Amazon met with ICE officials over facial-recognition system that could identify immigrants

Washington Post Amazon.com Inc. pitched its facial-recognition system in the summer to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials as a way for the agency to target or identify immigrants, a move that could shove the tech giant further into a growing debate over the technology industry’s work with the government. An Amazon Web Service official specializing in federal sales contracts, whose name was redacted in the emails, wrote that the conversation involved “predictive analytics” and “Rekognition Video tagging/analysis” that could possibly enable ICE to identify people’s faces from afar — a type of technology that immigration officials have voiced interest in for its potential enforcement use on the nation’s southern border. Hundreds of anonymous Amazon workers wrote Bezos a letter in June, roughly one week after the meeting, saying: “We refuse to build the platform that powers ICE, and we refuse to contribute to tools that violate human rights.” It will also further fuel a Silicon Valley culture clash between corporate leaders pursuing lucrative government contracts and the company’s rank-and-file workers, many of whom have voiced outrage over ICE’s separation of migrant parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border. ICE officials told tech-industry contractors last year they wanted an “extreme vetting” system that could automatically mine foreign visitors’ social media presence to assess whether they might commit criminal or terrorist acts. Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote a blog post in July challenging lawmakers to form a bipartisan commission to set standards that could prevent such systems’ misuse “by private companies and public authorities alike.” Last week, a person identified as an Amazon employee published a piece on Medium calling on Amazon to stop selling facial-recognition technology to police.