There’s a new Twitter account representing the 600+ Amazon employees who have signed an open letter to their bosses. They state they wish to have no part in creating software or products that governments can use to oppress or harm people. This includes things like AI drones for the military, facial recognition with racial biases used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), or processing and storage for detention facilities. Both ICE and CBP make mistakes without facial recognition, but facial recognition may have contributed to a U.S. born citizen being deported to a country he has never known.
Because facial recognition is less likely to properly identify women, people of color, and transgender people, governments can unintentionally discriminate against these groups. People of color face intense scrutiny from ICE and CBP, who are already trying to round up as many people who may be of Mexican descent as they can. These are groups that are already using racial bias, and with AI, they’re only going to make more mistakes.
A problem they don’t seem to mind.
But Amazon employees are speaking out. These employees have looked at what Trump’s doing and realized Trump’s administration could use their software could to further their of identifying and detaining people of Mexican and Central American heritage. Worst of all, their work is already in place, keeping concentration camps along the border running.
In This Article:
Refusal to Repeat History
Nazi Germany: Powered by IBM. And, yes, the AI Watson is named for Thomas J. Watson.
Cataloging and killing over six million Jews and more than four million other people isn’t easy. Especially if you have to do that cataloging by hand. Germany needed a better way to catalog all the people they wanted to brutally murder for being Jewish, political enemies, LGBTQ, or a person of color. When Germany was crafting their “final solution,” IBM was making it possible.
IBM sold equipment to Germany to help them catalog Jewish people through census information. IBM not only sold equipment, but worked closely with Germany to ensure that everyone was properly trained in the use for it. Germany wanted to ensure that all “undesirables” could be tracked through the census (sound familiar?) and IBM was quick to help them do it. Thanks to IBM, Nazi Germany was able to process 24,000 cards per hour, cataloging every Jew in Berlin, even identifying their profession.
We have to remember, when Germany was first cataloging these people, it wasn’t yet for outright murder. The purposes seemed potentially innocent at first, like wanting to have citizenship questions on the census. Though, many could see the dangerous writing on the wall. IBM could have stepped away, but they didn’t. In fact, they stuck by Nazi Germany through the entire ordeal.
IBM’s Willing Participation in the Holocaust
Thread.
As the brave activists and employees of tech companies have come out to stand up for #NoTech4ICE, we must remember that willingness of technology companies to choose profits over morality has been a tradition that has led to some of the worst atrocities in human history. pic.twitter.com/4Injl8Il5y
— ✡️ Never Again Action ✡️ (@NeverAgainActn) July 11, 2019
Concentration camps had IBM customer sites. When Nazi Germany went from cataloging census data to cataloging concentration camp populations, IBM was there. They helped them track Jewish people, Roma, political enemies, LGBTQ people, and more. They even had a system for tracking how the people were killed, whether by natural causes, execution, suicide, or gas chamber. The infamous tattooed numbering system used in concentration camps? It was IBM’s numbering system.
IBM should have seen the dangers of getting involved with Nazi Germany from the start. They didn’t. As Germany’s plans progressed, they didn’t take a step back, they charged forward. The Holocaust was powered by IBM.
Now Amazon Employees warn they won’t be a part of the next global human catastrophe.
Though they already are.
Amazon’s Role in America’s Concentration Camps
Amazon is providing facial recognition software as well as data centers through AWS to the U.S. government. It’s using it for ICE and CBP to find potential immigrants, separate families, and detain people in inhumane conditions. The technology, despite its flaws with identifying people of color, is also in use at police departments. There, it can worsen biases already existing in many departments, where racial bias isn’t even recognized as such. Systematic racism is so ingrained, even people who are staunchly against racism in policing don’t realize they can unwittingly reinforce it.
Amazon’s imperfect software is making that happen.
“Our company should not be in the surveillance business; we should not be in the policing business; we should not be in the business of supporting those who monitor and oppress marginalized populations.”
– From Amazon’s open letter to Jeff Bezos
Via the Houston Chronicle
Amazon is powering the software ICE and CBP need for detaining such a large number of people. They’re using AWS for data storage and processing, and the ACLU discovered Amazon specifically marketed their flawed and biased facial recognition technology to the government. It’s used for “person tracking” and allows them to identify people in group shots. However, since it’s inaccurate with people of color, and ICE and CBP are focused on immigrants specifically from Mexico and Central America, it’s not fit for their purposes. It will make mistakes.
Not Cut and Dry
Helping the United States commit such atrocities is abhorrent. But what happens when Trump is ousted, and another politician tries to clean up his mess? How can you reunite families? CBP has not been keeping good records. As such, this will still be extremely difficult. Courts have ordered improved record keeping, so families are not always permanently separated, though it looks like this is what’s happening anyway.
