Category: Surveillance Capitalism

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Amazon/Whole Foods Monopoly Power Boycott Amazon Campaign Surveillance Capitalism

Amazon’s MGM using Ring doorbell video surveillance in Film

There’s a petition campaign against it from Daily Kos:

Amazon’s MGM Studios are taking advantage of surveillance footage from Ring cameras for a new reality TV show. The show will feature footage entirely from Amazon’s Ring system and is a blatant attempt to normalize Amazon’s shady surveillance tactics by making those tactics appear “family friendly.”

Sign the petition to MGM: Cancel Ring Nation.

SIGN THE PETITION

Millions of people— including users, their families, and casual bystanders—are surveilled daily by Ring cameras. Our whereabouts are tracked. The things we do and say are recorded. This amassed data can be–and has been–shared with local police departments and their partners in government agencies. It’s important to recognize such devices for the surveillance power they have.

It’s irresponsible for MGM to promote dangerous surveillance devices, like Ring, as family-friendly entertainment. Ring is not safe for families or anyone else. By canceling Ring Nation, you will help protect our privacy and show solidarity for Black and brown people and abortion seekers, people most threatened by over-surveillance.

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Amazon/Whole Foods Monopoly Power Surveillance Capitalism

FTC Probes Amazon’s Monopolistic Acquisitions

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7z33d/shocking-ftc-tries-doing-its-job-investigates-amazon-acquisitions

Shocking: FTC Tries Doing Its Job, Investigates Amazon Acquisitions

The FTC has scrutinized numerous Amazon purchases and launched antitrust probes into the company’s operations since Lina Khan took charge of the agency.

Excerpt:

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Amazon’s plans to acquire two companies: vacuum maker iRobot and healthcare company One Medical. The Wall Street Journal reported that on Friday, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing by One Medical’s owner, 1Life, revealed the FTC requested additional information about the deal from One Medical and Amazon.

These are just the latest of Amazon’s acquisitions to fall under FTC scrutiny. Earlier this year, the FTC sought to review the acquisition of MGM Studios on grounds it could be anticompetitive. Though the deal closed in March, the FTC warned it could still block the deal.

In August, Amazon filed a complaint with the FTC about an ongoing antitrust probe of its Prime subscription program, claiming it has become “unduly burdensome.” Last year in June, Amazon begged the FTC to recuse Chairwoman Lina Khan from antitrust investigations into the company, citing her legal scholarship as bias that might prevent an “open mind” to its pro-monopoly arguments.

Comment: Not content with its enormous monopsony power, Amazon is also seeking monopoly power as well. Both i-Robot’s roomba and the One Medical operation also would vastly increase Amazon’s control of Big Data it can mine for all its other retail and production operations. [Wikipedia defines monopsony as: In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. The microeconomic theory of monopsony assumes a single entity to have market power over all sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service. This is a similar power to that of a monopolist, which can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, where multiple buyers have only one seller of a good or service available to purchase from.]

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Amazon/Whole Foods Monopoly Power Boycott Amazon Campaign Surveillance Capitalism

Surveillance Nation: From Amazon to the NSA

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/07/27/covertaction-bulletin-surveillance-nation-from-amazon-to-the-nsa/

Excerpt:

Amazon wants to be your retailer, educator, grocery store, security system, bank and now your healthcare provider: A few days ago, reports came out that the tech giant is looking to buy One Medical for $4 billion, its latest foray into the healthcare business. At the same time, Amazon provides law enforcement with easy access to massive amounts of data and the tools to parse it.

Of course it’s not just Amazon: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and every big tech company obey the basic law of capitalism: grow or perish. They all rely on one shared resource: our data. And they all cozy up to the U.S. government when it comes to information sharing.

Meanwhile, agencies like the CIA and NSA, plus lesser-known ones like the National Reconnaissance Office, regularly spy on people across the globe with flimsy legal pretext. In the digital age, what was once led by the government is more and more relying on partnerships with private big data companies.

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Amazon/Whole Foods Monopoly Power Boycott Amazon Campaign Surveillance Capitalism

Amazon Turns RING videos in to cops without consent

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/13/amazon-gave-ring-videos-to-police-without-owners-permission-00045513

Ring, which Amazon bought in 2018, has repeatedly said that police can’t view recordings unless clips are posted publicly or shared directly with police, though that doesn’t apply to police subpoenas and emergency requests. While the company’s policy has said this information can be shared without a user’s consent, this letter is the first time the company has confirmed that it has handed over this information. (Map above shows ring installations connected to law enforcement.)

