Amazon is actively pitching face-recognition to ICE

Despite an uprising of Amazon employees over the use of the company's AI facial recognition program ("Rekognition") in law enforcement, the company is actively courting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the hopes that it will use the wildly inaccurate technology.

Thanks to work by McKinsney, ICE and Amazon's sales team met over the summer to discuss how Amazon's facial recognition could help the agency, which has cemented its reputation for performative xenophobic cruelty with a program of stealing babies from immigrant parents, dooming thousands of babies and children to never see their parents again.

ICE could use facial recognition as part of its illegal surveillance of medical facilities and houses of worship.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently described his pro-immigration views ("Id let them in if it was me, I like em, I want all of them in").

In an email to ICEs Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) office dated June 15, 2018, an Amazon sales principal described the meeting and spelled out follow-up action items. One was setting up a tech briefing for ICE officials about tools including the tagging and analysis capabilities of Amazons real-time facial matching system, dubbed Rekognition.

Thanks again for your interest in AWS [Amazon Web Service] to support ICE and the HSI mission, the Amazon salesperson wrote.

The email lists actions items from our conversation, starting with an Innovation Workshop focused on a big HSI problem, but does not describe the problem. Regarding that problem, the Amazon employee wrote, I would be happy to arrange for a 1 day workshop.