Relevant: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-...
It may feel better to watch and yell from the outside, and you may have the moral high ground in doing so. But change happens from the inside. We need more companies like GitHub working with agencies to reform their policies.
Also, change is slow. Protests are step one, but there are probably 235 more steps until change is realized. Slow and steady, my friends.
EDIT: To answer the questions about how a company influences policy. Companies influence policy all. the. time. Look at ALEC[1] look at PACs. Look at the fact that Microsoft is not going to be offering facial recognition tech until privacy protections are passed. Not saying ALEC is good, but it exists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...
can someone be a considered authority without being an expert.
edit:
I am using authority from the example in wikipedia
"One example of the use of the appeal to authority in science dates to 1923,[20] when leading American zoologist Theophilus Painter declared, based on poor data and conflicting observations he had made,[21][22] that humans had 24 pairs of chromosomes. From the 1920s until 1956,[23] scientists propagated this "fact" based on Painter's authority"
Painter presumably was an expert. So not sure why you are saying why its ok if the person is an expert.
We really need to stop this sort of mob thought policing that has taken over the internet and bullies corporations and individuals into conformance. This is not new, but it seems particularly egregious right now. But how do you stop/mitigate internet mobs without "streisanding" even bigger mobs?
> As Friedman spoke, dozens of employees expressed frustration and outrage in a company Slack channel with more than 1,200 people, according to screenshots reviewed by The Times.
We are letting small minorities (dozens out of thousands) amplify their outrage and impose their demands on everyone else. Same thing happens on Twitter, and I really don't like that. It's like that one xkcd[0] except instead of "the people listening" being rational and reasonable, "the people listening" are an angry minority on social media stirring up everyone around them into a blood frenzy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz...
It really isn't. Private institutions are under no obligation to collaborate with public agencies unless explicitly required by the Defense Production Act[0]. Please remember that the government is meant to serve us, not the other way around.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950
Anyone who was around when the OSI set out a basic definition of minimal requirements for open source licenses will remember that there were some arguments about whether a license could restrict use based on fields of endeavour. The idea that it couldn’t is aligned with universalist civil libertarian principles, and epistemological humility.
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.[2]
The principles of open source are still very strong, and somehow more obvious than free speech or due process. The network effects could make it impossible for any significant change, but I expect we’ll soon see attempts at licenses that are otherwise free, but attempt to restrict use by certain domestic enemies of the maintainers. [1] Matt Taibbi - https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i... [2] OSI - https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
The USA has the most immigrants than any other country in the world at almost 47 million residents. That's 4 times higher than the second place country. And the vast majority of them came perfectly legally. For every one person that immigrates to Canada, 6 immigrate to the USA. I don't really know what people are asking for here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
And before anyone invokes Godwin's Law, ICE has been recently discovered to have literally poisoned detainees by using toxic cleaning chemicals in close proximity to detainees without giving them any protection or sufficient ventilation[2].
But even if you think it is unreasonable or overblown to call ICE nazis or fascists, I still question the premise that companies should not be held morally responsible for the people they knowingly and willingly do business with. If GitHub was selling software to known terrorists, you'd better believe that the American government (and hopefully most people) wouldn't see it as being fair game.
I agree that the lasting way to stop the abuses by ICE is through legislative and administrative changes, but I disagree with the argument that "refusing to sell software to ICE won't stop them from committing abuses, so I'll just sell them software anyway" is ethically justified. Now, GitHub is obviously free to do whatever they like but the public should also be free to point this out whenever they try to take the moral high ground.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [2]: https://thecrimereport.org/2020/06/11/ice-spraying-disinfect...
From Significance, right at the top: "(...) Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police. Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are white men."
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/02/how-border-...
In any case, here's two links. One's from Drexel University, the other is a meta-composition of resources by an organization connected to the Kennedy School at Harvard. Educate yourself.
[1] https://drexel.edu/now/archive/2016/December/Black-Men-3-tim...
