Trump needs tech to achieve his vision. But Silicon Valley isn't having it | NEVER AGAIN

Trump needs tech to achieve his vision. But Silicon Valley isn't having it | Technology | The Guardian
The inaugural Tech Solidarity meeting in San Francisco helped produce the Never Again pledge, a public declaration by tech workers that they will refuse to build a database identifying people by race, religion, or national origin. The pledge went live on 13 December – the day before Silicon Valley’s top executives made the pilgrimage to Trump Tower to sit down for a summit with the president-elect.
The organizers of the pledge are keenly aware of their industry’s history. The Never Again site refers to IBM’s well-documented role in providing the punch-card machines that streamlined the Holocaust – a history the company has never fully acknowledged or apologized for. Which makes it all the more chilling that IBM has gone out of its way to court Trump since his victory.

NEVER AGAIN PLEDGE
http://neveragain.tech/

We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States.
We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people.
We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration’s proposed data collection policies.
We refuse to build a database of people based on their Constitutionally - protected religious beliefs.
We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable.

We have educated ourselves on the history of threats like these, and on the roles that technology and technologists played in carrying them out.
We see how IBM collaborated to digitize and streamline the Holocaust, contributing to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others.
We recall the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.
We recognize that mass deportations precipitated the very atrocity the word genocide was created to describe: the murder of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey.
We acknowledge that genocides are not merely a relic of the distant past — among others, Tutsi, Rwandans and Bosnian Muslims have been victims in our lifetimes.

Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again.
We commit to the following actions:

• We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.
  
  
• We will advocate within our organizations:
  
  • to minimize the collection and retention of data that would facilitate ethnic or religious targeting.
    
  • to scale back existing datasets with unnecessary racial, ethnic, and national origin data.
    
  • to responsibly destroy high-risk datasets and backups.
    
  • to implement security and privacy best practices, in particular, for end-to-end encryption  to be the default wherever possible.
    
  • to demand appropriate legal process should the government request that we turn over
    user data collected by our organization, even in small amounts.
    
• If we discover misuse of data that we consider illegal or unethical in our organizations:
  
  • We will work with our colleagues and leaders to correct it.
    
  • If we cannot stop these practices,
    we will exercise our rights and responsibilities to speak out publicly and engage in responsible whistleblowing without endangering users.
    
  • If we have the authority to do so, we will use all available legal defenses to stop these practices.
    
  • If we do not have such authority, and our organizations force us to engage in such misuse,
    we will resign from our positions rather than comply.
    
• We will raise awareness and ask critical questions about the responsible and fair use of data and algorithms beyond our organization and our industry.