Hundreds of Google employees say they won't be 'complicit' in cloud computing work with Customs and Border Protection
Excerpt: In a petition posted on Wednesday to Medium, the employees wrote that CBP, along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is caging and harming asylum seekers, separating children from their parents and overseeing an abusive system. After noting that CBP is seeking vendors for a contract to provide cloud services, the Googlers asked that the Mountain View, Calif., company preemptively commit to not working with the agency. "It’s time to stand together again and state clearly that we will not work on any such contract. We demand that Google publicly commit not to support CBP, ICE or ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] with any infrastructure, funding or engineering resources, directly or indirectly, until they stop engaging in human rights abuses," the petition stated. [It isn’t usually a good idea to try to bully your own employer. I find it interesting to speculate just what reaction this would’ve gotten from a President Truman, Roosevelt, or Wilson. I suspect these nearly 600 individuals would’ve found themselves stranded in far northern Alaska, hundreds of miles by foot or kayak from the nearest telephone. If they were lucky. Everyone is entitled to their own political opinions, but they’re not entitled to demand that everyone else agree with those opinions. If they hate working for the “monster” Google, let’em quit. I doubt many of them are so indispensable they can’t be replaced within minutes. I hope Google is smart enough not to be bullied and just fires them all. I also notice none of them seem to have a problem working with China, whose human-rights policies are far more coercive than ours. Ron P.]
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