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Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

thehill.com

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Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#61

Post by confounded »

bb88 wrote: post #60
gasull wrote: post #54

I'm dismayed at the comments here of "if Amazon/Microsoft/Google don't work for ICE, someone else will". That argument doesn't fly. If you stop helping ICE, they will have to get worse software from likely more expensive vendors (less market competition for the contract). Which will make ICE less efficient in its goal to criminalize, separate and deport immigrants.

Your anger is misdirected. The fight isn't whether or not ICE should have facial recognition software. The fight is to make ICE act in accordance with our values. Some agency (ICE or whatever replaces it) will still need to protect the borders, and that protection will require facial recognition software. If you hate ICE, you should also probably hate defense contractors more, because they have very little moral qual…

Not sure if the parent expressed anything approaching either anger or hate.

> ... that protection will require facial recognition software.

Why?

Lots of things are effective, but life in a free country means that we don’t do some of them.

We could put cameras in every home, make them illegal to disable. Ban encryption. Censor the web. Ban cars that can’t be remotely disabled.

Free societies are free because there is slack in the system. This freedom is how norms evolve. Gay sex could put you in jail when my parents were teenagers. Supporting Nelson Mandela when he was in jail was supporting the leader of a terrorist organization. Heaven forbid smoking a joint. The status quo is not divined.

My point is, that regardless of your issue, authoritarianism is not a good answer. Even if you think it might swing things in your favor today, there are no guarantees that it will tomorrow.

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#62

Post by pravinva »

confounded wrote: post #55
pravinva wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, explain how the law enforcement is violating any terms and conditions. Domain fronting is illegal. Mass surveillance is what the NSA does for a living. If it is offensive to prime members, they have found the wrong tree to bark up

> ... explain how the law enforcement is violating any terms and conditions I’m not saying that they are, just that Amazon are within their right to stipulate that there are certain uses of their technology which they just don’t like , as they see fit. > Domain fronting is illegal. First I’ve heard. Where? Why? > ...NSA... If it is offensive to prime members, they have found the wrong tree to bark up This story is no…

The police cannot do any mass surveillance with AWS Recognition. For that they need access to huge amount of video feeds.IF they already have access to such video and use primitive techniques to sift through them for identifying criminals, then Rekognition makes it cheap and value for money for the taxpayers. Sifting through data to identify people is police work. Why hobble it by mandating that they use expensive outdated slow technology? If the police has no access to streaming video feeds on a mass scale, the tool can't help. If they are accessing the feeds illegally, then they are breaking laws - AWS can terminate accounts. Any proof that they are doing this illegal activity?

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#63

Post by [deleted] »

gasull wrote: post #54

I'm dismayed at the comments here of "if Amazon/Microsoft/Google don't work for ICE, someone else will". That argument doesn't fly. If you stop helping ICE, they will have to get worse software from likely more expensive vendors (less market competition for the contract). Which will make ICE less efficient in its goal to criminalize, separate and deport immigrants.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#64

Post by TangoTrotFox »

If people do not want a public organization to use facial recognition software, then energy should be directed towards that action of the public organization - not towards the vendors supplying the technology. They will get the technology whether or not Amazon or Google or whoever else provide it. The one and only thing that might stop this from happening is if our political representatives chose to take action against facial recognition. And as opposed to mass surveillance of digital communications, I think this is something that would have pull with the masses as well. People's faces being automatically processed and scanned is something much more visibly dystopic than the NSA archiving your digital communications.

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#65

Post by confounded »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #47

I have a feeling that one of these cloud companies is going to have a mass firing of employees that are protesting against government contracts. People underestimate just how much money the US government spends. Just DoD spending is more than 600 Billion per year. Microsoft and Google have annual revenue of 100 Billion. The $10 Billion Pentagon cloud contract immediately gives a huge boost to any cloud provider. As c…

Google and Facebook are known to retain the services of Pinkerton Corporate Risk Management for employee surveillance.

