genocide in the workplace.”

“The UN is finally calling out the companies complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation and genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in its ‘Economy of Genocide’ report yet the UN continues to contract and platform tech companies selling AI for war crimes,” the international BDS Movement declared in a press release sent to Free Radical. “The UN must uphold international law over corporate interests by ending contracts with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Palantir and all complicit companies whenever feasible to protect human rights globally.”

The protests outside the conference, led by Swiss affiliates of BDS, came with four demands: that the UN to end its partnership with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft due to their enabling of the genocide in Gaza and  use of environmentally destructive large language models; that they designate artificial intelligence and cloud-based technology as “dual-use,” given how these technologies have been used in genocide; that the UN cancels its contracts with Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Cisco, Oracle, Palantir and IBM owing to their roles in assisting Israel; and finally, that the UN investigate these companies’ roles in the genocide.

“By platforming big tech that is making profit off of the first AI powered genocide that humanity has ever faced, the city of Geneva and the UN are not only making a mockery of international law – especially the Geneva conventions that were established to commit to international legal standards for humanitarian treatment in war,” Freya told the Free Radical. ”Right now they lose the trust of hundreds of upcoming young scientists and engineers that commit to uphold international law, their moral compass and integrity."

“i think it's frankly insulting to get a host up on stage during a protest to talk about how your event is open to all opinions and how our accusation isn't productive while you're actively making an attempt to censor any critical talks back stage,” crimew said to Free Radical via text. ”it's even more insulting to even try and pretend your event is neutral while some of its biggest sponsors are actively involved in a genocide, this OBVIOUSLY creates a financial incentive to not allow dissenting voices.

“overall the repression freya and i experienced was a lot less extreme than we were prepared to deal with, but to get dragged off stage while a kind British voice proclaims the event is open to all sides certainly felt very surreal.”

Readers interested in supporting Gazans directly are invited to boost and provide fiscal support for community-vetted fundraisers available on social media. Those preferring organizations may support grassroots mutual aid ones like Vegans for Gaza.

Special thanks to David Forbes for editing this piece.