Microsoft Employees Call On Company To Cancel $480 Mln U.S. Army Contract

(RTTNews) - A group of Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) employees on Friday demanded that the company abandon a $480 million contract with the U.S. Army.

"We are alarmed that Microsoft is working to provide weapons technology to the U.S. Military, helping one country's government 'increase lethality' using tools we built," said the workers in a letter that began circulating throughout the company on Friday.

"We did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used." The authors did not identify themselves.

We've reached over 100 signature within the first day, stated in Microsoft Workers 4 Good Twitter post.

The letter, addressed to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and Brad Smith, the company's president and chief legal officer, comes just days before Microsoft plans to introduce the second version of the HoloLens, a head-mounted device that projects digital imagery onto the physical world.

Microsoft won a contract in November to supply the Army with at least 2,500 prototypes of augmented reality headsets, which digitally display contextual information in front of a user's eyes.

In the petition to Microsoft executives, posted on Twitter, They called on the company to develop "a public-facing acceptable use policy" for its technology and an external review board to publicly enforce it. In addition to cancelling the contract, the employees call for Microsoft to publish a policy explicitly laying out the acceptable uses for its products, and to appoint an independent ethics board to enforce it.