Amid Amazon’s ongoing collusion with government organizations, company employees circulated an open letter to CEO Jeff Bezos this week demanding he cancel the internet monolith’s contracts with law enforcement and Palantir, a tech firm that has helped the NSA expand its surveillance capabilities.
Gizmodo reported Wednesday that the internal letter circulated on a mailing list titled, “we-won’t-build-it,” calls on Bezos to discontinue its sales of facial recognition software, called “Rekognition,” to police departments, as well as to remove Palantir from its cloud services.
The employees specifically mention the Trump administration’s recent, controversial immigration crackdown, which has seen children separated from their parents and placed in detention centers. “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,” the letter reads.
“We refuse to build the platform that powers ICE, and we refuse to contribute to tools that violate human rights,” the employees also said, highlighting the fact that ICE uses Palantir, and Palantir runs on Amazon Web Services. It is unclear how many employees have signed on to the letter, and Amazon and Palantir have not yet responded to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Citing concerns that have been mounting across society for years, the dissenting employees asserted:
“We don’t have to wait to find out how these technologies will be used. We already know that in the midst of 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 employees who signed the letter are demanding the following:
- “Stop selling facial recognition services to law enforcement
- “Stop providing infrastructure to Palantir and any other Amazon partners who enable ICE.
- “Implement strong transparency and accountability measures, that include enumerating which law enforcement agencies and companies supporting law enforcement agencies are using Amazon services, and how.”
“While Mr. Bezos remains silent, Amazon employees are standing up and joining shareholders, civil rights groups, and concerned consumers to call out Amazon’s face surveillance technology for what it is: a unique threat to civil rights and especially to the immigrants and people of color under attack by this administration.We stand in support of these employees’ call on Mr. Bezos to do the right thing. Amazon must stop providing dangerous face surveillance to the government.”
Amazon has a long history of working with controversial government organizations. It has long provided cloud services to the CIA, securing a $600 million contract with the agency in 2014. The company openly discusses its close working relationships with the government through its Amazon Web Services (AWS), boasting late last lear that their services can “operate workloads up to the Secret U.S. security classification level. The AWS Secret Region is readily available to the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) through the IC’s Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract with AWS.” They noted that “[w]ith the launch of this new Secret Region, AWS becomes the first and only commercial cloud provider to offer regions to serve government workloads across the full range of data classifications, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret.”
Amazon is far from the only company to provide tech services to the U.S. government. Microsoft has a similar cloud services contract with intelligence agencies, and Google was implicated in the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program in 2013. More recently, Google came under fire for developing artificial intelligence to be used under the Pentagon’s drone warfare program. As a result of an employee revolt similar to what is now occurring at Amazon, Google announced it would not seek to renew that contract.
If those in charge of these companies are unwilling to protest on their own in the face of increasingly authoritarian developments, it seems at least some employees are stepping up. As the letter from “Amazonians” concluded:
“As ethically concerned Amazonians, we demand a choice in what we build, and a say in how it is used. We learn from history, and we understand how IBM’s systems were employed in the 1940s to help Hitler. IBM did not take responsibility then, and by the time their role was understood, it was too late. We will not let that happen again. The time to act is now.”
You can read the full letter here.
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Every government will - in time - erode itself. After that it will start to erode big business. There are two options:
it makes you think!
I think this collaboration is good for the company well fair and this will be good for their future success
What you think??
you are think
Providing servers to the government isn't that big of a deal. Amazon does that for many people. Them not taking a moral stance against what the government is doing doesn't really mean anything. Expecting a company to take a moral stance against something is downright stupid.
Companies are immoral. As in without morals. They are not people. Of course, they are made up of tons of people, but the reason they're formed is for the people to avoid consequences. They're just signing their piece of paper, and letting the monster's gears continue to move.
So a bit ass company is letting a government do things that it wants to do. Because companies are basically psychotic, you have to make it in their best interest to do whatever it is that you want or don't want them to do. I can only hope that this is enough to make Amazon think that going against the government's evil plans is in it's best interest.
The main problem is the government. Like WTF! They're becoming like the evil villain in one of the most boring books ever. It's like War and Peace level boring as fuck. We need to fucking do something. Yet, what do we do? We have to get some old boring fucks to actually start doing their fucking jobs.
Yeah, I mean any time you have an overbloated govt, you will have companies and individuals taking advantage and reaping the benefits of tax dollars. The resistance worked at Google, so hoping there can be a similar effect here.
Highly rEsteemed!
A VERY Interesting set of Circumstances. I doubt it will have any impact on Amazon but it's intriguing to consider that so many employees would turn on Amazon over this latest Media frenzy about the border... you'd think these people would have stood up sooner to protest against The Ministry Of Truth (Amazon). Strange that it took the border scandal for them to grow Spines... hmmmm. Thank you and SteemON!
And thanks for the resteem!
Yeah, it's unfortunate that it's taken too long for employees to say something (and I'm sure many are towing the partisan line), but I still prefer that to nothing at all. :)
Best thing to do is to quit buying from Amazon!
Nice to see people standing up.
Four typos:
And for alternatives to the likes of Amazon: https://www.minds.com/KevinSarpei/blog/how-to-avoid-funding-the-american-deep-state-857779708451414016
Amazon is basically controlled by the CIA via Jeff Bezzos. So no wonder they will cooperate with these Federal corporations called DHS, ICE etc etc - which are scamming the American people.
Please have a look at this also:
Q SOURCE X EXPOSES THE MATRIX AND THE FALSE RED PILL OF FAKE Q ANON.
Lift The Veil chats with Q SOURCE X.
https://busy.org/@motherlibertynow/lift-the-veil-chats-with-q-source-x
(The Clowns attack the block-chain connection of those who expose this. Clowns using a quantum computer to spy on people and knock them off of Steemit).