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Comment by kaikai | Hacker News Reader

"I was just doing my job" is not an excuse. It is absolutely not only our right to decide how our work is used in the world, but our duty to make sure we're not enabling human rights violations. I applaud and support tech workers making ethical calls around their work. Unfortunately we may need to put our money where our mouths are and leave employers that refuse to stand by any ethical code, and that's already happening all across the tech industry.

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Do we know that Github is being used to enable human rights violations, and that their use of Github for potentially negative actions outweighs potentially beneficial actions, given that ICE has a wide variety of responsibilities beyond immigration enforcement?

For example, it seems reasonable to guess that they might be using their Github deployment to help run the National Child Victim Identification System:

The National Child Victim Identification System (NCVIS), owned by U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), is an application that assists federal, state, local, and international law enforcement agencies, INTERPOL, and other supporting organizations, such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) (hereafter, authorized partners) in the investigation and prosecution of child exploitation crimes, specifically those involving images of child sexual exploitation.

https://www.dhs.gov/publication/dhsicepia-010-national-child...

But how is Github's product enabling human rights violations? I can understand if Github employees were protesting a product that created human rights violations (for example if Github offered a security service for ICE detention centers that was abusing prisoners). Would you be ok if Github was a restaurant and it had a policy of not serving anyone who is an ICE employee?

Yeah, I would love that actually. ICE runs concentration camps. Not enough people treat them how they deserve.

Ok so would you ok with a restaurant not serving republicans because the party currently supports ICE's actions?

A bit of Slippery Slope combined with Strawman fallacy here.

It's some great irony that two minutes before you posted this, a man of straw himself appeared and agreed with the statement.

I don't think you can call something a strawman if the idea seems to actually have wide support.

Hello, I'm a real boy! I happen to support both of these positions, but it is indeed possible to condemn ICE without feeling the same about the GOP in general, and jumping immediately from one to the next is exactly the kind of thing people mean when they talk about moving the goalposts.

I just wanted to see if dunstad would support such a ban. And they did, as you can see by their agreement. This shows how real that slippery slope is for many people...

Political alignment isn't a protected class.

You are right - I always forget that political affiliation is not a protected class within our legal system. However, I think it should be, because we've seen the whole ugly side of persecution and discrimination that came about during the McCarthy era and beyond where people like MLK, Chaplin, WEB Du Bois, and Linus Pauling were targeted for their political beliefs.

Can you point to some sources so I can understand how they are concentration camps? I’ve been to Dachau and nothing on the news shows anything like what I saw there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_inte...

From the article:

> In 2019, many experts, including Andrea Pitzer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, have acknowledged the designation of the detention centers as "concentration camps" [227] [228] particularly given that the centers, previously cited by Texas officials for more than 150 health violations [229] and reported deaths in custody,[230] reflect a record typical of the history of deliberate substandard healthcare and nutrition in concentration camps.[231] Though some organizations have tried to resist the "concentration camp" label for these facilities, [232] [233] hundreds of Holocaust and genocide scholars rejected this resistance via an open letter addressed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [234]

41,000 deaths in Dachau.[1]

15 deaths in ICE detention centers.[2] If you add 2017 it would be about 25.[3]

I have family who immigrated to the US last year with their children. We have the largest immigrant population and we want people to come here.[4]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_concentration_camp

[2]https://www.ice.gov/death-detainee-report#wcm-survey-target-...

[3] https://www.cato.org/blog/annual-death-rate-immigration-dete...

[4] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/03/which-countries-have-...

There always seems to be a conflation of concentration camps with Nazi death camps in these discussions. ICE running concentration camps (a facility for holding "people, commonly in large groups, without charges") seems wholly unremarkable.

Judging by the definition of "internment" linked from that wiki page....Japan runs "concentration camps", as it regularly imprisons people without charges and without trial for up to 23 days, under harsh conditions.

Seems like a pretty low bar for defining the term, and obscures the pretty real distinctions in overall human suffering that occur at different places.

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