Amazon pitched its facial recognition system to ICE

Amazon employees met with officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) this summer as part of a sustained attempt to sell the company’s controversial facial recognition technology, as revealed by internal emails obtained by The Daily Beast. The emails show that ICE officials met with Amazon on June 12th, in a McKinsey office in California, giving a specific pitch on the Rekognition program as well as more general machine learning capabilities within Amazon Web Services. The same official followed up a month later with a public link to a blog post that responded to privacy concerns raised by the ACLU. There’s no indication that ICE ultimately purchased or used the system. Available as an API within Amazon cloud services,... Continue reading…