Orlando's police chief admitted that the city's cops are testing the software in their headquarters and in a few places downtown. However, he said that it's only tracking the cops who volunteered to be part of the pilot. Despite his assurance that the department isn't using it to spy on residents, two members of the House of Representatives demanded details on how law enforcement is using the software exactly.

Amazon has been facing increasing pressure from privacy groups and investors to stop selling facial recognition to government clients. It remains to be seen whether its employees' plea is more effective, but they likely penned the letter in hopes of emulating what happened at Google. If you'll recall, thousands of Google employees signed a petition (and even quit) to end the big G's Project Maven deal. The military drone AI initiative would give the Pentagon access to an open-source AI software that will help it flag drone images for human review. Google reportedly decided not to renew its Project Maven contract due to all the pushback.

In addition to asking the company to stop selling Rekognition to the government, the employees also want Amazon to kick Palantir off the AWS cloud services. According to a report by The Intercept, Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses the Amazon-hosted data-mining firm's technology to root out immigrants.

You can read the employees' letter in full below: