> This is a political problem that can only be solved politically (by voting) not by some tech companies doing small scale boycott

Yet, big companies have had boycotts internally and that lead to the company changing its course. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/google-will-not-renew-a-cont... And, yeah, sometimes the efforts only work for a short period but they still had an effect.

Voting is nice but - most often - you don't get a real choice with voting. You choose one corrupt politician for another because more money == more speech. The uninformed masses who are more concerned with their own daily lives (divorce, family deaths, their children, etc.) are what are making large decisions for the rest of the informed. The cycle perpetuates.

The question isn't if you can actually cause Google or another big tech company to refuse to provide services, the question is if you can actually change the results with it.

Project Maven continues, now run by Palantir. Google's refusal to continue the project did nothing but slow down the project by a few months.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-14/palantir-...

In fact, considering the goals of Project Maven (roughly making sure you're blowing up what and who you intend and avoiding collateral damage), if you consider Google a leader in AI, you could make the perverse argument that you're actually killing people by reducing the effectiveness and delaying the timeline of the program. I'm not saying I've researched this enough to say that this is a correct or even plausible argument, merely that it is possible.

From my reading of available publications by the airforce on maven, the calculus was actually that they had a fixed threshold for risk, and being able to analyze more data would allow them to act in more cases with that same risk level. To probably oversimplify, if they were ok with 25% innocent causalities, increasing efficiency 100x would just let them kill 100x more often at the same ratio. Disclosure: ex-google

> By paying taxes you’re technically facilitating their efforts, so approximately everyone is complicit

You're only complicit if you pay taxes.

Refuse to pay or reduce your income below the taxable threshold and you will no longer be complicit.

Still complicit because income tax is not the only federal tax.

You have to pay taxes. You don't have to provide tech to the ICE.

Politics is a lot more than just voting, especially when you have a two-party system that is vulnerable to ratcheting and deception.

>You have to pay taxes.

Not really, no. You don't have to make money. You're able to live a life free of income and taxes, live like a vagabond.

You choose to earn enough income that you have to pay taxes on it. If you decide to get a job that pays you enough that you have to pay taxes, you're complicit.

And if a suffice t amount of people were to decide to live as vagabonds, society would collapse, and you'd be complicit in the millions of deaths that would cause.

No such conclusion if everyone stops selling software to ICE until they stop their grossly inhumane actions.

You can live an agrarian sustenance lifestyle and society wouldn't collapse... That's what society was for thousands of years.

Again, you choose to make a taxable income; you choose to pay taxes.