Dear technology sector: please download a spine

When a journalist asked nine major technology firms if they would help the incoming Trump administration build its proposed Muslim registry, only one said it would refuse. The sole voice of decency, according to an article by The Intercept, was Twitter. The rest – Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Booz Allen Hamilton, SRA International and CGI – either ignored the question, declined to answer or issued ambiguous statements.

Thankfully, whatever the dithering cowardice of the corporates on one of the most reprehensible promises of the president-elect, individual employees have – bravo! – shown more mettle. This week, a swiftly expanding group of them vowed to never be complicit in the creation of such a registry, pledging at neveragain.tech.

“We refuse to build a database of people based on their constitutionally protected religious beliefs. We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable,” states part of their pledge, which recognises the role technology companies have played in the past in facilitating surveillance and persecution.

“Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again,” they conclude.

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Dangerous moment

This is a laudable, brave and welcome public stance at a dangerous moment in time, when shamelessly overt and morally destitute actions are being proposed not just by the Trump team but by other far-right candidates and regimes across the world.

Yet the democratic West and its technology companies have much to answer for already. Covert domestic surveillance of the kind exposed by Edward Snowden – enabled by technologies provided by and in co-operation with tech firms – comes to mind, but that's only part of it.

Repeatedly, the issue of western technology firms selling products and services to repressive regimes has arisen in the recent past and little has been done, even though such actions often break (admittedly murky) domestic and international trade prohibitions.

Oh, we do get a bit of media kerfuffle over the most egregious offenders, like Italian company Hacking Team, whose relationships with regimes in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Sudan – as well as several US agencies including the DEA, FBI and Department of Defence – were highlighted when the company was itself hacked in 2015.

But Hacking Team was, if you will, an easy target. Less visible but just as concerning are the many mainstream, “respectable” companies, large and small, that engage in selling technologies and services to questionable countries. Tech that can, and plainly will, be used oppressively.

Collusion

Back in 2012, digital activists the

Electronic Freedom Foundation

(EFF.org) – reacting to numerous (pre-Snowden) media reports of questionable collusion – provided the

European Parliament

with a list of recommendations for combatting what it stated was “one of the most troubling problems facing democracy activists around the world: the fact that European and American companies are providing key surveillance technology to authoritarian governments that is then being used to aid repression.”

That same year, the Pew Trust in the US published a report on technology companies' corporate responsibility, asking respondents how they envisioned companies would and should approach such challenges. Many of the answers are not encouraging, with some warning that corporations could rival governments in influencing the digital future. Many said that the long-term trend would be towards more surveillance, because it serves the interests of both governments and tech companies.

And – apropos of today’s alarms – others concluded that “‘democratic’ countries want to filter, block, and censor the internet, too. Tech companies see co-operating with governments as a necessity,” according to the report.

Interception technologies

Last year, over a dozen British companies were licensed to sell powerful interception technologies globally, including to “Saudi Arabia, the

United Arab Emirates

,

Turkey

and Egypt; countries with poor human rights records that have been well documented to abuse surveillance technology,” according to a report from

[ Motherboard ]

.

A report released last week by INCLO, the International Network of Civil Liberties Organisations (which includes the Irish Council for Civil Liberties) is timely. Entitled Surveillance and Democracy, it features nine international examples of how surveillance and democracy too often go hand in hand (in Ireland, too), helped along by digital technologies.

It makes for chilling but essential reading. You can download it at inclo.net/pdf/surveillance-and-democracy.pdf.

There are no easy solutions to these problems, but one sector stands complicit.  The tech sector has done enough blathering on about vagaries like “innovation” and hyping its charitable foundations and diversity programmes, all while supporting reprehensible regimes and their anti-democratic schemes that crush lives.

Whether the prospect is enabling Muslim registries or surveilling entire populations, enough is enough. Get a spine and some morals.