They’re a pretty famous name in US labor history!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#66

Post by smsm42 »

gasull wrote: post #54

I'm dismayed at the comments here of "if Amazon/Microsoft/Google don't work for ICE, someone else will". That argument doesn't fly. If you stop helping ICE, they will have to get worse software from likely more expensive vendors (less market competition for the contract). Which will make ICE less efficient in its goal to criminalize, separate and deport immigrants.

ICE does not "criminalize immigrants" and can't do that. ICE ignores legal immigrants, as it should, and prosecutes illegal immigrants, according to laws passed by Congress. ICE is executive branch, it has no legislative powers and can't "criminalize" anything.

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#67

Post by smsm42 »

keeptrying wrote: post #4

I am seriously liking how S/W engineers are controlling the conversation here.

I don't see anywhere in the article where it says it's s/w engineers that are doing that - or even how representative is this group among Amazon workers and whether there are other opinions. So far the press seems to be controlling the conversation by choosing one voice and presenting it as the only opinion inside Amazon. Or at least the only worth reporting about.

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#68

Post by carlmr »

freedomben wrote: post #18
replicatorblog wrote: post #15

If you don't like what Amazon is building, just wait until all those contracts start going to Raytheon and Northrop! I appreciate the moral quandary these engineers are faced with, but there is something to be said for being a responsible steward of technology. I've met quite a few MIT Ph.D.s who nonchalantly mention their roles as, what sounds like to me like "Program manager for raining fire and destruction on thir…

This really aligns with my thoughts too. I was sad to see Google pull out, because I know that with the ideology of many of the people there, the whistle is far more likely to be blown when things go too far. Having worked for big defense contractors, that whistle is not likely to get used there. I get nervous as hell thinking about AI and ML in the hands of governments, but it's gonna happen anyway . I'd rather it b…

But isn't Maven and Rekognition people at these companies blowing the whistle? If they just did what was asked of them, then there would be no difference to other companies.

The reason we're hearing about this right now is that a lot of whistles are blown. The question is whether this will be effective in any way.

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#69

Post by TangoTrotFox »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #47

I have a feeling that one of these cloud companies is going to have a mass firing of employees that are protesting against government contracts. People underestimate just how much money the US government spends. Just DoD spending is more than 600 Billion per year. Microsoft and Google have annual revenue of 100 Billion. The $10 Billion Pentagon cloud contract immediately gives a huge boost to any cloud provider. As c…

I imagine many very large companies internally view themselves as above politics. Most peoples' political views wax and wane as a reflection of whatever is happening at a given moment in time and especially whatever is trending in the media and social media. By contrast consider individuals like Jeff Bezos. He wants to advance humanity into a commercial space age and is working extensively and at great cost to do just that. And that change will radically shift society in ways that would make many of our current issues seem quite trite, and even render others completely obsolete.

So what various political leaders or even nations are doing is not necessarily material to his goal. I wouldn't see it as a double-faced 'talking a good game', but rather understanding that what companies say in any region is little more than a product of their public relations teams, if not only because of apathy.

I also don't think they would ever fire individuals in large quantities over anything like this. There's a much easier solution. Turnover in tech companies is huge. All they need to do is change their hiring preferences and in a decade the company could have almost entirely shifted the ethos of their workforce without having had to fire a single person.

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#70

Post by StreamBright »

gasull wrote: post #54

I'm dismayed at the comments here of "if Amazon/Microsoft/Google don't work for ICE, someone else will". That argument doesn't fly. If you stop helping ICE, they will have to get worse software from likely more expensive vendors (less market competition for the contract). Which will make ICE less efficient in its goal to criminalize, separate and deport immigrants.

First of all, I am an immigrant. I am not sure why you think that ICE criminalize anybody? How is this even possible? People violate the law are criminals. Trying to enter the US illegally is a crime. Pretty plain simple. I do not like the ICE but I had pleasant experience with them even when I tried to enter the US (unknowingly) illegally once. They helped me through the process, fined me (following the law) and I was pretty ok with that.
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