While all eyes are on Musk, don’t take your eyes off of another oligarch, Jeff Bezos. Amazon Web Services, web host to a third of the internet, profits from enormous federal contracts for technology services.
This rise of AWS coincides with the convergence of private technology contracts and state power for the purposes of surveillance and information collection. This bipartisan project is entering a new era. Despite its relative low profile in DC, Amazon is at the center of this effort, and will likely win more police and military contracts in the next four years.
Where and why did Amazon perfect such devious data collection and processing? In the warehouses that have multiplied in the Inland Empire in the last ten years.
Every day over a million people work in Amazon warehouses moving goods that we order. These workers live in countries with freedom, like the United States, but inside the workplace there is no democracy. As a result, workers are subjected to experimentation and surveillance tools that create tight and complicated binds around them. Cameras track workers from the moment they enter the facility and record their actions, their motions, the number of items they move and their interactions with their co-workers. When Amazon wants to use the information against someone, they rewind or search the data to find a reason to discipline or fire the worker.
Amazon’s approach to getting people to work harder and faster has become the model of labor relations for many employers. Now Amazon has marketed these tools to the state.
Data “fusion” across different datasets, government agencies and across national boundaries, has been the driving logic of the enforcement state in this era. This leads to an amalgamation of data – consumer, administrative, biometric, location – harvested to enable police and state agencies to track all residents for any reason. Just as Amazon can go back to ‘find a reason’ to incriminate a worker they target for speaking up, the state has the same tools to go after a resident who has a differing viewpoint.
Workers inside Amazon warehouses were the first to receive punishment by data agglomeration, and now these same tools are being turned upon their communities.
But what can we do? The establishment of these data tracking systems does not guarantee their success. In fact, the dependence of these entities on technology and secrecy rather than public credibility belie the lack of legitimacy and fundamental weakness at the root.
Joining collectively and understanding that the goal is to scare us with our own data is a strong antidote as is making public the nefarious goals of data collection. Warehouse workers helped pass AB701, a groundbreaking policy that protects workers from retaliation related to high rates of work including quotas enforced with surveillance. It’s not too late. Direct action in alignment with policy and legal action will help us dismantle and resist these developing systems.
-Sheheryar Kaoosji
Additional Reading
There are lots more resources to go deeper. Mijente, which leads the No Tech for ICE campaign, has been tracking this process since 2018, with their amazing report Who’s Behind ICE reviewing tech companies like Amazon’s role in the development of the fusion center- sites where DHS and local police data were joined for border enforcement purposes. Since then, Amazon has been awarded additional contracts to expand these tools, most significantly the Repository for Analytics in a virtualized Environment (RAVEn) platform that aggregates private, legal and public datasets for DHS, and the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System (HART), which is focused on aggregating biometric data of citizens for DHS. AWS received a contract to host RAVEn in 2019 and to host HART in 2022. RAVEn is operational, HART is still in development.