[2] https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-...
In this study run by Harvard professor Roland Fryer, it was found that African-Americans are 20% less likely to be shot and proportionally more likely to see use-of-force against them.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
I didn't find anything unbiased in my quick search on "likelihood of death during interaction."
According to wikipedia these are BLM's policy demands:
Policy demands In 2016, Black Lives Matter and a coalition of 60 organizations affiliated with BLM called for decarceration in the United States, reparations for slavery in the United States, an end to mass surveillance, investment in public education, not incarceration, and community control of the police: empowering residents in communities of color to hire and fire police officers and issue subpoenas, decide disciplinary consequences and exercise control over city funding of police.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter#Policy_dema...
There's 3 times more slaves today than during the period of the transatlantic slave trade. Estimated to be 40m people, 10m of which are children, mainly in Africa and Asia.[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-...
ICE is pretty bad at following US law and pretty good at being cruel to everyone in their path
- ICE routinely detains and deports citizens and legal residents (guess their skin color) [1]
- ICE routinely abuses those placed in their care and doesn't punish known abusers [2] [3] [4] [7]
- ICE is happy to hurt its law enforcement practices to round up more immigrants [5]
- under Obama ICE was actively ignoring court orders [6] this is much worse under Trump
- ICE asylum officers (i.e. lawyers and experts) have reported extensive cruel and illegal practices [8]
[1] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-ice-20180...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2018/10/11/adelanto-ice-detention-c...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/us/sexual-assault-ice-det...
[4] https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/im...
[5] https://www.texasobserver.org/ice-hsi-letter-kirstjen-nielse...
[6] https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/ice-and-border-p...
[7] https://www.aclusandiego.org/cbp-child-abuse-foia/
[8] https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-11-15/asylum-off...
If ICE could be trusted to care for those in its care [1] or respect the legal rights of immigrants [2] then, maybe it would be unfair. How many children need to die in custody before "concentration camp" stops being hyperbolic?
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2019/12/19/ice...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-11-15/asylum-off...
Now this isn't quite the IBM nazi connection - but the government snatching up people, then paying private corporations to intern them, in turn apparently using them for forced labour... Is pretty bad.
I'd be surprised if software isn't essential to keeping the machine going - and I'd not hesitated to call taking money for tooling "being a collaborator".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/coronavirus-ice-d...
"Being illegally present in the U.S. has always been a civil, not criminal, violation of the INA[Immigration and Naturalization Act]"
"Criminal violations of the INA, on the other hand, include felonies and misdemeanors and are prosecuted in federal district courts. These types of violations include the bringing in and harboring of certain undocumented aliens, aliens (INA §275), ..."
As can already be deduced from the above, illegal entry is a misdemeanor. Only the bringing in, harbouring, and certain specific aggravation conditions raise it to a felony.
You presume that "dealing with illegal immigration has popular support" is the same as "the public broadly supports arbitrary cruelty to illegal immigrants".
The US population (~80%) appears to think "dealing with illegal immigration" should mean "provide a path to citizenship" [1]
1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx
> I don't think it's fair or makes sense to single them out.
ICE has earned all of the scrutiny they get. ICE does not seem to care about the welfare of the people in its care [2]. It does not seem to care about US immigration law [3]. Or the rights of legal immigrants [4]. ICE employees say ICE prioritizes rounding up law abiding families over criminal investigations [5].
[2] https://theintercept.com/2018/04/11/immigration-detention-se...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-11-15/asylum-off...
[4] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/ice-is-out-of-co...
[5] https://www.texasobserver.org/ice-hsi-letter-kirstjen-nielse...
How to you handle underclass, i.e. people who become disabled or injured, move into a recession, can't meet the initial requirements, or some reason to not comply. With your requirement #1, #3 seems cruel. In most countries a work permit gets you basic access to the same welfare and worker protections (usually statutory retirement, unemployment insurance, health care) for this exact reason.
