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Business Insider

8 Oct, 12 tweets, 5 min read

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have repeatedly used third parties or act as subcontractors to sidestep public scrutiny and work with US immigration agencies, despite employee backlash and some company policies against doing such work.

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The use of intermediaries has helped these tech giants quietly secure dozens of cloud contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, Insider has found.

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In some cases, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft provide clerical tools, like the Google Workspace suite or Microsoft Office, to ICE and CBP.

In others, the companies supply cloud services or professional tools for surveillance or immigration enforcement.

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The companies would generally know that their technology is helping those agencies, one of the contractors said.

That's because they get purchase orders from intermediaries and need to sign off on their technology being used, the person explained.

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Employees are often not aware of the practice, though industry insiders say that using third parties is common, especially for big tech companies.

These new details raise questions about the tech giants' willingness to audit their own contracts.

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Google, in particular, said after several employee protests that it would not work on immigration-enforcement contracts with ICE or CBP.

However, the company is currently involved in four active contracts with ICE and CBP, all through third parties.

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Just because many of these contracts are for professional tools like Google Workspace or Office 365 doesn't mean they should be excused, Irene Knapp, former senior software engineer at Google, said.

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ICE is expected to award three new contracts worth up to $300 million for work on RAVEn later this year.

The tool targets people not authorized to work in the US by mining social-media information, and processing surveillance footage and biometric data.

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Amazon Web Services and Red Hat, owned by IBM, are already used in RAVEn, according to a 2020 contract and a presentation, shown at an April informational "industry day" for the project, that Insider obtained.

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An IBM employee called their company's work on RAVEn "gross.”

The company pledged during 2020's Black Lives Matter protests to end work on facial recognition tools.

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People who attended the April industry-day event told Insider that companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft would probably use intermediaries rather than bid on the contracts directly.

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@thisisinsider

After Insider's initial RAVEn investigation, employee groups and lawmakers expressed concern.

The Alphabet Workers Union, which represents Google employees, called on Google not to bid on the project.

To read the full story, subscribe to @thisisinsider.
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