I love using GitHub products, but was shocked when I found out they do business with child separation agencies like ICE (Immigration Customs Enforc...
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My opinion is that if you don't support ICE that you vote in a way to show that. Any other attempt to attack any government bureaucracy is an attack on democracy. We have a system that allows all of us to be a part of the decision, whether you're the type of person who want to abolish public lands or the type of person who wants to abolish ICE.
GitHub, anyone has no place stopping a democratic government from pursuing it's job no matter what you or I opine.
EDIT: Just to be clear, my position is that it doesn't matter if you think it's wrong or not, because democracy is the only way an opinion about government operation can be validated.
If you go the GitHub page and read the open letter they are not trying to stop ICE from pursuing its job. They are simply asking GitHub to cancel it's contract with ICE because it does not represent the values of its employees and consider profiting from it to be reprehensible.
Employees, as stakeholders, have a right to hold the company to personal standards, but I strongly believe that the general public does not. I'm nearly certain that we here are all general public.
EDIT: I understand that as customers we are also stackholders, but ICE is a custom also. I, as a customer, do not want to see GitHub become choosy about what code they host. Even if North Korea hosts code on GitHub I will not be upset. I just don't know what qualifies GitHub or internet activists to determine what's right or wrong, regardless of my position.
And lastly... Corporate America is the LAST group I want to dictate government policy. Petitioning GitHub (Microsoft) to help form government policy is a deal with the devil at best.
The big question to me here is, can you call ICE a democratic institution? Most of what we know about it is thanks to whistleblowers and or detainees themselves, as opposed to government accounts. edition.cnn.com/2019/10/24/us/ice-...
You can call it an institution that is subservient to a democracy. It answers to the executive branch of the United States Government which is duly elected. Congressional oversight is also applicable, and when a law is passed to stop or inhibit (or ebbed) actions for the institution, it's done at the behest of elected officials from the governing country.
Now if they violate international law, that's slightly different. But I don't think they have at this point. Every country separates children from their families, so I would assume if that's a violation of international law. Like the Jugendamt in Germany.
So if there is an actual violation of human rights, that's the place to start. But interpretation is malleable as anyone who understands "legislating from the bench" would know. That means using "human rights" without considering the implications of the argument only weakens the strength of the actual cases that involve human rights such as those in North Korea where children are worked to death in prison camps.
As someone who has been paying for GitHub's(and to a lesser extent Microsoft's) services for years, what is the best way to reach out and let Nat Friedman, GitHub and parent company Microsoft know that its customers are not on board with them profiting via ICE contracts?
They do not appear interested in hearing about it. Microsoft's been chasing government contracts for a while, militarizing HoloLens and just now winning JEDI. I moved my public GitHub projects to GitLab (which has been having its own ethics fiascos of late, if at least on a much smaller scale) early this year after it was clear they were ignoring the original let-GitHub-know-how-you-feel project and hoping it'd blow over.
I don't support ICE. I want to make that clear. This is playing the devil's advocate because it's a discussion worth having imo.
Anyway.. GitHub providing an Enterprise level service to ICE, which group does bad things, is hard to boycott without implying that lots of others need similar treatment.
Take a look at Google and their work with censored search in China. If everybody's gung ho about Hong Kong right now then why on Earth would they support Google? Even if they stopped the project after it went public (and would probably totally try it again?)
Oh wait. It's Google. Cancel culture doesn't work too well on a company that runs the systems (Google search, suite, Youtube, etc) that facilitate the majority of people's internet usage.
It's a similar issue with ICE. No, they should not be separating families. That is wrong. I agree with you.
But how do you specifically target and address THAT without denigrating the need for making sure our incoming citizens and visitors are safe and sound? We have to do it somehow. I don't have an answer beyond "child separation bad." That's why I'm not in politics.
I appreciate the hard questions.
I have sympathy for the difficulty companies face, when the legal context makes it nearly impossible for them, for example GitHub's restrictions in Crimea, Syria and Iran. They could have handled some of it differently, but overall the onus is on US Dept of Treasury/Justice.
In the case of Google, they are not compelled to censor/provide a censored version of Google search in China. And their employees have been successful in getting them to cancel Project Dragonfly.
Making larger tech companies accountable is certainly a challenge, whether it's Amazon, Google or Microsoft and yet people still do. Whether it is Google employees staging a massive walkout, or community organisations stopping Amazon from staging a new HQ in New York City.