Links for 2018/06/19, US Police State Edition

June 19, 2018 · 2 minute read

Posted in: police state politics

Links for the last couple of days, focusing on the US police state, and companies that are complicit with it.

Microsoft

tldr; Microsoft is providing cloud services to ICE. They claim that this support is not going directly to supporting child detention, but services are fungible, and the ethical thing would be to refuse to accept the contract.

Microsoft needs to pick a side in the ICE debate. The world is watching

Microsoft CEO: don’t worry, we’re mostly helping the parts of ICE that don’t involve kidnapping children / Boing Boing

There are some tech writers speaking out about it, and there are companies refusing to provide services to companies that can be expected to contribute to the problem.

Separating immigrant families isn’t just wrong, it’s a war crime

It Takes a Village to Separate A Family - Deps

Doxxing ICE Employess

An artist wrote a Python script to scrape LinkedIn (no link because they are a terrible company) for employees of ICE and publish their information.

antiboredom/ice-linkedin: Dataset of LinkedIn members who work for ICE

This information was immediately deleted by GitHub, of course.

GitHub, Medium, and Twitter take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts - The Verge

However, there are still forks of it available on GitHub that didn’t get removed, and there is also a backup on archive.org.

github.com-antiboredom-ice-linkedin_-_2018-06-19_03-03-37 …

What are US riot police armed with?

A Mastodon user shares with us a detailed thread on what US riot police are likely to be using against you.

pɹıq ɥsɐɹʇ ǝɥʇ: "USpol, activism, police violence" - Mastodon

What you can do

Here are a couple of bills that have been entered into the US Congress to restrict the actions of ICE.

The Keep Families Together Act was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to end the practice of separating children from their parents. It really doesn’t otherwise stop ICE abuse, but any little bit helps. You can call your senator about this, especially if they are on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is where the bill is currently residing.

Keep Families Together Act (S. 3036) - GovTrack.us

The DONE Act was introduced in the House by Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) to prohibit the expansion of immigration detention facilities and to improve their oversight. You can call your US representative about this bill.

DONE Act (H.R. 5820) - GovTrack.us

Neither bill goes far enough, and neither is likely to pass the current Congress, but we must imagine Sisyphus to be happy.