Since Donald Trump returned to the White House last January, the biggest names in tech have mostly fallen in line with the new regime, attending dinners with officials, heaping praise upon the administration, presenting the president with lavish gifts, and pleading for Trump’s permission to sell their products to China. It’s been mostly business as usual for Silicon Valley over the past year, even as the administration ignored a wide range of constitutional norms and attempted to slap arbitrary fees on everything from chip exports to worker visas for high-skilled immigrants employed by tech firms.

But after an ICE agent shot and killed an unarmed US citizen, Renee Nicole Good, in broad daylight in Minneapolis last week, a number of tech leaders have begun publicly speaking out about the Trump administration’s tactics. This includes prominent researchers at Google and Anthropic, who have denounced the killing as calloused and immoral. The most wealthy and powerful tech CEOs are still staying silent as ICE floods America’s streets, but now some researchers and engineers working for them have chosen to break rank.

More than 150 tech workers have so far signed a petition asking for their company CEOs to call the White House, demand that ICE leave US cities, and speak out publicly against the agency’s recent violence. Anne Diemer, a human resources consultant and former Stripe employee who organized the petition, says that workers at Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, TikTok, Spotify, Salesforce, Linkedin, and Rippling are among those who have signed. The group plans to make the list public once they reach 200 signatories.

“I think so many tech folks have felt like they can’t speak up,” Diemer told WIRED. “I want tech leaders to call the country’s leaders and condemn ICE’s actions, but even if this helps people find their people and take a small part in fighting fascism, then that’s cool, too.”

Nikhil Thorat, an engineer at Anthropic, said in a lengthy post on X that Good’s killing had “stirred something” in him. “A mother was gunned down in the street by ICE, and the government doesn’t even have the decency to perform a scripted condolence,” he wrote. Thorat added that the moral foundation of modern society is “infected, and is festering,” and the country is living through a “cosplay” of Nazi Germany, a time when people also stayed silent out of fear.

Jonathan Frankle, chief AI scientist at Databricks, added a “+1” to Thorat’s post. Shrisha Radhakrishna, chief technology and chief product officer of real estate platform Opendoor, replied that what happened to Good is “not normal. It’s immoral. The speed at which the administration is moving to dehumanize a mother is terrifying.” Other users who identified themselves as employees at OpenAI and Anthropic also responded in support of Thorat.

Shortly after Good was shot, Jeff Dean, an early Google employee and University of Minnesota graduate who is now the chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, began re-sharing posts with his 400,000 X followers criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration tactics, including one outlining circumstances in which deadly force isn’t justified for police officers interacting with moving vehicles.

He then weighed in himself. “This is completely not okay, and we can’t become numb to repeated instances of illegal and unconstitutional action by government agencies,” Dean wrote in an X post on January 10. “The recent days have been horrific.” He linked to a video of a teenager—identified as a US citizen—being violently arrested at a Target in Richfield, Minnesota.

In response to US Vice President JD Vance’s assertion on X that Good was trying to run over the ICE agent with her vehicle, Aaron Levie, the CEO of the cloud storage company Box, replied, “Why is he shooting after he’s fully out of harm’s way (2nd and 3rd shot)? Why doesn’t he just move away from the vehicle instead of standing in front of it?” He added a screenshot of a Justice Department webpage outlining best practices for law enforcement officers interacting with suspects in moving vehicles.

Whether it was protesting Covid lockdowns, attending school board meetings, or facing off against Black Lives Matter protesters, the far-right Proud Boys were always on hand to support Donald Trump’s first term in office.

When Trump left office in 2021, the group’s leaders languished in jail for their role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. With reported infighting destabilizing the movement, it looked like the group’s glory days were behind it.

But Trump’s return a year ago, and his release of all January 6 prisoners, signaled that a Proud Boy comeback could be in the cards. And while there have been intermittent signs that the group could return to the levels of activity of its heyday, the reality is that Trump’s militarization of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the Border Patrol, together with the administration’s embrace of white nationalist rhetoric, has left the Proud Boys without a role to play. There is little incentive for Proud Boys to leave their homes when heavily armed representatives of the Trump administration are already picking fights with left-wing protesters.

Never has that been more evident than over the course of the last week, as anti-ICE protesters have flooded the streets of towns and cities across the country since a masked federal agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.

Instead of taking to the streets to face down the protesters and defend Trump’s hard-line immigration crackdown, the Proud Boys have been relegated to posting incendiary memes while promising to provide personal security for right-wing influencers who track every part of ICE’s anti-immigrant raids.

A WIRED review of hundreds of Telegram channels run by Proud Boy chapters across the country, as well as other far-right extremist and militia groups, reveals that there are no public calls for members to mobilize and defend ICE from the protesters.

Instead, members of the Telegram channels are posting deeply misogynistic and homophobic images, videos, and AI-generated content featuring Good and her wife, with one extremist expert telling WIRED that the channels in recent days have been almost giddy in response to the shooting.

“They are very enthused about what’s happening, because for many of them, [ICE and the DHS are] following what their blueprint would have been anyway,” says Wendy Via, cofounder and president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, adding that there is no reason why the Proud Boys need to be on the ground. “When you’ve got law enforcement that seems so willing to abuse their powers, why get in trouble.”

The Proud Boy channels, in between celebrations of Good’s death, are also praising the work of ICE in the city.

“You’re an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Five and a half years after George Floyd, in the same city, you subdue a prisoner with your knee. Imagine being that based,” a member of a North Carolina chapter of the group known as the Cape Fear Proud Boys wrote in a Telegram post this week.

There have been some promises of action, however. After right-wing influencers Nick Sortor and Cam Higby claimed to have been attacked while filming content in Minneapolis this week, former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio claimed he wanted to help. “I reached out to both [Nick] and Cam with an offer for personal detail,” Tarrio, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sent to prison over his role related to the January 6 riots at the Capitol, wrote on X on Monday. Tarrio still claims to lead the Proud Boys. “Waiting for a reply. We have a great solution for both of them,” he added.

CrowdStrike has been granted a motion to dismiss a consumer class action lawsuit brought by shareholders who were affected by the now-infamous 19 July 2024 outage – prompted by a faulty sensor update – which crashed Windows PCs around the world causing widespread disruption and billions of pounds worth of losses.

The suit, filed on behalf of CrowdStrike investors in August 2024, accused the defendants, who included the company’s founder and CEO George Kurtz of making false and misleading statements over the efficacy of the Falcon platform at the centre of the outage.

It also alleged failings over software testing and quality assurance and claimed that CrowdStrike was seeking to maximise its profit by rushing untested updates.

Handing down his decision at the federal district court for the Western District of Texas in the city of Austin, US district judge Robert Pitman said the plaintiff’s claims were dismissed in their entirety in part because the shareholders had failed to establish any plausible motive of intent to commit securities fraud on CrowdStrike’s part.

It his judgment, Pitman said the court agreed with CrowdStrike that the statements it made were neither false or misleading when considered in the context from which the plaintiffs removed them. He wrote that the court concluded that if anybody was being misleading, it was the plaintiffs.

Rejecting other arguments, Pitman also said that corporate mismanagement did not, standing alone, give rise to a multibillion-dollar claim

“We appreciate the Court’s thoughtful consideration and decision to dismiss this case,” said CrowdStrike chief legal officer Cathleen Anderson in a brief statement.

The Reuters news agency earlier reported that the office of New York State comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who led the lawsuit, is reviewing options following the decision.