And then there were three...

Remember when I wrote that Microsoft weren't the only giant multinational whose normally-safe (and very lucrative) government contracts were becoming increasingly problematic in the Trump Era? I was thinking of Google's troubles with Project Maven. I was not expecting that Amazon's employees were literally days away from following in the footsteps of their Google and Microsoft counterparts... but here we are:

Following employee protests at Google and Microsoft over government contracts, workers at Amazon are circulating an internal letter to CEO Jeff Bezos, asking him to stop selling the company’s Rekognition facial recognition software to law enforcement and to boot the data-mining firm Palantir from its cloud services.

[...]

“Along with much of the world we watched in horror recently as U.S. authorities tore children away from their parents,” the letter states. “In the face of this immoral U.S. policy, and the U.S.’s increasingly inhumane treatment of refugees and immigrants beyond this specific policy, we are deeply concerned that Amazon is implicated, providing infrastructure and services that enable ICE and DHS.”

In May, an investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that Amazon had heavily marketed its Rekognition software to police departments and government agencies. The technology can recognize and track faces in real time, and the ACLU noted that such a powerful surveillance tool could easily be misused by law enforcement. Earlier this week, several Amazon shareholders called on the company to stop selling Rekognition to the police.

That backlash has now spread among employees as well.

“Our company should not be in the surveillance business; we should not be in the policing business; we should not be in the business of supporting those who monitor and oppress marginalized populations,” the employee letter states.

Now all that remains is for Facebook's employees to start sending open letters to Mark Zuckerberg about that company's egregiously awful business practices, and the Grand Slam of Tech Ethics will be complete. And it's about damn time, too.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether Microsoft or Amazon back down in the face of their internal revolts with the same alacrity that Google showed in walking away from their big-dollar Pentagon contract. There's no guarantee of it, in either case; Google was founded with an explicit "don't be evil" mission statement, which a significant percentage of their employees have clearly internalized, but the same may not be true of their gigantic tech rivals. Still, images of traumatized children can have a wonderfully clarifying effect on one's worldview, so one can hope.

One thing is becoming increasingly clear, though; tech companies, who had clearly hoped to remain above the political fray, are not going to be able to avoid recognizing and dealing with the political ramifications of their various businesses. Trump's malignant influence simply cannot be escaped, and wishing isn't going to make any of these issues go away.