> If you break the law you will be separated from your family
Really depends what law you have broken, doesn't it? Under US immigration law crossing the border at the wrong place is punishable by $250 fine (8 U.S.C. Section 1325, I.N.A. Section 275). Many traffic violations have stricter penalties.
In early 2017 the Trump administration stopped accepting asylum applications at ports of entry and required asylum seekers to apply in the country (contrary to law). In April 2018 ICE started separating families of asylum seekers who had committed the grievous act of a) crossing the border b) requesting asylum from the first US official they encountered (a condition explicitly allowed in US asylum law)
> keeping children in cages ... 3 different presidents now
I think that's a false equivalency. The fucked up stuff ICE got away with under Obama is not the same as the fucked up shit Trump has given the green light to. The Trump admin is actively violating US immigration law to for no other apparent reason than a simple desire to be cruel to asylum seekers. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/688/the-out-crowd
The only vilification happening here is your misrepresentation of the critics of ICE, many of whom do not advocate for "open borders".
ICE is not equivalent to "border security", which should be obvious when you consider that this agency was only created in 2002.
ICE doesn't even work at the border. That's the Border Patrol (and customs, and the Coast Guard).
ICE exclusively works within the US. Since illegal immigrants have little protection, it acts much like any unchecked police force, at least according to its critics.
There were 1,200 complaints of sexual assault in ICE custody[0], for example. Less than 2% of these were investigated[1], proving the point about them acting "largely unchecked" that I somehow felt the need to qualify with "according to its critics", above, before looking this up.
From 2012 to early 2018, ICE wrongfully arrested and detained 1,488 U.S. citizens, including many who spent months or years in immigration detention.[2]
Since it isn't particularly hard to find illegal immigrants in the US, ICE also has a lot of liberty to decide who to go after. That's a recipe for arbitrary enforcement, and there have been complaints about individuals, families, neighbourhoods, or cities being targeted or a variety of reasons, none of which fit most people's idea of justice, from shakedown collecting money from individuals in exchange for sparing them harassment to cities being targeted after incurring the wrath of the current government.
[0]: https://theintercept.com/2018/04/11/immigration-detention-se...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_E...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_E...
I mean, it's also lunacy that the US government would run concentration camps, right?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/aoc-holocaust-why-mi...
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentratio...
The issue I take with your argument is, politics in the United States aren't "normal". Maybe they never were "normal". But I think the notion is, this is more than a "political" disagreement over whether the tax rate should be 23% or 25%. We're in the midst of a fundamental moral disagreement about whose lives matter.
There are tens of thousands of them now, every one of them installed by the artist who originally came up with the idea.
They are installed in front of their last place of residence. So it's really decentralised, and the realisation that the Holocaust happened in your street (or even to people living in the house you now life in) is powerful.
They're incarcerating newborns and forcing unrelated 5 year old detainees with no relation to them to take care of them. They smell, they're covered in lice, bodily fluids, they're denied personal hygiene, food, water. They are forced to drink water from toilets.
Kids that are too active are sedated and some of them, left unsupervised causing them to smash their heads against the floor causing them permanent brain damage.
Children covered in lice, bodily fluids, without showering for weeks to months. Newborns being taken care of by 5 year old detainees with no relation. They are denied food and water. They are forced to drink water from toilets. They're scared to ask for food and water [1].
Then, let me introduce you: The Mexican Repatriation Act of 1929. If your argument is that citizens need to be protected, I remind you that in 1929, the US government took US-born children of Mexican heritage (technically, US nationals), put them in buses, and sent them to Mexico. In total, up to 4,000,000 Mexicans and their US born descendants were victims of this.
It is possible that some the families being detained and separated are descendants of US citizens. But nobody cares, you know why? because it's not about citizenship and immigration. It has never been about that. It's about making bullshit excuses for racism and ethnic cleansing. Before the Mexican annexation it was done to the Native Americans, and for them there were other excuses as well.
