
‘450 Amazon employees tell Bezos to kick Palantir off AWS’ - hinchlt
https://sociable.co/business/amazon-palantir-aws/
======
agency
This is a very confusingly written article. It repeatedly refers to
Rekognition as a Palantir product, but it is in fact an AWS offering[1]. This
is much clearer in the ACLU article they link to [2], which makes no reference
to Palantir.

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/](https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/)

[2] [https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-
te...](https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-
technologies/amazons-face-recognition-falsely-matched-28)

~~~
hinchlt
Solid point and the article has been updated.

------
writepub
We live in an age of private companies owning the infrastructure facilitating
daily life. For instance:

1\. Communications infrastructure: FB, Twitter, private sites hosted on big
cloud vendors

2\. Payments: Stripe, Braintree, ...

3\. Cloud: Google, AWS, MSFT-Azure, ...

4\. Transportation: Uber, Lyft, ...

5\. Domain registration, hosting: GoDaddy, Google, AWS, ...

Imagine running a real business while being banned from the aforementioned
platforms --> It's unfeasible!!!

Never ever in history have companies from the valley held outsized control
over private communication and business. With this power comes great
responsibility - one of which is tolerance for an opposing political thoughts.
If these "infrastructure" companies start making it unfeasible for those with
differing politics to exist online, they'll immediately draw regulatory ire.
Not to mention that systemic censorship of certain thought is unethical.

If AWS employees disagree with Palantair & ICE, they should consider other
channels of expression - from social media to pressuring their elected
representatives to call for change. But, if Palantair isn't engaged in illegal
activity, they should be sent to an orientation in tolerance for opposing
political philosophies.

~~~
ezrast
Political philosophy is not a protected status, nor should it be, and private
entities should not be under pressure to give up their freedom of association.
Consumers should have options, of course, but we get that through good old
monopoly-busting (the situation is different for physically-entrenched
monopolies like ISP's, but none of your listed industries are that).

Aside from _maybe_ payment processing, you're also drastically overstating how
limited the options in these spaces are. There are literally hundreds of
domain registrars. Hosting providers are also plentiful and you can always
colo. Facebook and Twitter are not infrastructure. Uber and Lyft are not known
for their business services in any case.

Capricious bans do happen, but if someone somehow manages to get blacklisted
from all of AWS, GCP, Azure, Rackspace, and DigitalOcean, odds are pretty good
that that's society working as intended. It's nearly impossible to convince
that many businesses not to take your money without actually being a terrible
person who doesn't deserve to have your views publicized.

~~~
philwelch
> Political philosophy is not a protected status, nor should it be, and
> private entities should not be under pressure to give up their freedom of
> association.

This justifies 80% of McCarthyism. Are you comfortable with this implication?

~~~
ezrast
If by "justifies" you mean "doesn't explicitly outlaw" then yeah, I am,
because libel laws also exist.

Is it your position that the real problem with McCarthyism was that actual
communist spies were being denied jobs and service? I don't know how else you
could be drawing the connection to what you quoted.

~~~
philwelch
There's no legal burden of proof requirement for firing somebody for suspicion
of belonging to a non-protected class.

American libel laws also require that, to convict someone of libel, you need
to affirmatively prove that the defendant's claims are untrue, particularly if
the victim is a public figure.

The real problem with McCarthyism is that even actions by non-governmental
entities to enforce social norms against genuinely totalitarian ideologies by
means that fall within the bounds of the law can still be unjust if they are
pursued to extremes.

~~~
ezrast
I don't know why you're bringing burden of proof into it. Of course people get
fired for unjust reasons all the time. If those reasons are petty prejudices
that have existed for the duration of humankind's existence, and that the best
efforts of societal and political leaders have failed to stamp out, we use the
sledgehammer of protected classes to try and limit the damage.

If the reasons have more to do with a massive, nation-wide disinformation
campaign instigated by powerful political figures, those are some very
particular problems that are not best fixed by putting additional shackles on
those pesky private businesses.

"<thing> can be unjust if pursued to extremes" is not a provocative or
substantive comment for any value of <thing>. But before I go on, let me seek
clarification: for the purposes of this discussion, are you actually
suggesting that political affiliation should be made a protected class? That
seems like where this is going but I don't want to accidentally end up
fighting a straw person.

~~~
philwelch
My argument is that private entities _should_ be pressured to exercise their
freedom of association responsibly and fairly, even when failure to do so
falls below the legal standards of non-discrimination.

I agree that legal "sledgehammers" and "shackles" are burdensome. It's because
of my eagerness to avoid such remedies that I strongly advocate other measures
to discourage private firms from abusing their market power to effect
political change by selectively including or excluding potential customers and
employees for political reasons. While I suppose I technically agree that
"private entities should not be under pressure to _give up_ their freedom of
association", they _should_ be under pressure to use extreme discretion in
exercising that freedom.

~~~
ezrast
Okay, that's generally reasonable, but in the context of the current US
political climate I think you're concerned about the wrong thing. While the
national situation is frequently described as being rife with political
intolerance, those attitudes belong mostly to the masses and to politicians.
The megacorporations in question skew heavily techno-libertarian and display
little propensity for censoring their platforms beyond removing illegal
content and porn. In the case of social media in particular, it's the major
platforms' lack of interest in curating political content that has allowed
them and their "unbiased" algorithms to become the unwitting tools of those
who would undermine our political institutions. If the likes of Facebook,
Twitter, and Reddit would choose some principles to stand for rather than
trying to be everything to everyone, they and we would be less susceptible to
that sort of manipulation.

~~~
philwelch
Social media is a whole other can of worms.

What do you consider “undermining our political institutions”? If that
consists of spreading disinformation and propaganda, those have been part of
politics for as long as there have been politics. If it’s because the
propaganda is inserted by witting or unwitting agents of a hostile foreign
power—well, that was the rationale for blacklisting suspected Communist
screenwriters. This wasn’t the angle I was coming from, but it does circle
back to that somehow.

------
neom
"An anonymous Amazon employee verified by Medium’s editorial staff wrote
yesterday that Amazon should not be selling facial recognition software
“Rekognition” to law enforcement as it was being used by police departments
and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without ethical oversight."

I'm curious who's ethics and who's oversight this is referring to? I read the
article and the medium post and that still seems unclear to me.

------
fierro
this will never ever ever ever never ever happen. don't waste your time
reading this

