Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/393583-amazon-employees-protest-
sale-of-facial-recognition-tech-to-law

A group of Amazon employees are pressuring company leadership to stop
selling its facial recognition software to law enforcement and to stop
providing services to companies who work with Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE).

“We refuse to build the platform that powers ICE, and we refuse to
contribute to tools that violate human rights. As ethically concerned
Amazonians, we demand a choice in what we build, and a say in how it is
used,” a group of Amazon workers wrote in a letter obtained by The Hill
and posted on Amazon’s internal wiki addressed to CEO Jeff Bezos.

In their letter, Amazon workers criticized the company selling its facial
recognition service – Amazon Web Services Rekognition – to law enforcement
and government agencies, citing “historic militarization of police,
renewed targeting of Black activists, and the growth of a federal
deportation force currently engaged in human rights abuses.”

“This will be another powerful tool for the surveillance state, and
ultimately serve to harm the most marginalized,” the workers wrote.

After the ACLU reported on Amazon providing facial recognition software to
law enforcement, a slew of critics lined up to condemn Amazon’s work,
including 40 civil rights organizations as well as members of Congress,
including the entire Congressional Black Caucus.

They worry that marginalized groups, including African Americans who are
already less likely to be accurately identified by facial recognition
technology, could suffer at the hands of the technology.

The workers also voiced their opposition to Amazon Web Services providing
digital infrastructure service to Palantir, a data analytics firm that ICE
uses to help run their detention and deportation work.

“Along with much of the world we watched in horror recently as U.S.
authorities tore children away from their parents,” they wrote. “In the
face of this immoral U.S. policy, and the U.S.’s increasingly inhumane
treatment of refugees and immigrants beyond this specific policy, we are
deeply concerned that Amazon is implicated, providing infrastructure and
services that enable ICE and DHS.”

In the past, Amazon has defended Rekognition and dismissed the idea that
it is a surveillance tool.

"Our quality of life would be much worse today if we outlawed new
technology because some people could choose to abuse the technology," an
Amazon spokesperson told The Hill in May. "Imagine if customers couldn’t
buy a computer because it was possible to use that computer for illegal
purposes?"

In addition to not selling their facial recognition tool to law
enforcement and dropping Palantir from AWS, Amazon employees also asked
Bezos to introduce “strong transparency and accountability measures” for
Amazon’s products including “enumerating which law enforcement agencies
and companies supporting law enforcement agencies are using Amazon
services, and how.”

Their letter follows a similar letter my Microsoft employees calling on
the company too to drop its more than $19 million contract with ICE. That
letter came amid backlash after a blog post from January about the
company’s work with ICE went viral earlier this week.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has downplayed the company’s work with the
agency, saying on Tuesday that it was not directly involved with the
agency’s policy of separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Employees that The Hill spoke with, including one who was a part of the
group who organized the letter, said that they opposed aiding ICE in any
capacity.

President Trump and the Department of Justice have faced massive blowback
from lawmakers in both parties, as well as the public, over its "zero
tolerance" immigration policy, which has led to the separations. On
Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order to end the forced separations.


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