In addition to running the one of the world’s largest news and journalism wire services, the Canadian media giant Thomson Reuters is an information clearing house. It creates databases with information gathered from cell phones, credit cards, and health records to name but a few. The data is then sold to law enforcement agencies such as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. Tracy Rosenberg thinks Canadians should be aware of this. She is with Media Alliance, a San Francisco-based advocacy group.
This week on CounterSpin: “As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border,” the global tech company declared in a statement. “Family unification has been a fundamental tenet of American policy and law since the end of World War II.” The same Microsoft bragged a few months ago about ICE’s use of its Azure cloud computing services to “accelerate facial recognition and identification” of immigrants, though the post has since been altered to omit the phrase “we’re proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud.”
The spotlight on the White House’s inhumane agenda on immigration and immigrants is exposing more than the devastatingly cruel practices in force at the border, but also the numerous big corporate and institutional players that are—often invisibly—enabling that agenda. And just like the agenda, the impact of these collaborations extends well beyond immigrant communities. We’ll talk about all that with organizer/advocate Tracy Rosenberg, executive director of Media Alliance and co-coordinator of Oakland Privacy.
DEA agents with guns drawn as well as IRS agents swarmed the Oaksterdam campus as well as the store/cafe site, bringing much of Downtown Oakland to a halt and drawing swarms of protesters to the ongoing raid.
