Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them. —Sarah Kendzior [1]

Our pledge

We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people. 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. 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.

We have educated ourselves on the history of threats like these, and on the roles that technology and technologists played in carrying them out. We see how IBM collaborated to digitize and streamline the Holocaust, contributing to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others. We recall the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. We recognize that mass deportations precipitated the very atrocity the word genocide was created to describe: the murder of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey. We acknowledge that genocides are not merely a relic of the distant past—among others, Tutsi Rwandans and Bosnian Muslims have been victims in our lifetimes.

Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again.

We commit to the following actions:

Signatories’ references to affiliated organizations below are for identification purposes and are not intended to imply an endorsement by the organization.

To sign, follow these instructions.

Signed,

How to sign this pledge

To sign this pledge, please follow these instructions.

Credits

This pledge is the joint work of more than 50 tech workers who helped write the pledge text, organized meetups that led to the pledge, verified signatures, created the software infrastructure to support it, managed volunteers, and spread the word about it. Some people who worked on the pledge include:

Leigh Honeywell (lead organizer)
Ka-Ping Yee
Eddie Kay
Libby Horacek
Liz Fong-Jones
Maciej Cegłowski
Matthew Garrett
Melissa Elliott
Valerie Aurora

Additional resources

If you’re reading this and want to take action beyond signing, some things you can do include:

Donate

Volunteer

Legal assistance and referrals

Other resources

Further reading

Footnotes

  1. From We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump by Sarah Kendzior