It’s a data point that is likely to only heighten Congressional scrutiny of the tech giant, which lawmakers have already upbraided over its privacy practices, after its facial recognition service Rekognition falsely associated 28 members of Congress with criminal mugshots in 2018 and how its Echo Dot Kids Edition protected children’s privacy.

The company is also facing antitrust concerns over its dominance across online retail, and its treatment of the third-party sellers that use its platform.

Ring doorbells, in particular, raise privacy concerns because of their popularity, Amazon’s agreements with police, and Amazon’s growing technological capabilities. In 2020, Ring responded to a letter from five senators and revealed that four employees improperly accessed Ring video data.

Amazon currently has agreements to let 2,161 police departments across the country use an app called Neighbors where users post Ring camera footage and leave comments. Police can use the app to send alerts and request videos.

In 2021, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that police in Los Angeles requested Ring footage recording Black Lives Matter protests.

“As my ongoing investigation into Amazon illustrates, it has become increasingly difficult for the public to move, assemble, and converse in public without being tracked and recorded,” Markey said in a statement.

While Congress is mulling over a federal data privacy law, the proposed bill wouldn’t cover Ring sharing data with police, as it allows for exceptions in cases where a company needs to comply with law enforcement agencies.

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Amazon/Whole Foods Monopoly Power Labor actions Surveillance Capitalism

Every Move You Make-Amazon is Watching You

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgn73/internal-documents-show-amazons-dystopian-system-for-tracking-workers-every-minute-of-their-shifts

Excerpt:

Infamously, Amazon punishes and sometimes fires warehouse workers who it believes are wasting time at work. A new filing obtained by Motherboard gives detailed insight into how Amazon tracks and records every minute of “time off task” (which it calls TOT) with radio-frequency handheld scanners that warehouse associates use to track customer packages.

The documents, filed with the National Labor Relations Board as part of a dispute at the recently-unionized Amazon warehouse in Staten Island called JFK8, reveal that workers can receive a written warning for accumulating 30 minutes of time off task in a day one time in a rolling one year period. They can be fired if they accumulate 120 minutes of time off task in a single day or if they have accumulated 30 minutes of time off task on three separate days in a one year period. Examples and sample spreadsheets provided in the documents show Amazon tracking, down to the minute, the amount of time individual workers spent in the bathroom and infractions such as “talking to another Amazon associate,” going to the wrong floor of a warehouse, and, as an example, an unaccounted for 11-minute period where a worker “does not remember” what they were doing.
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Amazon/Whole Foods Monopoly Power Boycott Amazon Campaign Labor actions Surveillance Capitalism

Exposing the Harms of AWS

Exposing AWS Rally in D.C.

Tuesday May 24, 11:30 AM Eastern Time

Walter E. Washington Convention Center

801 Mt Vernon Pl NW, Washington DC

Despite being a seemingly invisible force, Amazon has inflicted immeasurable harm on Black and Brown communities by supporting and colluding with state violence. Join us on Tuesday May 24, 11:30am-1pm in DC to help expose AWS at Amazon’s (AWS) Summit. We will be there, to demand an end to the harms of Amazon in our communities, including through the surveillance of workers and providing tech for pol(ice), prisons, and apartheid.

We’ll be hosting an art installation outside of the Convention Center to shed light on Amazon’s harms and to galvanize our community to rally and resist Amazon. Join us to tell this megacorporation that we reject their violence!

**ICYMI** Check out last night’s teach-in on AWS’ harms! We learned a lot from great speakers including Myaisha Hayes (MediaJustice), Aly Panjwani (ACRE), and Paromita Shah (Just Futures Law). Learn more about the Northern Virginia Coalition here https://www.facebook.com/ForUsNotAmazon/ https://HQtoo.com and here https://forusnotamazon.org/

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Amazon/Whole Foods Monopoly Power Boycott Amazon Campaign Stand with Palestine Surveillance Capitalism

Amazon Employees Condemn Israeli Military Cloud Contract

https://www.businessinsider.com/hundreds-google-amazon-employees-condemn-israeli-military-cloud-contract-2021-10

Excerpt:

  • Hundreds of Google and Amazon employees called for their companies to cut ties with the Israeli military.
  • Employees criticized Project Nimbus, a contract the two companies signed to sell cloud services to Israel.
  • Employees said the technology would allow for further Israeli surveillance of Palestinians.

Hundreds of Google and Amazon employees signed an open letter published in The Guardian on Tuesday condemning Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract signed by the two companies to sell cloud services to the Israeli military and government.

“This technology allows for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land,” the letter stated. “We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court.”

Yesterday, almost 800 workers at Amazon and Google joined forces to demand their employers pull out of Project Nimbus – a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud services for the Israeli military and government – and cut all ties with the Israeli military. 

