Salesforce Protests Planned Amid Sting of Association with US Border Agency

Salesforce has become the latest technology company to be targeted for supplying their services to US Customs and Border Protection; just the latest instance of corporate reputational risk resulting from the association with the agency.

Activists, with the support of Greenpeace among other groups are calling for protests of Salesforce’s upcoming Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on September 25.

A website dropsalesforce.com is live and is trying to crowdfund money to take out bus advertisements to coincide with the conference.

See also: Microsoft ICE Contract Draws Fire

The site has an open letter to the company published which states: We are absolutely appalled that Salesforce training is providing assistance to government agencies that are violating human rights and is declining to drop the agreement with Customs and Border Protection.

We can't, in a great inner voice, disregard this issue… As Salesforce clients and potential clients, we urge you to cut your contract with Customs and Border Protection. We will not be quiet until you do.

The letter is signed by a range of Salesforce customers, along with Greenpeace, Catholic Charities of St. Petersburg and the New York State Nurses Association to name a few. Fight for the Future, an advocacy group appears to be coordinating the campaign against the company.

US Customs and Border Protection Contract

In March this year US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced it had selected Salesforce certification to be its digital modernization platform.

Linda Jacks Office of Human Resource Management at CBP commented in the release that: “In this competitive hiring environment, it is critical for law enforcement agencies to embrace new technologies as a tool for accomplishing their mission and CBP is no exception.

While Salesforce’s Dave Rey, EVP for Public Sector also commented: There is a huge opportunity for government agencies to modernize so they can meet the expectations of today’s digitally-savvy employees and citizens

By conveying Salesforce, CBP is enabling its workers with a cutting edge CRM stage that will boost engagement, information sharing and productivity.

Contract Triggers Employee Campaign

This sparked employees at Salesforce to write an open letter signed by 650 Salesforce object manager employees, which was obtained by Buzzfeed. The signatories expressed: "We are especially worried about the utilization of Service Cloud to oversee outskirt exercises.

Given the unfeeling partition of kids from their folks as of now occurring at the border, we believe that our core value of Equality is at stake and that Salesforce should reconsider us authoritative association with CBP and stand up against its practices.

The dropsalesforce website seems to be an escalation of this protest which is now drawing in not just the employees, but Salesforce customers.

The site has set up eight automatic tweet links that people are using to tweet their displeasure at the company’s CEO Marc Benioff.

It is also encouraging people to tweet at Al Gore, actor Adrian Grenier and singer will.i.am. who are all scheduled to talk at their conference.

Computer Business Review contacted Salesforce for comment, but at the time of writing had received no reply. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff earlier this year tweeted that “we don’t work with CBP regarding the separation of families.