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Amazon introduced its facial recognition system this summer to immigration and customs officials to target or identify immigrants, which could push the technology giant into a growing debate over work. from the industry with the government.
The June meeting in Silicon Valley, revealed in e-mails as part of a Freedom of Information Act request by the Project On Government Supervight advocacy group, shows that ICE and I & I officials 39; Amazon Web Services spoke about the implementation of the technology analyst Rekognition face analysis platform with internal security investigations.
An Amazon Web Service manager specializing in federal sales contracts, whose name was included in the emails, wrote that the conversation involved "predictive analytics" and "markings / analyzes of recognition videos." "likely to allow ICE to identify the faces of people by far – a type of technology, immigration officials have shown interest in its potential use on the southern border.
"We are ready and willing to support the Homeland Security Investigations," the Amazon official said.
Amazon and ICE representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment. (The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post.)
Amazon has commercialized this technology with police services to target and identify criminals. This technology is deployed for the use of police officers in Oregon and Florida. But civil rights and privacy advocates fear that the expansion of unproven technology may have a chilling effect on public protests or embolden government and police efforts to overburden mass surveillance.
The meeting could inspire new troubles among Amazon workers who urged the company, with a budget of $ 850 billion, to reject any work that could be used by the government. Hundreds of Amazonian anonymous workers wrote a letter to Bezos in June, about a week after the meeting, stating, "We refuse to build the platform that feeds ICE and contribute to the tools that violate ILC rights. man."
It will also fuel a cultural conflict in Silicon Valley between business leaders seeking lucrative government contracts and grassroots employees of the company, many of whom have expressed outrage at the ICE separation of parents and children. migrants on the Mexican border.
Microsoft, a tech giant who creates facial recognition tools competing with those of Amazon, has been criticized this summer for the potential work that it could achieve as part of a major ICE contract. Google has also encountered internal resistance for its contributions to the Maven project, a Ministry of Defense initiative that would allow AI to identify objects in a drone video on the battlefield.
Amazon has signed a number of contracts with the government and is considered the leading candidate for the Pentagon's $ 10 billion cloud computing contract, called JEDI. The company also operates a private cloud service for secret information used by the CIA. Dawn Meyerriecks, deputy director of the agency for science and technology, described the link between the Amazon and the CIA during a debate before the committee held last month in Washington's "partnership" narrower than ever in my career. "
Bezos gave money to fund scholarships for undocumented immigrant students, but he also publicly supported the contributions of the technology industry to national security efforts and to Other government work.
"If big tech companies have to turn their backs on the Department of Defense, we have big problems," Bezos said at a Wired magazine event last week. When asked about immigration, he added, "I would let them in if it was me, I love them, I want them all, but it's a big country and you have to defend it."
ICE has described facial recognition and other artificial intelligence software as potentially powerful tools in finding ways to combat illegal immigration. Last year, ICE officials told entrepreneurs in the information technology sector that they wanted an "extreme filtering" system that automatically exploited the social media of visitors. foreigners to determine if they could commit criminal or terrorist acts.
Amazon unveiled Rekognition in 2016 to analyze images and detect faces on a large scale. His early marketing materials focused on the less sensitive side of technology, including his ability to look at the face of a dog and recognize that it was a golden retriever.
But the growing role of technology in criminal justice and investigative cases has been subject to increasing scrutiny by civil rights groups and Democratic lawmakers have been concerned about its potential use in surveillance efforts that could threaten privacy and civil rights. Technology has also been found to work less well in people of color, raising fears of misidentification.
The recognition, for example, incorrectly matched the face of 28 members of Congress with that of people arrested for a crime during a summer test by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. . Amazon said the test methodology was wrong.
Some players in the technology sector have called for broader regulation of facial recognition systems, and only a few states regulate the appropriate use of technology. Microsoft Chairman Brad Smith wrote a blog post in July inviting legislators to form a bipartite commission to set standards that would prevent abusive use and abuse of systems. "by private companies and public authorities".
"We know from history that new and powerful surveillance tools left unchecked in the hands of the state have been used to target people who have done nothing wrong," wrote an anonymous employee of Amazon last week. "We can sell dangerous surveillance systems to the police or we can defend what is right, we can not do both."
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