(by Drew Harwell, The Washington Post) – Amazon pitched its facial-recognition system in the summer to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials as a way for the agency to target or identify illegal immigrants….

At the June meeting in Silicon Valley, revealed in emails as part of a Freedom of Information Act request by the advocacy group Project on Government Oversight, officials from ICE and Amazon Web Services talked about implementing the tech giant’s Rekognition face-scanning platform to assist with Homeland Security investigations.

An Amazon Web Service official specializing in federal sales contracts, whose name was redacted in the emails, wrote that the conversation involved “predictive analytics” and “Rekognition Video tagging/analysis” that could possibly allow ICE to identify people’s faces from afar — a type of technology that immigration officials have voiced interest in for its potential enforcement use on the southern border.

Officials from Amazon and ICE did not immediately respond to requests for comment. [NOTE: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos personally owns The Washington Post.]

Amazon has marketed the technology to police departments as a way to target and identify criminals, and it is [used by departments] in Oregon and Florida. Civil rights and privacy advocates worry that the unproven technology’s expansion could have a chilling effect on public protests or embolden government and police efforts to supercharge mass surveillance.

…Amazon [employees oppose] work that could be used for government surveillance [against illegal immigrants]. Hundreds of anonymous Amazon workers wrote CEO Jeff Bezos a letter roughly one week after the meeting, saying, “We refuse to build the platform that powers ICE, and we refuse to contribute to tools that violate human rights.”

Amazon has a number of government contracts and is believed to be the lead contender to win the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud-computing contract, known as JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure). The company also operates a private cloud service for top-secret intelligence used by the CIA. …

Bezos has donated money to fund college scholarships for “undocumented” students, but he has also publicly supported the tech industry’s contributions to national-security efforts and other government work.

“If big tech companies are going to turn their backs on the Department of Defense, we are in big trouble,” Bezos said at a Wired magazine event last week. Asked about illegal immigration, he added, “I’d let them in if it were me. I like ’em, I want all of them in. But this is a great country and it does need to be defended.”

ICE [wants to use] facial recognition and other artificial-intelligence software as potential…ways to [stop] illegal immigration. (ICE officials told tech-industry contractors last year they wanted an “extreme vetting” system that could automatically mine the social media of foreign visitors to assess whether they might [have criminal records or be linked to terrorists/terrorism].)

Amazon unveiled Rekognition in 2016 as a way to analyze images and detect faces on a massive scale. Its first marketing materials focused on the softer side of the technology, [making it sound fun and innocent], including its ability to look at a dog’s face and recognize it’s a golden retriever. …

From washingtonpost .com. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced on other websites without permission from The Washington Post.