Out of nine U.S. technology firms contacted by The Intercept earlier this month, only one — Twitter — would rule out participating in the creation of a national Muslim registry, something Donald Trump has floated as a possibility. On Monday, 22 advocacy groups sent a letter to the other eight companies, urging them to take a stand.
The letter is signed jointly by a coalition including major progressive and human rights organizations: CREDO, Muslim Advocates, Color of Change, Courage Campaign, Democracy for America, #AllOfUs, Amnesty International USA, Asian Law Caucus, Bend the Arc Jewish Action, Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Media Justice, Daily Kos, Demand Progress, Desis Rising Up and Moving, Faithful America, Fight for the Future, Free Press, Mijente, MPower Change, Presente, Sum of Us, Ultraviolet. Below is the version of the letter sent to Google. Copies are also being sent to Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, Booz Allen Hamilton, SRA International, CGI, and Apple.
Sundar Pichai, CEO Google
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy Mountain View, CA 94043December 12, 2016
Dear Mr. Pichai,
Google is a company that prides itself on championing diversity, fairness and inclusion. In the spirit of that commitment, we, the undersigned advocacy organizations, write to express grave concern regarding your failure to unequivocally respond to inquiries from The Intercept regarding participation in the creation of a registry for Muslim immigrants.
In November, the online publication The Intercept requested a response to the following question:
“Would Google, if solicited by the Trump administration, sell any goods, services, information, or consulting of any kind to help facilitate the creation of a national Muslim registry, a project which has been floated tentatively by the president-elect’s transition team?”
While Twitter answered with an unequivocal no, Google failed to respond.
On behalf of 22 groups representing more than 35 million people, we are calling on you to do better.
The creation of a registry of Muslims in the United States is one of President-elect Trump’s most chilling proposals. Within just two weeks of the election, a member of the Trump transition team was photographed carrying a document entitled “Plan for First 365 Days,” which listed an updated registration program as one of his top priorities. The author of the document, Kris Kobach, was the architect of the National Security Entrance Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, a registration program targeting primarily Muslims on non-immigrant visas shortly after 9/11.
Under the guise of preserving national security, proponents of NSEERS claimed the program was necessary. However, not a single person on the registry was convicted of a terrorism-related crime. In reality, NSEERS was a program that profiled Muslims, subjected many of them to detention and deportation, and damaged their communities. In only the first year of the program, the government started deportation proceedings for more than 13,000 people.
This is not about politics. Government targeting of individuals based on religion and ethnicity violates the Constitution and our core values as a country. It also threatens millions of people.
We believe it is a great sign of corporate responsibility and common decency for corporations to ensure their resources are not used to support bigotry and discrimination. An important first step would be for Google to publicly refuse to help build a Muslim registry.
Sincerely,
CREDO, Muslim Advocates, Color of Change, Courage Campaign, Democracy for America, #AllOfUs, Amnesty International, Asian Law Caucus, Bend the Arc Jewish Action, Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Media Justice, Daily Kos, Demand Progress, Desis Rising Up and Moving, Faithful America, Fight for the Future, Free Press, Mijente, MPower Change, Presente, Sum of Us, Ultraviolet
cc:
Susan Molinari, Vice-President, Government Relations
Juniper Downs, Senior Counsel, Public Policy & Government Relations
As of Monday, Twitter is still the only company we reached that was willing to speak out against the possibility of registering Muslims in the United States — an enormous task that would surely require the help of technology contractors. Farhana Khera, executive director of the legal defense group Muslim Advocates, told The Intercept she believes these companies have an obligation to respond. “We now have a president-elect who has called for registering Muslims and the monitoring of an entire community of Americans based simply on their faith,” she said. “More than ever, we need these companies to be clear about what they will do to protect the vast amount of information they already collect on the public every millisecond of every day and to be clear that they will not participate in unconstitutional and undemocratic activities of the U.S. government.”
Google and Facebook indicated that they were working on a response, though we have not received one yet. The other companies have simply refused to answer.
If Facebook doesn’t stand for liberty for Muslims, what other religions will we begin to register in this country? It is unconstitutional. I will leave Facebook if there is no rejection toward a Muslim registry by Facebook. I’m beginning to wonder, without a “Republican” party, we wouldn’t need all of the Civil liberty and Environmental activists. Doesn’t this strike a cord with anyone???
If your government isn’t acknowledging, respecting and actively supporting their citizens privacy rights (search and seizure) etc., you’ve lost the war. Expecting public moral calls to hold back companies from going along with their governments in its application of tyranny (and secret orders) is a fools errand. To rely on a single company (its leadership really – Apple, Tim Cook) to stand up for customers privacy rights is also doomed to failure as eventually Apple will get the secret order (if not already) with the accompanying gag order or the leadership will cave or he’ll eventually be replaced by someone more interested in profits – and that is the end of that. If all their OS’s and firmware were open source (so it could be publicly verified and checked there’d be a chance, but its not).