What few records they are keeping could be used later to reunite families. A good system can help us save the families this administration has torn apart.
However, we could also force CBP to provide their own storage. If Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other cloud service providers step away, and a court order forces Trump’s administration to keep records, the increased costs could make the entire endeavor worthless. However, Trump has planned to dump billions into a useless wall, just to send a message of exclusion. It seems as though his anti-immigrant stances have no price ceiling. As such, it’s questionable if companies boycotting these enforcement organizations would be able to stop Trump’s concentration camps. However, it also wouldn’t hurt our ability to make amends to these families later. That means these companies can step back, make Trump’s job more difficult, and not hurt our long term efforts to reunite families.
Pulling away from these contracts would allow the people who work at these companies to know that they did not contribute to a humanitarian crisis in the United States. Everyone has to sleep at night, and knowing your work split children from their parents would make sleeping very difficult.
Via the Houston Chronicle
Amazon’s Open Letter to Jeff Bezos
Dear Jeff,
We are troubled by the recent report from the ACLU exposing our company’s practice of selling AWS Rekognition, a powerful facial recognition technology, to police departments and government agencies. 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. We are not alone in this view: over 40 civil rights organizations signed an open letter in opposition to the governmental use of facial recognition, while over 150,000 individuals signed another petition delivered by the ACLU.
We also know that Palantir runs on AWS. And we know that ICE relies on Palantir to power its detention and deportation programs. Along with much of the world we watched in horror recently as U.S. authorities tore children away from their parents. Since April 19, 2018 the Department of Homeland Security has sent nearly 2,000 children to mass detention centers. This treatment goes against U.N. Refugee Agency guidelines that say children have the right to remain united with their parents, and that asylum-seekers have a legal right to claim asylum. 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.
Technology like ours is playing an increasingly critical role across many sectors of society. What is clear to us is that our development and sales practices have yet to acknowledge the obligation that comes with this. Focusing solely on shareholder value is a race to the bottom, and one that we will not participate in.
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. 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.
We call on you to:
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.Our company should not be in the surveillance business; we should not be in the policing business; we should not be in the business of supporting those who monitor and oppress marginalized populations.
Sincerely,
Amazonians
Hello Twitter!
We are a group of @amazon workers calling for accountability and transparency in the tech we build.
With the detentions and abuses of people in concentration camps by ICE, we are reminded of the role IBM played during the Holocausthttps://t.co/pMX25yBWZy
— Amazonians: We Won't Build It (@WeWontBuildIt) July 29, 2019
Amazon employees want no part in this government’s human rights violations.
Would you?
Author’s Note:
You’ll notice I continually refer to America’s “detention centers” as concentration camps. The historical significance of the word is a powerful one, and I do not use it lightly.
When the United States operated concentration camps for Japanese people in WW2, we called them “Determent Camps.” We didn’t split up families, but we did detain people of Japanese heritage, ripping them from their homes and communities. It was a nationwide, racist effort.
We have always tried to differentiate our atrocities from ones in other countries. But we now have people sleeping on floors, without soap or toothbrushes. We don’t give them clean water during one of the worst heat waves to hit North America. A born U.S. citizen was sent to a camp because he was of Mexican descent and didn’t have his passport on him at the time. In a little over three weeks, he lost an incredibly dangerous 26 lbs. That kind of weight loss can be deadly, and recovery from it must be carefully managed.
These are concentration camps. The conditions are so bad, people are dying from them alone. They’re worse than our determent camps. We’re splitting families up, an act the U.N. has defined as genocide. It devastated Native American tribes in the U.S. during this country’s expansion. It’s why many Americans with native heritage cannot trace their family history. It was erased. The act of trying to “erase” a group of people is genocide.
These are concentration camps. These are places where the U.S. in engaging in activities defined as genocide, where people sleep on concrete floors in packed rooms, where people don’t have access to water, soap, toothbrushes, or a change of clothing. Any attempt to paint them as anything other than concentration camps is pure political partisanship. Leaf and Core will call out any party for any atrocity, and will not taint the language used here for partisan sensibilities.
Sources/References:
- Matt Cagle and Nicole Ozer, ACLU
- Susan Carroll, The Houston Chronicle
- Kate Conger, Gizmodo
- Meagan Flynn, The Washington Post (via MSN News)
- Lawrence Hurley, Andrew Chung, Reuters
- Doug Stanglin, USA Today
- Isaac Stanley-Becker, The Washington Post