By Brett Wilkins Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is calling on the United States military to acknowledge civilian casualties caused by unmanned aerial drone strikes in Somalia, and to compensate those harmed by such attacks. Speaking to the BBC, Omar, who is originally from Somalia, said that the US was obligated Read more…
Brad SmithPresident of Microsoft1 Microsoft WayRedmond, WA 98052 Re: Domain Awareness System – New York City Contract Dear Mr. Smith,We, the undersigned civil rights and community-based organizations, call on Microsoft to end its surveillance partnership with the NYPD on the Domain Awareness System (DAS). Your company has worked with the Read more…
By Brett Wilkins The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a complaint on behalf of a Michigan man who was wrongfully arrested and detained by police earlier this year after an incorrect facial recognition match. Detroit police were investigating the theft of five watches with an estimated value of Read more…
By Brett Wilkins An ethics committee appointed by the Norwegian government is recommending that companies that manufacture lethal autonomous weapons — killer robots — be excluded from investment by the country’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund. Bloomberg reports the committee also urged the government to prohibit investment by the Government Pension Fund Read more…
By Brett Wilkins The United States plans to reinterpret a decades-old arms control agreement so that US weapons companies can sell more unmanned aerial drones to nations including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose air strikes in Yemen have killed thousands of civilians. An unnamed US government official Read more…
By Brett Wilkins The current wave of deadly civil unrest sparked by police and white supremacist killings of unarmed black people including Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have brought increased scrutiny of tech companies’ business dealings with law enforcement agencies. This, in turn, has resulted in some leading Read more…
By Brett Wilkins From the moment I first encountered Ethics In Tech, it was engaged in intersectional solidarity. Back in 2014, when EIT was a one-man operation, I met founder Vahid Razavi not at a tech conference but rather at a San Francisco street demonstration in support of the Palestinian Read more…
By Brett Wilkins One would be remiss to say it all started with the tweets suggesting that MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough murdered his young aide nearly 20 years ago. To do so would ignore a years-long relationship between Donald Trump and Twitter in which the social Read more…
British police are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition and predictive policing technologies, often without promised public consultation, according to a new report from the London-based Royal Society of Arts (RSA). (RSA), a 266-year-old London-based organization dedicated to solving social problems — past members include Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, Charles Read more…
By Brett Wilkins There are few surer signs of a democracy in danger than permanent states of emergency. One could reasonably argue that such a state existed in the immediate smoldering aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when Congress rushed to approve the USA PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening Read more…