The courageous workers at every level of Amazon and Google are making it very clear that technology should be used to bring people together, not enable apartheid and violence.

Project Nimbus is designed to make the Israeli military that carries out atrocities in Gaza — and the government that carries out the daily business of apartheid — more oppressive and deadly for Palestinians.

They deserve our support. Click here to send an email to Amazon and Google execs & let them know that there’s still time to do the right thing: Cut Project Nimbus, and stop doing business with Israel’s apartheid government.

Batool Syed, a lead organizer of the campaign and employee at Amazon, told American Muslims for Palestine today, “We know that this contract further enables Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. We’re concerned, we’re outraged, and we will no longer be complicit as our companies continue this pattern of militarization that follows working with ICE, the US military, and policing agencies. We are urging Amazon and Google to respect human rights and dignity by dropping Project Nimbus and committing to ethical business practices.”

Let’s declare together: #NoTechForApartheid.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/12/google-amazon-workers-condemn-project-nimbus-israeli-military-contract

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Amazon/Whole Foods Monopoly Power Surveillance Capitalism

Amazon & Digital Redlining

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/16/chris-gilliard-sees-digital-redlining-in-surveillance-tech/

Excerpt:

Gilliard began calling attention to Ring’s discriminatory potential soon after Amazon acquired it in 2018. He grew so preoccupied with the camera that he changed his Twitter name to “One Ring (Doorbell) to Surveil Them All,” a play on a line from “The Lord of the Rings.” He made himself available as an expert source to Vice, USA Today and the Associated Press, explaining how consumer surveillance tools such as Ring, along with social “neighborhood watch” apps such as Neighbors and Nextdoor, feed on people’s fears and amplify their biases.

“I think about what the effect is of law enforcement having easy access to cameras from everyone’s porch,” Gilliard said. “It makes nuisance crimes” — from stolen Amazon packages to an egged car — “available for escalation in a way that they weren’t previously.”

Gradually, Gilliard’s concerns were borne out. Stories began to emerge about Ring’s secret partnerships with police departments; its security vulnerabilities; the rampant racism on its neighborhood watch app, Neighbors; and how it trades on people’s suspicion of others who look like they “don’t belong.” (Ring says it doesn’t tolerate discrimination on the Neighbors app, and it encourages users to consider whether their suspicion is reasonable before sharing footage.)

<snip>

Gilliard is “a true leading indicator,” said Rumman Chowdhury, an expert on artificial intelligence ethics who directs Twitter’s Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability team. “For anybody looking to understand the next narrative in tech, whatever tomorrow’s story is going to be, it would be smart to follow Chris and to listen to what he is saying.”

***

If Gilliard appears prescient about how tools of surveillance may be abused in the future, it might be because he’s intimately familiar with how they’ve been abused in the past.

Gilliard grew up in Detroit in the 1970s and ‘80s, a time and place associated with drugs and violent crime in the popular imagination. But Gilliard, one of eight children born to a washing-machine repairman and a cook, didn’t see it that way. To him, the perceptions of urban Detroit as a dangerous dystopia were more damaging than the reality. They meant that members of his community were viewed by White society primarily as a threat — a problem to be solved, or contained.

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Amazon/Whole Foods Monopoly Power Surveillance Capitalism

Amazon Profits from Endless War

Recent disclosures of the revolving door between Amazon and the national security state have underlined the degree to which the company has been profiting from the “War on Terror”.

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-09-big-tech-billions-war-terror.html

Excerpt:

Tech giants made billions through contracts with the US military and other government agencies during the so-called “war on terror”, according to a report released ahead of the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

The main report, “Big Tech Sells War”, is available here:

https://bigtechsellswar.com

Steve Pandelides, pictured above  worked at the FBI from November 1999-March 2021, including at the National Counterterrorism Center and Operational Technology Division. He’s now the Director for Security at Amazon Web Services. Christine Halvorsen, above, also worked at the FBI, from March 2013-April 2019, including as Deputy Assistant Director for the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. She is now
Amazon Web Services Senior Technical Business Development Manager, and a Mission Acceleration Team Strategic Account Executive, for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Jana Kay had two tours of duty at the Department of “Defense”, 2005-2007, and 2009-2018, including as a Strategist for the Global War on Terrorism; from 2007-2009, she was a Strategic Planner, at the National Counterterrorism Center. She has been with Amazon Web Services as a Cloud Security Strategist, 2018-Present.

