Anonymous Microsoft and Amazon employees speak out on Medium

[nir]

When Jeff Bezos took the stage at a Wired conference this week, he told the audience that it was part of a business leader’s job to make potentially unpopular decisions, like working with the military.

 

One day later, on Tuesday, an Amazon employee explained exactly why those decisions might be unpopular. In a public letter posted to Medium, an anonymous worker at the company outlined concerns about Amazon’s facial recognition tool, Rekognition. The product has been under fire since May, when the ACLU revealed that the company was offering it to police departments, raising serious civil liberties concerns.

 

“We know Bezos is aware of these concerns and the industry-wide conversation happening right now,” the employee wrote. ”On stage, he acknowledged that big tech’s products might be misused, even exploited, by autocrats. But rather than meaningfully explain how Amazon will act to prevent the bad uses of its own technology, Bezos suggested we wait for society’s ‘immune response.’”

 

It’s the second anonymous callout post from a tech employee in less than a week. On Friday, a Microsoft worker separately raised concerns on Medium about the company’s interest in a $10 billion contract to provide cloud services to the US Department of Defense. “Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war,” the employee wrote. (“Microsoft submitted its bid on the JEDI contract on the October 12 deadline,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. “While we don’t have a way to verify the authenticity of this letter, we always encourage employees to share their views with us.”)

 

The choice of Medium is itself noteworthy: a platform that has in the past been a place for users’ first-person missives, and one built with a tech company ethos. Siobhan O’Connor, vice president of editorial at Medium, says the posts were brought to them by a person they knew, and then their authors were verified to be employees. Both posts were behind Medium’s gated paywall, limiting reach somewhat, although O’Connor says they’ve received a wide readership. She says she recognized the letters as “particularly interesting to the readers of a platform like Medium.”

 

The letters were the latest salvo in a series of worker actions in Silicon Valley. Google employees have objected to the company working on a Defense Department AI project, which led Google to scuttle its plans. The company has also faced backlash over its plan to build a censored search engine in China, a move that has led not only to criticism but outright resignations. Amazon employees have objected to Rekognition, and Microsoft workers have objected to the company providing services to ICE, although leaders have stood behind the decisions in those cases. Salesforce has also faced both outside criticism and public protests over its ICE contracts.

 

Yana Calou, who has organized tech workers as part of the organization Coworker.org, says employees are thinking about what accountability looks like in an industry already facing substantial media pressure. While there’s been “incredible journalism” on the subject, Calou says, workers are also aware of the impact a first-person, op-ed-style piece could have. “It put a personal spin on something that has felt to a lot of readers very, very theoretical,” O’Connor says.

 

“Amazon talks a lot about values of leadership,” the letter concludes. “If we want to lead, we need to make a choice between people and profits. We can sell dangerous surveillance systems to police or we can stand up for what’s right. We can’t do both.”

 

Source

[steven36]

 Project Maven Google  did not pull out of and existing contract , The contract  time limit was over and they decided to not rebid and someone else got it. The real reason they didn't rebid is not really known,  so its just over hyped  Google PR.   Google is non union  you don't have a real vote as a worker .  Most likely the reason they  didn't renew the bid is someone that owns a lot of stock and voting rights didn't want them to renew it.

 

And  JEDI cloud contract Google didn't even qualify for it so it does no good to bid for something you have no chance  of wining so that was more Google PR . And as far as Amazon and Microsoft there non union  as well, they not even said who won it yet.  but i bet you anything it was Amazon because they already have contracts with the CIA for the cloud.   And leaks from Anonymous cowards  because  they have feelings sure dont  matter to these outfits.  Microsoft and Amazon would fire them if they ever find out who it is .

 

JEDI cloud contract proposals were not even done online the only way you could bid on it was give  the Pentagon a DVD with it on it  in person.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/277818-pentagon-will-only-accept-proposals-for-military-cloud-network-on-dvd

 

All i know Google is treading on dangerous waters if a real war ever breaks out  with China and US them helping China make AI  they all most likely will be arrested for treason . They putting all Chinese people in danger that live in the USA  and other countries as well .

 

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With no fanfare, Google removed “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct sometime between April 21 and May 4, when it simply disappeared from the Google website.

 

Shortly after that, in May, Google announced that would not renew its contract with DoD for Project Maven, which provides AI technology for analyzing drone footage, because its employees objected to doing any work for the American military.

 

But in December of last year, Google announced that it would open a state of the art AI development center in Shanghai, where the most advanced AI technology would be made available to the Chinese government and the Chinese military.

 

The biggest public scandal this year occurred when word leaked out in July that Google for almost two years had 200 programmers working on an advanced AI search engine for China called Dragonfly that would detect users who made requests that violated Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censorship rules, and would make personal identifying information about such users available to the Chinese government and Chinese military.

 

As China continues to prepare to launch a war against the United States, it is hard to avoid the impression that Google has already chosen the side that it wants to win that war, and it is not the United States.

 

And somebody ought to tell Sundar Pichai that those same super-intelligent weapon systems that Google is helping the Chinese military to build will also be used against his native India. Perhaps that thought never occurred to him.

 

And finally, Chinese employees working in America should realize how dangerous Google’s policy is for them personally. During World War II, Japanese Americans were interned. After 9/11, Muslim Americans were jailed without trial. The path that Google is on will adversely affect all Chinese-Americans, and an anti-Chinese public mood could materialize overnight. Gizmodo (18-May) and Gizmodo (1-Jun) and CNBC (13-Dec-2017) and NY Times (16-Aug) and The Intercept (9-Oct) and Washington Post