Kristallnacht, Vermont: ICE Is Targeting Activists in Vermont. And the State’s DMV Has Been Helping Them
One of my long-standing critical posts of Google takes the idea that even well-intended and well-executed data collection can prove dangerous. A tool that was critical in the persecution of Jews and others in Europe were the routine data collection -- business and census records, as examples -- particularly of governments at various levels. In some cases, the local political climate changed, as in Germany on the night of 9-10 November 1938, in others, the countries were invaded and conquered by military force, and the records made available to the Nazi regime. The Netherlands and Poland are particular examples of this, and of course there's the history of IBM in directly supporting the Holocaust's data-processing requirements (more). The information technology industry has blood on its hands.
Google, of course, collect vast troves of data on billions of people, as do many other tech giants. And even if the intentions are good, the execution excellent, and the policies robust, a change in political regime, or black-hat actors internally at the right levels, can turn these data against their subject with devastating effect.
This is what's now happened and happening in Vermont
From the ACLU:
In October 2017, Vermont-based Migrant Justice scored a major victory in the organization’s campaign to extend labor protections to undocumented farmworkers in the state. After years of public action and lobbying, they reached an agreement with Ben & Jerry’s that established basic labor standards at the farms supplying dairy products to the company. Those standards included one day off a week, a minimum wage of $10 per hour, and accommodations that included electricity and running water — a milestone for farmworkers’ rights in Vermont. For many Migrant Justice organizers, who were themselves undocumented and had worked long hours in those dairy farms, the victory was personal....
In 2013, Migrant Justice played a critical role in the passage of Vermont’s Driver Privilege Card law, which allowed undocumented immigrants to obtain legal driving permits. But a public-records request filed by the ACLU revealed that DMV officials systematically passed the private information of applicants for those permits directly to ICE, even in cases where ICE agents hadn’t asked for it. Email correspondence obtained in the request show DMV workers using racist language to describe those applicants, referring to “South of the Border” names and in one case lamenting that the state was being “over run by immigrants.”
Data are liability.
h/t Shava Narad at the PLOOS.
#Kristallnacht, #DataAreLiability #Vermont #ICE #immigrants #SanctuaryCity #racism #ACLU
https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/ice-targeting-activists-vermont-and-states-dmv-has-been-helping-them
