Most of the recent debate has been around uses of artificial intelligence to identify objects in video footage from drones, or to identify people through facial recognition. Yasha Levine, author of the book Surveillance Valley, says scrutiny of tech companies needs to extend beyond “the splashy Terminator-like stuff” and “look at the more routine and mundane integration of Silicon Valley tech with military and law enforcement. Critics lambasted Microsoft on social media, asking the company to discontinue its work with ICE.
The post resurfaced amid outrage over ICE’s role in forcibly separating families soon after they arrive in the US, with some children detained in cages. “The agency is currently implementing transformative technologies for homeland security and public safety, and we're proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud,” the post added. The sales-driven blog post outlined ways that ICE might use Azure Government, including enabling ICE employees to “utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification,” Tom Keane, a general manager at Microsoft wrote. The post celebrated a government certification that allowed Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud-computing platform, to handle sensitive unclassified information for ICE. On Sunday, critics noted a blog post from January in which Microsoft touted its work with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Microsoft has become the latest company dragged into the tech industry’s ethical reckoning over the use of its products by government agencies.
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