Is Google Trying to Violate Human Rights Law? - Questions Arise after Suspension of 4 Employees

On November 27 ( Monday), Google suspended 4 employees stating that they involved in the repeated violation of data security policies. However, the inside information as per The Guardian and various other sources report that the action was taken since the 4 employees played an integral part in the organisation of Google Employees to protest against Google's engagement with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to sign Google Cloud Platform (GCP) contract.

The following is the detailed petition of 1495 Google employees and 95 other supporters that was published on Medium on August 14, 2020. 

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is currently engaged in human rights abuses at the US Southern border. Together with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is presently responsible for the housing of migrant children, they are caging and harming asylum seekers, separating children from parents, illegally detaining refugees and US citizens, and perpetrating a system of abuse and malign neglect that has led to the deaths of at least 7 children in detention camps. These abuses are illegal under international human rights law, and immoral by any standard.

In January of 2017 thousands of Googlers, including our executives, joined together to protest the Trump administration’s Muslim Ban. This was the right thing to do and we are proud to work at a place that reflects these values.

It has recently come to light that CBP is gearing up to request bids on a massive cloud computing contract. The winning cloud provider will be streamlining CBP’s infrastructure and facilitating its human rights abuses. It’s time to stand together again and state clearly that we will not work on any such contract. We demand that Google publicly commit not to support CBP, ICE, or ORR with any infrastructure, funding, or engineering resources, directly or indirectly, until they stop engaging in human rights abuses.

Google has repeatedly advertised its commitments to implementing ethical guardrails on its tech. Google’s AI Principles state that Google will not build technologies “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.” By any interpretation, CBP and ICE are in grave violation of international human rights law. The company has also pledged to create a diverse, inclusive, and psychologically safe workplace for all its workers, including immigrants and Latinx people — the very populations whose communities, families, and friends are being terrorized by CBP and ICE.

In working with CBP, ICE, or ORR, Google would be trading its integrity for a bit of profit, and joining a shameful lineage. We have only to look to IBM’s role working with the Nazis during the Holocaust to understand the role that technology can play in automating mass atrocity.

History is clear: the time to say NO is now. We refuse to be complicit. It is unconscionable that Google, or any other tech company, would support agencies engaged in caging and torturing vulnerable people. And we are not alone — the world is watching and the facts are clear. We stand with workers and advocates across the industry who are demanding that the tech industry refuse to provide the infrastructure for mass atrocity.

Signed,

1495 Googlers and 94 other supporters*

Two of the suspended employees, Rebecca Rivers and Laurence Berland claimed that during the Googlers protest last Friday, they were inquired about their involvement in the petition. Reportedly Berland agrred that he supported to come up with the petition. 

At the recent rally, Google employees were protesting against the suspensions of Berland and Rivers and demanded that they be returned to work.