Big Tech, led by the US, is colonizing the Global South and destroying the planet. It’s time to fight back.
The mainstream media and US-centered digital justice intellectuals have failed to identify the American Empire at the center of the global digital economy. Here at People’s Tech, we are calling on the world to band together to oppose digital colonialism, led by the US, and the capitalist suicide machine destroying life on earth. As a matter of survival, we need a digital degrowth movement that dovetails with broader movements for full equality, before it is too late…
color, and Amazon, called out for aiding police surveillance. But Microsoft, which has largely escaped criticism, is knee-deep in services for law enforcement, fostering an ecosystem of companies that provide police with software using Microsoft’s cloud and other platforms. The full story of these ties highlights how the tech sector is increasingly entangled in intimate, ongoing relationships with police departments.
Microsoft’s links to law enforcement agencies have been obscured by the company, whose public response to the outrage that followed the murder of George Floyd has focused on facial recognition software. This misdirects attention away from Microsoft’s own mass surveillance platform for cops, the Domain Awareness System, built for the New York Police Department and later expanded to Atlanta, Brazil, and Singapore. It also obscures that Microsoft has partnered with scores of police surveillance vendors who run their products on a “Government Cloud” supplied by the company’s Azure division and that it is pushing platforms to wire police field operations, including drones, robots, and other devices.
