Hawzah News Agency (US) - In a new report from The Intercept, 8 out of 9 major technology firms either gave no reply or took no position when asked if they would cooperate with the incoming Trump administration in building a national registry of Muslims. Only Twitter gave a firm No and spokesperson for Twitter made clear the company would not cooperate.

Microsoft said it was “not going to talk about hypotheticals at this point,” while pointing to company statements on security collaboration between government and the tech industry.

Booz Allen Hamilton declined to answer the question. IBM, Apple, Google, Facebook, SRA International, and Canada’s CGI did not respond to The Intercept’s inquiry.

US President-Elect Donald Trump and his transition team have waffled on several of his campaign promises, but they seem to still be considering a registry of immigrants from Muslim countries, and possibly of Muslim Americans. Under such a system, immigrants or citizens in a database could be subject to interrogations and other forms of monitoring.

How exactly such a system would work is still unclear, but it’s easy to imagine information harvested from social media, big data analytics, and large-scale database infrastructure being attractive tools for anyone trying to build it.

As The Intercept’s Sam Biddle made clear, providing no answer isn’t the same as “tacitly endorsing” a Muslim registry. But the hesitancy of normally pro-privacy companies to take a position could be seen as an index of a political landscape that has shifted massively.

END