Employees Supporting PRISM, It’s Time To Quit Your Day Job
by Charlie Edelen, PEP Board Member, Jobs with Justice Communications Organizer
Microsoft
Yahoo
Google
Facebook
Paltalk
Youtube
aol
dskype
apple
25,000
You are part of the problem.
Edward Snowden, an employee for Booz Allen Hamilton, leaked a powerpoint presentation to The Guardian and The Washington Post. The powerpoint presentations revealed a mass government surveillance program called PRISM, that included the federal government accessing data from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Skype, Apple, and other companies. The PRISM program is essentially the government unconstitutionally collecting private data from millions of Americans. The program has been going on for years.
When I’ve listened to the radio, they’ve said “some people consider Snowden a hero, others call him a traitor.” Indeed, Dick Cheney was recently quoted in the Christian Science Monitor as calling him a “traitor.” Senior Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss said, “If he’s not a traitor, then he’s pretty darn close to it.”
And yet, I haven’t talked to any REAL person who ACTUALLY thinks Snowden did anything wrong. Everyone I’ve talked to thinks what he did was brave, courageous whisteblowing. The media appears to be attempting to make it look like Americans feel good and bad about what Snowden did – like how Americans feel about guns, or abortion.
But the media isn’t fooling anyone – we all know it’s wrong. And we are paying attention.
Wikipedia says,
“Booz Allen Hamilton is engaged in providing management and technology consulting services to the United Staes government and commercial services. Booz Allen’s services include strategic operational improvement, information technology work, systems engineering, organizational change efforts, modeling and simulation, program management, assurance and resilience, and economic business analysis.
Booz Allen is the private company administering the PRISM surveillance. They likely designed the damn thing. Edward Snowden is one of their 25,000 employees. That’s right – Booz Allen has 25,000 employees. Twenty-five thousand co-conspirators.
And I have a charge for the rest of Snowden’s former co-workers, from mail room copy boys and secretaries to its CEOs – your continued employment by Booz Allen contends you accept, and are complicit in, this mass surveillance on the American people. Continuing to trade your mental and physical labor to this company for a paycheck shows your implicit approval in their role in disregarding the liberty and freedom of Americans. Indeed, your choice to work for Booze Allen disrespects the Constitution of the United States of America and all of your fellow Americans.
Now, a lot of people out there work for corporations that do things that some people find unethical. Some say Coca-Cola facilitates the murder of union organizing in Colombia, El Salvador and other countries. Phillip-Morris had an interest in trying to disprove that smoking cigarettes harms your health. Some could argue McDonald’s contributes to obesity in America. Maybe you think Halliburton is unethically and unfairly benefits from making war machines.
I’m sure many people work for these companies, and have these thoughts in the back of their minds in the day to day, but they keep pushing on because they gotta make ends meet. Their role in the bad practices seems removed, disconnected somehow. And besides, they need that job to pay the bills, raise the kids and survive in this world. And also, if they didn’t have that job, someone else sure would.
To the employees of Booz Allen: you cannot use these reasons. Not this time. Whether it’s 1984, V for Vendetta, or any other of the dozens of dystopian “big brother” novels and movies, our current real world is rapidly approaching these fictional settings. It’s time to understand our role in allowing – and even encouraging – this to happen.
This is a very, very *practical* consideration. And even though all you do is get some asshole his coffee, or just run reports on one little slice of a data set, or any other ant-like job in Booz Allen’s machine, you are making 198 happen. And you can’t live with yourself for that. You cannot stand idle and go with the flow. You need to ask yourself some hard, glaring questions. Your fellow Americans won’t let you live with that.
Employees of Booz Allen – ask yourself what the right thing to do is. I’m not asking you to tell any more secrets. I’m not asking you to jeopardize the life of you and your family by pulling a Snowden and having to go on the lam.
Just don’t be part of the problem anymore. Prove to your fellow Americans you do not approve of this surveillance. Don’t go into work tomorrow. We got you.
