Amazon reportedly offered ICE its facial recognition system

By Drew Harwell | Washington Post

Amazon.com introduced its facial recognition system this summer to immigration and customs officials to target or identify immigrants, which could push the tech giant into a growing debate over the Industry work with the government. .

The June meeting in Silicon Valley was revealed by emails as part of a request from the Freedom of Information Act of the advocacy group Project on Government Supervight; e-mails were first published in the Daily Beast. They show that the managers of ICE and Amazon Web Services spoke about the implementation of the company's Rekognition facial analysis platform to facilitate internal security investigations.

A manager of Amazon Web Services specializing in federal sales contracts and whose name was included in the emails wrote that the conversation involved "predictive analysis" and "marking / analysis of video recognition "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 at the southern border.

"We are ready and ready to support the vital mission (Homeland Security Investigations)," wrote the head of the Amazon.

Amazon officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. (Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, owns the Washington Post.)

ICE, which currently has no contract with Amazon, said in a statement that its homeland security investigation unit had used facial recognition technology to contribute to "criminal investigations related to fraudulent activities , the theft of identity and crimes related to the exploitation of children ".

ICE spokesman Matthew Bourke said the agency could not say how many times his officials had met Amazon, but added that "developing relationships with the industry and establishing relationships with potential contractors are relatively common in government acquisitions. " "Can use various investigative techniques and technological tools to carry out its mission of protecting the United States against cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security and public safety."

Amazon has commercialized this technology with police services to target and identify criminals. This technology is also used by police officers in Oregon and Florida. Civil rights and privacy advocates are concerned that the expansion of this unproven technology could have a chilling effect on public protests or encourage government and police efforts to overburden mass surveillance.

The June meeting could spark further unrest among Amazon workers who urged the company, with a capital of $ 850 billion, to reject any work likely to be used by the government. Hundreds of Amazonian anonymous workers wrote a letter to Bezos in June, about a week after the meeting, saying, "We refuse to build the platform that feeds ICE, and we refuse to contribute to tools that violate ICE's rights. # 39; man. "

It will also fuel a cultural conflict in Silicon Valley between business leaders seeking lucrative government contracts and core employees of the company, many of whom have expressed outrage at the separation of parents and migrant children through ICE at the Mexican border.

Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore, said Tuesday in a statement that he was "troubled" by the fact that ICE did not inform him of the meeting, adding that without clear guarantees, the technology " could potentially be misused by the government. "

"Amazon should not sell facial recognition technology to law enforcement without clear protections and policies to protect Americans from abuse," he said.

Microsoft, a technology giant that is creating competitive facial recognition tools for Amazon, was criticized this summer for the potential work it could do under a major ICE contract. Google has also encountered internal resistance for its contributions to the Maven project, a Department of Defense initiative that would allow artificial intelligence to identify objects in a drone video on the battlefield.

Amazon has signed a number of contracts with the government and is considered the main candidate to conquer the $ 10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract, known as the JEDI, for a common defense infrastructure. The company also operates a private cloud service for secret information used by the CIA. Dawn Meyerriecks, Deputy Director of the Science and Technology Agency, described the link between the Amazon and the CIA in a debate before the Washington Council last month in the face of "a closer partnership that I have never seen in my career.

Amazon spent $ 3.63 million between July 1 and September 30 to put pressure on the US government on various issues, including "facial recognition technology," according to federal ethics documents released this year. week.

Bezos donated money for scholarships for undocumented immigrant students, but he also publicly supported the contributions of the technology industry to national security efforts and 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 inside. 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 the search for ways to combat illegal immigration. ICE officials said last year to technology sector entrepreneurs that they wanted an "extreme filtering" system, able to automatically exploit the social media of foreign visitors in order to determine whether or not they were going to work. 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 was focused on the less sensitive side of technology, including his ability to look at a dog's face and recognize him as a golden retriever, for example.

But the growing role of technology in criminal justice and investigative cases has been subject to increased scrutiny by civil rights groups, and Democratic legislators have worried 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 President Brad Smith wrote a blog post in July urging lawmakers to form a bipartisan commission to set standards that would prevent abuses and abuse of systems "by private companies and authorities public. "