In a blog post published in June, Garrett Langley, the CEO and co-founder of surveillance company Flock, said “We rely on the democratic process, on the individuals that the majority vote for to represent us, to determine what is and is not acceptable in cities and states.” The post explained that the company believes the laws of the country and individual states and municipalities, not the company, should determine the limits of what Flock’s technology can be used for, and came after 404 Media revealed local police were tapping into Flock’s networks of AI-enabled cameras for ICE, and that a sheriff in Texas performed a nationwide search for a woman who self-administered an abortion.
Langley’s statement echoes a common refrain surveillance and tech companies selling their products to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or other parts of the U.S. government have said during the second Trump administration: we live in a democracy. It is not our job to decide how our powerful capabilities, which can track peoples’ physical location, marry usually disparate datasets together, or crush dissent, can or should be used. At least, that’s the thrust of the argument. That is despite the very clear reality that the first Trump administration was very different to the Biden administration, and both pale in comparison to Trump 2.0, with the executive branch and various agencies flaunting ordinary democratic values. The idea of what a democracy is capable of has shifted.
Some other examples include:
- In an interview with the technology publication Indicator, the founder of GeoSpy, a company that uses AI to quickly geolocate images, Daniel Heinen said “It's not my job to play the ethics game because our elected officials will eventually figure that out. I have full faith in the American people to decide who to elect and what to vote on.” A GeoSpy demo video showed how it could potentially be used to track down illegal immigrants; in the case of the video, those people were alleged murderers. The LAPD, which has been especially violent towards anti-ICE protesters, has shown interest in the technology.
- Langley, the CEO of Flock, told Forbes in an on-camera interview “That’s one of the cool things about this country; no one elected me the police chief of America. I’m the CEO of Flock. And so I’m going to build technology that I think will help communities solve crime and build thriving communities. But it’s up to those elected officials to vote and decide as a group, what’s right for their community.”
- On ICE specifically, and local governments choosing to work with the agency on immigration enforcement or not, Langley said: “Flock really has no input, has no opinion, has no, really, control over what a local government chooses to do or not do.” After 404 Media’s reporting, Flock made radical changes to its product including removing certain states from the national lookup tool to comply with state law; the company also paused a pilot that gave Customs and Border Protection (CBP) direct access to Flock cameras.
- In internal Palantir material in which Palantir justified its work with ICE, the company pointed to the shifting conversation around immigration enforcement in the U.S., and how it was something that both parties wanted. “The country is experiencing an increased (and bipartisan) public desire for more focused effort on border security and the enforcement of existing immigration law. This was a prominent element of both parties' recent campaigns, and with this level of attention there is both a lot of opportunity to do good work, as well as risk of potential harm.”
Current and former employees of some of these companies see this stance as a way to skirt responsibility for how their technology is used. 404 Media granted multiple sources for this article anonymity to protect them from retaliation.
One Flock source told me it is “good way to pass the buck/absolve ourselves of any responsibility to implement guardrails that would allow us to live up to our own ethical creed/basic morality [in my opinion].” Another Flock employee previously told 404 Media the use of the tool by CBP would be defended by the company “by saying Flock follows the law and if these officials are doing law-abiding official work then Flock will allow it […] the question more in my mind is the fact that law in America is arguably changing, so will Flock just go along with whatever the customers want?” A former Palantir employee told me “Today, given the authoritarian way things are going, it is even more clear that there needs to be a line they won’t cross.”
“Using software I worked on to send U.S. citizens to a foreign gulag without due process is surely not a situation where ‘if you don’t like it, your remedy is to go vote’ is a reasonable response,” they added.
Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel and director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told me “The claim that these extreme initiatives were somehow authorized by voters are demonstrably false. For example, it is hard to imagine that voters who put a check mark next to President Trump’s name were voting to open up their tax records to scrutiny by non-tax authorities, in violation of longstanding precedent. Or that the Trump Administration would gut the civil rights and civil liberties offices that Congress created to oversee the use of intrusive technologies.”
“These statements ignore the reality that the Constitution restricts governmental initiatives that violate individual rights, including the right of non-citizens in the U.S. Companies should think twice about profiting from supporting such initiatives. Constitutional rights matter, and people will remember,” he added.
In Trump’s first administration tech companies sometimes spoke about following their own values. That often came in the form of content moderation decisions which went above and beyond what was permitted by the law because, presumably, people inside those companies thought they were the right thing to do. Companies took a stance. In Trump 2.0, that sentiment has mostly vanished, with tech firms collectively shrugging their shoulders, and suggesting they don’t have any real responsibility to do anything beyond what is in the letter of the law.
A democracy’s emphasis, or disregard for, certain values can shift from administration to administration. “These days, the line between rights-respecting democracies and autocracies is blurring. I never thought that in my lifetime and in my country, armed and masked agents of the federal government would forcibly pick up people on the street, whisk them away to distant detention centers, and claim the authority to remove them from the United States, without a hearing or other due process, based on the political opinions they have expressed online. Companies should be held to account for assisting with such conduct,” Nojeim added.
Palantir’s position is more active than simply ‘we live in a democracy.’ As the leaked material highlighted, Palantir holds internal meetings and discussions around the ethics of working with certain customers. In this case, Palantir, or at least some parts of it, believe that by proactively working with ICE it can “promote government efficiency, transparency, and accountability.” In The Technological Republic, Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir and co-author Nicholas W. Zamiska wrote that Silicon Valley tech companies have fallen into producing food delivery apps and social networks, products for the consumer, when really those companies should be working closer with the state to uphold and protect what they describe as western values.
“Our broader hope is that this book prompts a discussion of the role Silicon Valley can and should play in the advancement and reinvention of a national project, both in the United States and abroad—of what, beyond a firm and uncontroversial commitment to liberalism and its values, including the advancement of individual rights and fairness, constitutes our shared vision of the community to which we belong,” they write.
Which brings up an obvious question: how is providing the technical infrastructure for an agency actively undermining western values—transparency by wearing masks; accountability by detaining people filming them; fairness by ‘de-documenting’ people who had valid work permits—actually protecting them?
“In my eyes, it is the classic double speak. They talk about these ideals but only care as far as public perceptions see it,” another former Palantir employee said when asked about this cognitive dissonance.
“It’s absolutely unhinged,” one said when asked about the contents of Karp’s book and Palantir’s subsequent work with ICE.
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