The simple reality is that governments have these companies balls in a vice and control their market access throughout the world (i.e. how they make money). Morals aside, from a company profit / point of view it makes no sense to fight these govts for this or that & this is why the Nazi’s had no issues with companies lining up to help them and why most U.S. companies are/were willing accomplices in the mass surveillance of U.S. citizenry data that we found out from Mr. Snowden.
This is also why only Apple was being pushed to put a back door in their phones publicly by the FBI (i.e. everybody else is going to go along with what the govt wants, that includes Alphabet). This isn’t to say don’t fight, but the companies aren’t the ones where this game is won or lost…its the government where that happens and we lost with the Bush Administration after 2001. The Trump administration appointments point to this getting worse. JMHO…
Was Oracle asked? It would seem to me that this company, and other such organisations that sell consultancy services to governments will provide the greatest assistance if asked to do so.
This seems extremely broad: “sell any goods, services, information, or consulting of any kind to help facilitate the creation of a national Muslim registry.” I think companies are afraid of saying yes, then being hit with gotchas. I mean, what if they have a database for targeting ads for halal food or marriageable Muslim women? What if their customers do? The way I read that, Google is supposed to deny access to googleapis.com scripts to anyone who is making a list of Muslims for any reason. But they let everyone access their scripts because they want them to be so universal nobody would think of disabling them or looking into what they do… A company that doesn’t shrink from this text doesn’t have a very versatile business model…
P.S. How do I thank the guy who keeps rewriting the comment interface so that if I accidentally hit the tab with the arrow the comment gets nuked, if the connection gets loose while I’m posting the comment fails to repost and backarrow gets me a blank entry, etc. Guys like that are what make the Internet what it is.
Thanks Sam + Intercept. Complicit silence is not an option.
“a sign of corporate responsibility and common decency for corporations”
LOL. Corporate responsibility is to make money with most of it going to wealthy investor and to obscene salaries of top officers. Corporations are not people and they have zero morality. They exist only to make money for investors and to shield as much as possible from taxes and to cut expenses such as salaries and benefits in order to increase profits. Citzens United decision only enhanced the myth that they have any sense of personhood. Yet by repetition, that facade is now believed by many people. Corporations cannot die, nor be jailed for crimes, nor be executed, nor be drafted, nor anything else a living human does. They cannot vote but political contributions allow them more influence over our government than actual voters can only dream of having such influence.
Yet our Supreme Court ruled they are persons with all the protections of the Constitution and law while holding none of the responsibilities and duties that we the people possess and are subject to.
The solution to this problem is deceptively simple. As extreme fidelity to monotheism is that which is putting Muslims at risk (the state shall have no other gods before it) of being singled out by republicans, then every Muslim ought to register as a republican. Pew Research Center estimates that there were about 3.3 million Muslims of all ages living in the United States in 2015, or roughly one percent of the US population. As the poll also predicts that “Muslims are projected to become the second-largest religious group in the U.S., by 2040, they might very well come to comprise a significant segment of the conservative religious core of the republican party at that time. This strategy would not only facilitate a radical change in the republican position on Muslim immigration, but provide the republican party with a countervailing strategy to the influx of Hispanic migrants who have traditionally gravitated to the democratic party. Now, I know what you are thinking, republicans and Muslims are not a good mix. But considering the fact that both are inclined to faith based perspectives that are commonly enamored of authoritarianism, I believe that their proposed association could be perceived as mutually beneficial by both parties.
An interesting and relevant fact: Anwar al Awlaki, before he ended up going down the path he did, voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election, according to Jeremy Scahill in his book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. So your comment isn’t actually all that far fetched.
I guess there is a downside to defecting from the republican party ;)
Sometimes I receive misdirected e-mails. The following one, for example.
.
There is no need for a Muslim registry, there is only need to ban Islam the religion of hate from being preached.
In Germany it is illegal to spread nazi propaganda, it is incompressible that the Quran holy book can be legally distributed in Europe to spread pedophilia and hate.
Uhuh… because no-one affiliated with the Christian faith has ever been tied to messing with kids or preaching against ‘others’. Right…
boycott these services
thankyouverymuch!
defending the constitution of the United States of America is everyone’s responsibility and right. New law will specify that.
I’m going to assume that there will be no Muslim Registry.
If there is one, however, all of us must register (at least those of us who don’t support such a registry).
Overwhelming the system and standing in solidarity is the only way to fight such nonsense. In the meantime, Thank You Sam Biddle for your efforts in shaming these companies.
Hear, hear. :)
Ad a Google fan boy, this is very disappointing…
There are a lot of other organizations that could be much more involved in creating this registry such as the travel industry. Why not send letters to them?
A Muslim registry? NO!
A Pizzagate registry? Absolutely.
As long as my entry comes in pepperoni … and hold the special sauce!
Is there any organized effort to call these organizations and demand an answer?