US Border Cruelty, Powered by Google Cloud

The history of tech is strewn with technologists who turned a blind eye to the use of their inventions to commit hideous war crimes

By Cory Doctorow / pluralist.net

In 2018, 20,000 googlers walked off the job in a protest over the company's tolerance for (and rewards to) sexual predators.

The walkout was the culmination of a long year of moral reckonings for Google workers, amid revelations that the company was secretly building AI tools to help the Pentagon's drone program and search tools to help the Chinese state suppress and spy on dissidence.

And while the walkouts killed these controversial projects, forced some exec resignations, and ended the company's use of binding arbitration clauses in employment contracts, the key organizers were forced out.

Ultimately, the company's commitment to networked authoritarianism and profits over human rights has continued to overpower any fear of worker walkouts. How else to explain yesterday's news that the company is helping CBP police the US-Mexican border?

As Lee Fang and Sam Biddle write for The Intercept, Google's role in providing cloud AI services for the "virtual border" was laundered through Thundercat Technology, a fact revealed by Jack Poulson, an AI scientist who quit Google over its Chinese censorship project.

Google's Cloud and AI systems are being integrated with tools sold by Anduril Industries, the company founded by the neofascist Palmer Luckey, who was made a billionaire by Facebook when they bought his Oculus VR startup at a hugely inflated price.

Luckey is a sociopath pariah who has been caught secretly funding white nationalist movements. His company is allied with Palantir, a company that produces tools for automating racial oppression and mass surveillance.

Luckey boasts that his company's recruiting materials court engineers who want to build weapons. He has donated $1.7m to Donald Trump's re-election campaign. He is precisely the kind of unsavory would-be war-criminal that Google leadership promised it wouldn't associate with.

The history of tech is strewn with technologists who turned a blind eye to the use of their inventions to commit hideous war crimes, such as IBM's complicity in Nazi death camps.

Google's use of a cutout to disguise its participation in the ethnic cleansing project on the US southern border is eerily reminiscent of IBM's systems for laundering its complicity with extermination camps.

Lead Image by Doug Porter