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On Thursday, during what was supposed to be an ordinary keynote speech by Amazon's technical director, Werner Vogels, in front of a crowd of technology workers in New York, demonstrations were halted.
The protesters interrupted the conversation on several occasions, challenging the policy of separating families at the US border south implemented by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the relationship between Amazon Web Services and the agency.
On Friday, the fallout continued when Vogels tweeted a powerful response.
"I let the trolls be trolls, but for the group yesterday who believes that, because of my name, I (and therefore Amazon) must be the next incarnation of the Nazi atrocities of the WII: I am Dutch. My parents were forced to forced labor in Germany, to go back where many were not, do your research, " he tweeted.
Vogel seems to comment that the Tech Workers Coalition in New York, one of the protest groups, compared detention centers on the southern border of the United States, where migrant children kidnapped from their parents are kept by the authorities. Nazi concentration camps.
The Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940 and sent thousands of Jews and political prisoners to forced labor concentration camps. The Second World War ended in 1945, making Vogels a baby boomer. He was born in 1958, according to Wikipedia.
Read: Microsoft does not fear anything and will not ask its trading partners to use its software
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently launched a fierce public debate on the description of these facilities as "concentration camps", after using this term to describe detention centers.
Tech Coalition New York uses a similar language. On Thursday, during the demonstrations that interrupted Vogel's keynote speech, he tweeted: "Technology will always be used by the powerful to achieve their own goals, as workers we must unite and say no, we will not repeat the horrors of the past, we will not build concentration camps, we will not build of machine to expel We will not separate families. "
He also tweeted: "As one speaker at outside events has pointed out, we can not forget that IBM has played a crucial role in providing cutting-edge technology to help murder thousands of Jews. [sic] and others during the Holocaust and actually benefited from the genocide. "
The demonstrations were organized by several groups, including Jews for racial and economic justice, who demonstrated outside the event. Some protesters shouted the name of Vogels during their troubles, asking him to stop Amazon's badociation with ICE. Hundreds of other people were outside, disrupting the traffic.
Read more: Protesters repeatedly disrupted the presentation of a senior Amazon executive at a technical conference
The protesters opposed the Amazon's badociation with Palantir, who acknowledged working with the Homeland Security Investigations Unit of ICE and who would have used the AWS cloud services. Amazon also met with ICE officials to publicize sales of its facial recognition technology and other AWS services, as revealed by e-mails exchanged between Amazon and various government officials obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundations.
Amazon employees are also stepping up their protests internally. A group of them sent a second letter this week asking the company to take a stand against ICE and to stop its relations with Palantir. Employees had sent a similar letter a year ago, specifically asking the company to no longer provide its Rekognition face recognition software to law enforcement.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, a spokesman told the Washington Post that businesses and government organizations should use technology in a "responsible and lawful" manner and said that he was working with lawmakers on the technology regulation of technology. # 39; IA.
Amazon has not yet released a replay of the highly-interrupted keynote address online. However, according to some information, the video would have filtered the voice of the protesters during the livestream.
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