Big Brother is Being Increasingly Outsourced To Silicon Valley, Says Report (fastcompany.com)

The federal and local governments have long relied on private companies for defense and law enforcement technologies, from Lockheed Martin jetfighters to Booz Allen Hamilton data analysis. But increasingly, the government is expanding beyond the usual defense contractors to the company that also provides free shipping and online TV. From a report: "The ... thing that was shocking for me was to understand just how the federal authorizations are allowing Amazon to have such a monopoly over the storage of government information," says Jacinta Gonzalez, field organizer for immigrant advocacy group Mijente. Along with the National Immigration Project and the Immigrant Defense Project, Mijente funded a new report entitled, "Who's Behind ICE?: The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations." Its findings are based on documents such as contracts, memoranda, and corporate financial reports --which are publicly available but take a lot of digging to decipher.

While Amazon plays the leading role, the report also details the involvement of companies including Peter Thiel's Palantir, NEC, and Thomson Reuters in storing, transferring, and analyzing data on both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens. The U.S. government is moving its databases from federal facilities to cloud providers, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS), raising concerns about accountability.

Comments

Do you blame surveillance video for B&E?

[El Cubano]

Who's Behind ICE?: The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations.

Why not publish a report on Who's Behind the County Sheriffs?: The Video Equipment Companies Fueling Breaking and Entering Arrests

Seriously, the deportation issue is a combination of people who do not respect the law and a broken immigration system which nobody seems to really want to fix.

Sure, progressives make a lot of noise about it, but you can bet that they have no interest in actually seeing it fixed, as at the moment it is one of the few things they can use to rally their base. Besides, when Democrats had both houses of Congress and the presidency, they did not lift a finger to fix the immigration problem. Here is an excerpt from Obama's 2010 State of the Union:

And we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system â" to secure our borders, enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nations.

Of course, if he said those same words today he would be branded a xenophobic racist by his own party. In fact, if I had not said up front that they were Obama's words from just 8 years ago, most would probably assume they were Trump's words from 8 days ago. And, of course, nobody wants to mention how ICE under Obama deported far more illegal immigrants that ICE under Trump. Clearly, the "abolish ICE" crowd only cares now because they don't like Trump.

Of course, the Republicans right now have both houses of congress and the White House and don't seem to have much interest in fixing immigration either.

It sure makes a handy political prop.

Re:Black Lives Matter? Not to black people!!

[Kiuas]

They're a violent people, plain and simple.

Did you time travel here from the 1800s or something? Is your next argument going to be 'look at the shape(s) of their skulls, this proves they're primitive savages?'

Look, the following things are true globally speaking about crime: people with lower socio-economic status commit more crimes. Pretty much universally most violence, especially gang-violence, is committed by young, disenfranchised males. Got no job and no access to education? Why not join a gang or a criminal organization. I mean, people prefer not being poor to being poor, but if you've no means of entering the education system (for example due to higher education being too expensive) often criminal activity is seen by young males as the best/most efficient route upwards in terms of social mobility and wealth.

Look at developing countries and countries with higher murder rates than the West or the US. Southern america has a lot of problems. Do you think it's black people killing each other in the cartel wars in central and southern america? Do you think a high amount of black people is the reason for example Russia, and a lot of the other former Soviet states have such high violent crime statistics? Or could it possibly be that these are regions with extremely high poverty rates and income/wealth inequality which is fertile ground for social problems and organized violent crime and those who benefit from it?

However, I have read in the past that in the US the poverty level alone does not explain the differences in stats, because the black population is over-represented in the stats even when controlling for income. Now I'm not American and by no means a criminologist, but as someone who works with data, I'm always interested in a data-driven approach, so I did some googling about racial crime data and economics and came across this post titled racial differences in homicide rates are poorly explained by economics, lets have a read shall we?

Although it’s clear that poverty predicts homicide quite independently of black, it’s also clear that black predicts independently of the poverty. Moreover, if you look closely at the distribution and other analysis I present here it’ll be clear that poverty doesn’t come close to closing these racial differences.

Single-motherhood is also a strong predictor.

Although the data are somewhat noisy and single-motherhood is quite strongly associated with the black population (r=0.76 at the county level), it seems to me that:

there is a non-linear relationship between single-motherhood and homicide (which may be throwing off the linear model estimates somewhat)
counties with very high rates of single-motherhood have very high homicide rates even with negligible black populations
blacker counties with low-rates of single-motherhood seem to have homicide rates much closer to the national average (the same cannot be said for other covariates)
Based on the other evidence I have seen, I have come to view the single-motherhood being at least a very strong proxy for community health is and, in many respects, a stronger predictor of inter-racial differences than other measures like poverty rates. It does not entirely explain the observed racial differences here, but it mediates much of the relationship and does so more effectively than other common measures.

Controlling for single-motherhood rates with an unweighted loess regression I find little evidence to suggest that percent black adds much in the way of predictive validity. - -

Conclusion

To summarize:

1. There are vast differences in homicide rates between groups.
* This “effect” is found consistently in aggregated and (racially) disaggregated data.