IBM supplied surveillance gear to Davao while Duterte was mayor and cheering on the city's police-linked death-squads

During the long years when Philippines strongman Rodrigo Duterte (previously) was mayor of Davao (circumventing term limits by periodically allowing his daughter to run for mayor and serving as her vice-mayor) the city was terrorized by death-squads who enjoyed total impunity as they assassinated police suspects and Duterte's political opponents, while Duterte cheered them on (Duterte has boasted about his participation in extrajudicial killings during this period, but has also denied participation in the death squads).

In 2012, IBM signed a multi-million-dollar deal to supply high-tech surveillance gear to the Duterte regime, a program that IBM boasted of when attempting to sell surveillance gear to other cities. IBM also produced sales literature boasting of having sold its "Face Capture" facial recognition program to the city (the city's promotional material also features police using this tool), though now IBM claims it never supplied facial recognition tools to Davao.

Davao's death-squads murdered scores of street children, petty criminals, and suspected gang members. Often, these victims would be slain shortly after being released from police custody. One police official, Antonio Boquiren, boasted that IBM's tools let them arrest people for the pettiest of crimes: "Whether its criminality, smoking, or jaywalking, any violation of ordinance is a crime and a police is sent."

IBM says it stopped supplying Davao in 2016. Today the city uses surveillance gear supplied by giant, Chinese firms like Huawei, paid for with loans from state-owned Chinese funds.

IBM is notorious for supplying the Nazis with the tools needed to track the mass-slaughter of Jews, homosexuals, Catholics, communists and dissidents in the concentration camps, through an ongoing relationship that included servicing and supplying these systems throughout the camps' operation, directed from IBM's New York offices. Read the rest “IBM supplied surveillance gear to Davao while Duterte was mayor and cheering on the city's police-linked death-squads”