President-elect Donald Trump has hinted about the thought of a Muslim registry in the past, but Silicon Valley tech employees vowed to never create such a database that would target people based on their religion.
Laborers representing companies such as Google, Twitter, Uber and IBM were just a handful of people to sign a document stating that promise. In addition to not helping construct identifying databases from this moment forward, dozens of employees who signed the digital pledge committed to "scale back" the practice of retaining data that describes a person's ethnic or religious background. Signees also plan to fight back against any perceived misuses of data collection should the method arise in the future.
"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," the signed document reads. "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."
Those behind the pledge include "engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people," according to the statement.
Reince Priebus, Trump's Chief of Staff, said that a Muslim registry is not in the works, but he wouldn't kill the idea entirely.
"Look I'm not going to rule out anything," Priebus told NBC's "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd. "We're not going to have a registry based on a religion. But what I think what we're trying to do is say that there are some people, certainly not all people...there are some people that are radicalized. And there are some people that have to be prevented from coming into this country."
Priebus would go on to say that Trump's primary objective is to create a system that can better manage the influx of people coming into the United States "from a place or an area around the world that harbors and trains terrorists."
