The criticism over work with the government is the latest iteration of a tension between the industry’s business interests and political beliefs that has existed since Trump’s election, especially as the companies seek to avoid alienating their largely liberal employees and risk-averse shareholders. "Detaining children in cages is against what the majority of tech workers stand for, and they don’t want to provide the technology that enables that to happen.
The furor over President Donald Trump’s policy of seizing and caging immigrant children at the border is fueling yet another revolt in the tech industry, whose workers have bristled at doing business with his administration.
This time, Microsoft is facing criticism from its own employees for its dealings with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency leading the president’s campaign to uproot undocumented immigrants. The company had to backpedal on Monday after liberal activists called attention to a months-old blog post boasting about ICE’s use of Microsoft’s cloud services to power facial recognition and other technologies.
“As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border,” the company said in a statement late Monday, as criticism rose on social media and some employees told news outlets they might quit. Microsoft added that it does not believe that immigration authorities are using its technology to enforce family separation.
The incident made the Seattle company just the latest tech industry megafirm to face intense internal scrutiny for selling their wares to federal government and law enforcement agencies carrying out Trump’s agenda.
At Google, nearly 4,000 employees signed onto a petition in April declaring that the company "should not be in the business of war," objecting to providing the Pentagon with artificial intelligence. And Amazon has faced censure from its shareholders after the American Civil Liberties Union uncovered documents detailing its marketing of facial recognition technology to law enforcement.
The criticism over work with the government is the latest iteration of a tension between the industry’s business interests and political beliefs that has existed since Trump’s election, especially as the companies seek to avoid alienating their largely liberal employees and risk-averse shareholders.
Trump critics say the industry needs to choose a side.
“You cannot build surveillance tools for an oppressive and bigoted administration and claim to be neutral,” said Brandi Collins, senior campaign director for Color of Change, a social justice group. “Taking contracts and building tools of surveillance is an endorsement of Trump’s dangerous agenda. These companies are fully aware of who they are doing business with."
Companies that have long bid on contracts with the government are no stranger to such criticism, particularly big corporations that build weapons or equipment for defense and national security purposes. But this is new territory for Silicon Valley types who in recent years have made a more earnest effort to win lucrative government contracts.
What’s more, much of the outcry is coming from insiders, compounding the challenge for an industry that prides itself on encouraging independent thinking within its ranks but is not necessarily accustomed to such ferocious internal dissent.
An activist with the Tech Workers Coalition, which rallies industry members around social justice causes, said technology industry employees are rightly outraged by the administration’s handling of immigrant children.
“Tech Workers Coalition supports workers using their lawful right to organize in order to apply pressure to their companies to stop the deployment of technology that contradicts their value," said Ares Geovanos, a volunteer organizer with the group. "Detaining children in cages is against what the majority of tech workers stand for, and they don’t want to provide the technology that enables that to happen."
The tech industry in particular solicits and responds to the opinions of its employees – especially engineers who command high salaries and can move to new jobs easily. Their opinions can influence executives directly. And of late, those employees and some investors have become among the industry’s most vocal fault finders.
“Listening to our employees requires that we regularly review and adjust our practices, understanding that we will not always get it right on the first try, but aren’t afraid to adjust and work towards getting it right,” said Dean Garfield, the president and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council, which counts Google, Facebook and Amazon as members.
The latest backlash comes as the door to government work is wider than ever. The industry successfully pushed the Republican-controlled Congress late last year to pass the Modernizing Government Technology Act, which created a fund providing $250 million for the next two years to upgrade federal IT. It has also collaborated with the White House Office of American Innovation, under the direction of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to devise a plan for bringing cutting-edge technology to sorely out-of-date agencies.
Google’s employees pushed the company to stop providing artificial intelligence to the Defense Department through Project Maven, a program aimed at using the company’s sophisticated computer algorithms to analyze drone footage in war zones. Top executives acquiesced to the pressure, vowing earlier this month to wind down the program and not start others.
CEO Sundar Pichai followed the shift in strategy with a list of ethical principles for using artificial intelligence that included not letting its technology be used for certain types of surveillance or weaponry. “They are concrete standards that will actively govern our research and product development and will impact our business decisions,” he wrote.
Amazon has for weeks faced criticized from lawmakers and advocacy groups after it became known the company is selling technology that identifies faces and objects to law enforcement – a tool that some fear will be used to track immigrants, racial minorities and political dissidents. The company declined to comment publicly for this story.
In a letter Monday, nearly 70 immigration, social justice and free internet groups warned CEO Jeff Bezos that the technology, called Rekognition, “poses a grave threat to communities, including people of color and immigrants, and to the trust and respect Amazon has worked to build.” Nearly 20 shareholders signed a separate letter saying the technology could undermine Amazon’s long-term value and urging leaders to put ethics guidelines in place.
“Each company will have their own decisions to make about what government contracts to pursue, what lines of work to enter into," said Alex Burgos, vice president at trade association TechNet. "But by and large employees are increasingly leading companies to consider all of these issues from all angles.”
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