The US has set a strong precedent about not giving a flying fuck about borders, immigration and sovereignty. What did American immigrants in Tejas, Mexico do? or Alta California, Mexico? or the Kingdom of Hawaii? or countless other territories? They were given land grants and instead of being grateful, they revolted, declared independence and then joined the Union because they were not allowed to have slaves, or because they saw themselves as entitled to those lands. Lands that they had no connection to whatsoever.
Before the US existed, their predecessors, the British empire, had other races to discriminate. Basically every other nation including other nations in the British Isles. That mentality led them to invade 99% of the planet and kill millions of people through wars, famine, etc.
In contrast, the ancestors of the families being detained are the populations that have inhabited North America for 10,000 years. Not a couple of centuries. 10,000 fucking years.
I think that social constructs could be discriminated against based on race, religion, sex, etc if it was discriminated against because its members were part of a protected class.
[0] https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/8686/what-is-a-creed...
Microsoft itself is denying service to police departments right now regarding face detection tech.
"Microsoft won’t sell facial recognition to police until Congress passes new privacy law" https://www.theverge.com/21288053/microsoft-facial-recogniti...
The IRS uses the term "undocumented alien," which is kind of a weird, mixed construction, referring to people as "aliens" (which I always find weird, but, okay), but not "illegal." [2]
Other government agencies, and, yes, immigration advocates, use the term "undocumented immigrant," which has the virtue of both being accurate, and not referring to individuals as "illegal," when the thing that's actually illegal is the fact that they are in the country without authorization (the "undocumented" part).
In summary, "illegal alien" as a term of art: fine in my book, just weird. "Undocumented alien": sure, if you're the IRS. But, otherwise, "undocumented immigrant" is the most technically accurate, because it's not the person who is illegal, as the word "illegal" modifying "immigrant" in the phrase would indicate, but their presence in the country that is illegal.
[0]: https://www.heritage.org/immigration/commentary/undocumented...
[1]: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/may/09/steve-mccr...
[2]: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/immi...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529671.
Or perhaps the checks are very common and don’t usually result in public letters and whatnot.
ICE hasn’t even been accelerating in their harm to people. If anything they’ve plateaued or declined. I’m not sure how to best measure fascism in ICE, but long term internment, death, and mistreatment is probably a start. The death rate has dropped, despite many more detentions [0]. I tried to figure out some metric around number detained, but I think that may also be influenced by number of crossings and not straightforward to risk of becoming Nazi Germany.
How do you think we can better measure this risk within ICE?
[0] https://www.cato.org/blog/8-people-died-immigration-detentio...
In this case, GitHub took actions similar to what you describe, donating $500k to "nonprofits helping communities adversely affected by the Trump administration’s immigration policies": https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-10-31...
Personally I think $500k is a bit small, and if I were Nat Friedman in this situation, maybe I would have announced a few extra paid leave days for employees engaging in protest, strikes, visiting elected officials to lobby for change, etc.
Nat Friedman's quote on this particular request from employees is "Picking and choosing customers is not the approach that we take to these types of questions when it comes to influencing government policy."
Feel free to try and explain it away but to say no one is calling for this would at this point be willful blindness. I have complete freedom to think that many of the protests demands are dangerous, poorly thought out and outright foolish.
If you would've spoken out, then you agree with the principle but don't agree that ICE is "bad enough" to warrant this treatment. If you wouldn't have spoken out but wouldn't have worked for them, then you agree that working on these systems is clearly unethical (and thus IBM was acting unethically) but feel that ethics are less important than not disrupting the freedom of a company to sell their services to whoever they like. If you would've worked for them and wouldn't have spoken out, then we have very different views on ethics and I'm not sure we're going to agree on anything.
Yes, laws should be changed but businesses should be held accountable for who they do business with. You'd better believe that the US government wouldn't have the same rosy outlook you do if they discovered that GitHub was selling software to known terrorist groups.