Power

Microsoft employees are pushing for change. Will it matter?

The company's track record on listening to employees and activists over law enforcement and defense is … limited.

​Protestors at a Microsoft store

Protestors at a Microsoft store in midtown Manhattan protesting the company's involvement with ICE in September 2019.

Photo: Getty Images/AFP

When activist Lau Barrios saw that 250 Microsoft employees had called for their company to cancel its police contracts and support defunding the Seattle police department, she says she felt "extremely hopeful."

But it's unclear if much will come of the effort.

Nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd have spurred a reckoning within the tech industry over race and ethics, prompting companies like IBM and Snap to make significant policy changes. But history shows that Microsoft has rarely heeded the demands of employees and activists pushing for structural change within the company, particularly when it comes to Microsoft's lucrative law enforcement and defense contracts.

Since OneZero published a letter Monday, addressed to CEO Satya Nadell and signed by 250 employees, Microsoft has not responded publicly. A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment further and pointed Protocol to CEO Satya Nadella's blog post from last week standing against racial injustice.

Here's a rundown on previous protests against Microsoft and how the company responded.

  • Microsoft's work with ICE: In June 2018, hundreds of Microsoft employees signed an open letter protesting the company's work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ultimately, the company did not walk back its multimillion-dollar contracts with ICE, which stand today. Andy Ratto, a volunteer with immigration group Close the Camps NYC who helped plan the Microsoft protest, said "it remains an ongoing concern and an ongoing effort to try and continue to pressure Microsoft around this issue."
  • GitHub's work with ICE: Microsoft also faced pressure over its ICE ties since acquiring GitHub, the world's largest host of source code, in 2018. After it came to light that GitHub maintained a $200,000 contract with the agency, multiple GitHub employees resigned, Microsoft employees posted an open letter on GitHub in solidarity with the protests, and over 2,000 open-source contributors penned an open letter asking GitHub to cancel its contract and commit to higher ethical standards. GitHub CEO Nat Friedman defended the contract and did not address the grassroots protests. "They never said anything," said Daniel Sieradski, who helped organize the GitHub efforts.
  • JEDI contract: In October 2018, Microsoft announced its intent to bid for a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Department of Defense — the famous JEDI deal. Soon after, an anonymous group of Microsoft employees published a Medium blog titled "An Open Letter to Microsoft: Don't Bid on the US Military's Project JEDI." Last year, Microsoft won the $10 billion deal over Amazon Web Services, a surprise to analysts who had predicted AWS was most likely to win. AWS has since been contesting the award of the contract.
  • HoloLens: A group of more than 100 Microsoft employees signed on to a letter in February 2019 protesting the company's plan to equip the U.S. military with up to 100,000 augmented reality headsets called HoloLens. But Nadella defended the $479 million contract with the Pentagon in an interview, saying the company will not "withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies."
  • AnyVision: For months last year, groups including MPower Change and Jewish Voices for Peace pressured Microsoft to stop funding an Israeli startup called AnyVision, which was surveilling Palestinians in the West Bank. A petition from the groups gathered more than 75,000 signatures, and the activists partnered with Microsoft workers to deliver the petition to Microsoft's Redmond campus. In March of this year, Microsoft announced it was divesting from the company — one of most high-profile instances of Microsoft taking action in response to protests. "When activists and media and workers [are] all on the same page, you can win," said Granate Kim, an organizer with Jewish Voices for Peace who worked extensively on the campaign. A turning point, says Kim: when a Microsoft employee spoke up against AnyVision during a company town hall.

Now, with Microsoft's partnerships with police departments across the country well-known, the question is: Is this time any different? Will the company continue to provide law enforcement with cloud computing power, facial recognition technology and various forms of surveillance technology, or listen to the complaints of some of its staff?

Barrios, who helped organize the protests around AnyVision, said she thinks it's "important" that Microsoft workers are following the lead of Black organizers in the movement. "If you're in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, that means you have to follow the demands of it," she said. "Your actions have to speak louder than your PR statements." And this time, it finds itself under new pressure on some fronts: around its facial recognition business, for instance, after rival IBM announced it will no longer sell facial recognition technology due to the human rights and ethics concerns.

"Microsoft execs did a great job to 'listen' long enough for the energy to go away when Microsoft workers asked for the ICE contracts to get canceled," tweeted tech industry activist William Fitzgerald. "Let's hope this time around workers keep pushing until these contracts actually get canceled."

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins