More than 300 Boston Dynamics employees sign petition against selling Spot robots to ICE
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
The sale of a robot to a law enforcement agency has prompted a public protest inside the developer company; management has kept the deal.
More than 300 Boston Dynamics employees, about half of them anonymously, signed a petition calling for the sale of Spot robot dogs to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to be cancelled; according to WBUR, the company employs more than 1,500 people. According to Ars Technica, on September 25 a $1.3 million Department of Homeland Security contract went to Connecticut company Radeco, which will supply ICE with modified versions of the robots; WBUR writes of four robots. The petition's authors write that the deal harms the company's reputation and may cause employees to leave. Management kept the deal: according to WBUR, CEO Amanda McMaster said the robots are sold to the ICE unit Homeland Security Investigations, which deals with transnational crime, and that the terms of sale prohibit "any attempts to weaponize our robot or use it for purposes of harm or intimidation." ICE said the robots would provide "real-time situational awareness in hazardous, confined, or tactically uncertain environments" and would not replace officers' judgment.
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