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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.
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.
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.