A new report reveals that IBM had a secret relationship with the New York Police Department for several years. The tech giant made a surveillance program that allowed the police to search through videos of city residents and flag them by race.
Not only is this program frightening in an Orwellian Big Brother sense, but it also has dangerous repercussions in terms of racial profiling. The NYPD has a history of racism in surveilling Muslims and conducting stop-and-frisk searches on African Americans, so it's downright irresponsible to hand over a tool like this to the police.
While the NYPD swears it never actually used the function that allowed it to search via skin color, IBM continues to make and improve this feature in subsequent editions.
We call on IBM to eliminate this feature altogether, since it's ripe for misuse, racial profiling and civil rights violations. No good can come from handing the government equipment to sort through people in this manner.
