Worked for them. The "biometrics" moniker is not accurate.
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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Abolition of police and prisons
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Abolish is to flourish! Against the prison industrial complex and for transformative justice.
See Critical Resistance's definitions below:
The Prison Industrial Complex
The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.
Through its reach and impact, the PIC helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic and other privileges. There are many ways this power is collected and maintained through the PIC, including creating mass media images that keep alive stereotypes of people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, youth, and other oppressed communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant. This power is also maintained by earning huge profits for private companies that deal with prisons and police forces; helping earn political gains for "tough on crime" politicians; increasing the influence of prison guard and police unions; and eliminating social and political dissent by oppressed communities that make demands for self-determination and reorganization of power in the US.
Abolition
PIC abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.
From where we are now, sometimes we can't really imagine what abolition is going to look like. Abolition isn't just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It's also about undoing the society we live in because the PIC both feeds on and maintains oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, and controls millions of people. Because the PIC is not an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future. It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead us all to believe that things really could be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives.
Abolition is both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.
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I agree, I know people who work for them and they aren't a bio company.
How would you describe their business specialty?
They're an IT firm.
IT consulting. They take jobs in contract. They built Healthcare.gov (poorly) on the first round.
It's not their specialty, but it's a field they're a giant in. The context is clear from the article.
Asked about Accenture’s international work on biometric identification, predictive policing, and national security, Bernard, the JCOD spokesperson, said the firm was involved in many different kinds of work. “Accenture is a large, international consulting firm with many lines of business. The specific consultants assigned to this project are part of a team in Accenture dedicated to the public sector. Their team comes from a variety of backgrounds, primarily in the health and human services industry.”
It's kind of clear at this point that no-one in this off-topic thread has read the article, or has contributed anything useful to the discussion.
I worked there for about a decade. It's a poor description of the company. It's like calling Microsoft a Database Giant. Yes, they make MS SQL, yes they're known for that, but is that the best description of their work? No.
When I left, Accenture had 400k employees. My friends who work there still saw this article and had the same take I did.
So, to paraphrase someone in this comment section, "it's kind of clear to me that some people don't know a thing about Accenture but what the article says."
It's accurate to say that I don’t know a thing about Accenture but what the article says. On a site about discussing news articles and learning new things, that's not something to be ashamed of. And Microsoft is unambiguously a database giant, even if that's not the way a person who worked in another tentacle of the organization would describe it.
I think it's telling that you and the people who still work there's first reaction is to quibble with the true but unusual title rather than engage with the meat of the article, or even read it before discussing it, for that matter.