[liberationtech] ICE Uses Open Source to Violate Human Rights.

[Yosem Companys]

On any given day, 40,000 people are detained by ICE in unsafe and unsanitary
conditions with substandard medical care and sporadic, if any, access to legal
counsel.
These conditions have led directly to nearly two hundred detainee deaths at the
hands of ICE.
And if the human costs are not enough to persuade you, consider the financial
ones. In 2018, taxpayers spent $3.076 billion dollars on DHS Custody Operations.
A budget four times greater than the Department of Education's English Language
Acquisition programs.
In addition to the cruelty of ICE and the financial costs to taxpayers, ICE is
the public face of the United States’ ever-expanding domestic surveillance
apparatus. How? Through lucrative contracts with privately held technology
companies like Palantir, Microsoft, and even darling GitHub.
Are we complicit?
At present, Palantir has 188 repositories hosted on GitHub, which rely on
thousands of open source projects. Every dependency in use by ICE and Palantir
contributes to human rights violations. Each dependency is a stone in the wall
between reality and the dream of open source as a champion of freedom, liberty
and equality.
What can we do?
Students across the country are organizing to stop Palantir from recruiting on
their campuses. Whistleblowers are risking everything to go public detailing how
their companies are complicit. International human rights groups are
investigating ICE. And immigrant rights activists are working tirelessly to
protect vulnerable people from the evils of the current anti-immigrant policies
put in place by the Trump administration (and other administrations before his.)
It's time for software developers to step up, too.
So what can you as a developer do?
 * You have a tech industry salary. You can probably afford to donate $100 a
   month to #NoTechForICE causes.
 * Support and participate in #NoTechForICE protests and programs.
 * Keep your code from being used by ICE by adopting an Ethical Source license.
 * If all else fails, pull your public code.

Tear Down The Wall!
This is the wall that open source has built for ICE. Every open source
dependency listed here (updated nightly) is used in Palantir's software and
supports ICE in its systematic human rights violations.
ICE Uses Open Source to Violate Human Rights. Every open source dependency
listed here (updated nightly) is used in Palantir's software and supports ICE
in
its systematic human rights… icebreaker.dev
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