Excerpt:

  • The 2000s saw the rise of profits and prominence of US Big Tech. While tech corporations like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter became more and more a part of our everyday lives, these same companies were providing tools to the US military and government to help fuel their war on Muslim communities. From databases to drones, US Big Tech is complicit in and has profited from this never-ending war against Muslims at home and abroad.
  • Big Tech has also been a vehicle for the rampant spread of Islamophobia since the start of the GWoT. Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s streaming service YouTube platform virulent anti-Muslim, xenophobic hate speech, and conspiracies that have fueled events like the 2019 Christchurch attack. These platforms also allow think tanks and individuals invested in the GWoT in some way to spread disinformation to justify its continuation. At the same time these platforms have censored BIPOC creators and activists for speaking out against state violence.
  • While weapons manufacturers have rightly  gotten much attention as war profiteers, tech also has a role in war against our communities. The United States remains the largest arms exporter in the world, but now tools to fight “war” are different and focused on what the tech and military industries refer to as the “digital battlefield” where metadata, drones, and artificial intelligence (AI) do the killing in the name of efficiency. Add the reality that surveillance has become an essential part of the GWoT and there is now an entire terro industry for Big Tech to profit from.
  • Big Tech is benefitting from what some have called “terror capitalism,” the phenomenon of corporations profiting off of defining entire communities as “terrorists” and using these communities as test subjects for technology developed in service of counterterrorism, which can eventually also be deployed for other purposes. For the GWoT, it is Muslim communities across the globe who have been dehumanized as “terrorists” and have become test subjects for a wide range of technology from drones to databases.
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Amazon/Whole Foods Monopoly Power Boycott Amazon Campaign ICE Surveillance Capitalism

Amazon Partial Owner of Deportation Airline

https://investigate.afsc.org/company/atsg

AIR TRANSPORT SERVICES GROUP INC

STOCK SYMBOLS
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ATSG
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Recommended for Divestment

A US air cargo and transportation company, which operates charter deportation flights for the US government

Transportation and Deportation

Air Transport Services Group Inc (ATSG) is a charter cargo and passenger airline operating primarily in the U.S. and Canada. It is the largest provider of charter flights to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), which in 2020 accounted for 31% of its revenue. The company’s other major clients include Amazon, which is a partial owner (see below), shipping companies DHL and UPS, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), for which ATSG provides deportation flights (see below). Other than charter flights, the company also provides air transportation services such as aircraft leasing, aircraft maintenance and modification services, logistics, and training. ATSG owns three charter airlines with a combined fleet of 106 Boeing aircraft and reported a 2020 revenue of $1.5 billion.

ATSG is partially owned by Amazon, which acquired a 19.5% stake in ATSG in 2020, and has the option to increase its share to 40%. ATSG reports having a “long-standing, strategic customer relationship” with Amazon, which accounted for 30% of ATSG’s 2020 revenue. ATSG’s cargo airline Air Transport International is one of two airlines that comprise the bulk of Amazon’s air fleet (“Amazon Air”), since Amazon established it in 2016. ATSG reports as an advantage the fact that it is headquartered at the Wilmington Air Park in Ohio, which Amazon also uses as a regional hub. Another ATSG subsidiary, Cargo Aircraft Management, has contracted the Israeli military company Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) to convert Boeing 767 aircraft from a passenger to cargo configuration for Amazon’s fleet. As of 2019, 80% of Amazon’s cargo planes were reportedly converted by IAI.

Omni Air International, ATSG’s passenger charter airline, is the sole provider of “special high-risk charter” deportation flights for ICE. These are flights that involve deporting people who “fail to comply” with ICE’s orders or other “high-profile” deportations, and are different from most ICE deportations, which are handled either by routine charter flights to Central America or by booking seats on commercial flights. As specified in government contracting documents, Omni Air effectively has a monopoly on “high-risk” deportation flights, as no other company can provide these services on ICE’s schedule. The planes used for such deportations are Boeing 767s and 777s.

ICE does not contract Omni Air directly for deportation flights, but through an intermediary broker company called Classic Air Charter, which arranges most ICE air deportations. This contract, which started in 2017, is worth a potential $737.9 million and can be extended through 2023. It is unknown how much of this amount ends up in the hands of Omni Air, however the company charged ICE $33,500 per flight hour and a total of almost $1.8 million for one deportation flight to Bangladesh, India, and Vietnam in 2019.

On many of the “high-risk” deportations that Omni Air operates, ICE puts people into a device called the WRAP, a full body, straitjacket-like restraint. Anecdotal accounts indicate that this process often involves pinning individuals to the ground face-down on the ground before the flight, beating them up while they are in the restraint, and using TASERs to subdue them. The WRAP device is manufactured by Safe Restraints, a privately-owned company based in Diablo, CA. It is also used by hundreds of law enforcement agencies and prisons across the U.S. and has been implicated in multiple fatalities.

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