Tech Industry News: Scores Of Employees Plan To Fight Proposed Muslim Registry, Mass Deportations

Scores of tech industry employees Tuesday said they would not help Donald Trump register people based on their religion or participate in mass deportations, just a day ahead of a scheduled meeting between the president-elect and tech industry leaders.

More than 100 employees of such tech firms as Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Twitter Inc., IBM, Slack and Salesforce signed an open letter on neveragain.tech, pledging to “stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again.”

"We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration’s proposed data collection policies," the letter reads, likening the plans to the Holocaust and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The declaration comes a day before Trump is scheduled to meet in New York with technology company executives, including Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook, Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos and Oracle Corp. CEO Safra Catz.

Trump has suggested registering Muslims as a means to prevent terrorism. He also has promised to deport 11 million people who entered the United States illegally.

"We refuse to build a database of people based on their constitutionally protected religious beliefs. We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable," the engineers, designers and business executives vowed.

The signatories say if they find data being misused within their organizations, they will work to correct the situation within, speak out in public, employ all legal avenues to stop the practices and resign rather than comply with directives to engage in any abuses.

“We will raise awareness and ask critical questions about the responsible and fair use of data and algorithms beyond our organization and our industry,” the letter concludes.

Ahead of Wednesday’s Trump tech summit, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, himself an immigrant, urged his colleagues to stand up for human dignity.

Tech investor Dave Pell said it’s unlikely tech leaders will stand up to Trump, given the way the president-elect went after Boeing and Lockheed. Pell characterized Trump’s tweets as power plays.

“They [tech leaders] fear he will purposely take action to punish their companies if they don’t heed his wishes,” Pell wrote in a Medium post. “And that fear is wholly reasonable, and unlike most things associated with Trump, fact-based.”