Doing the Right Stuff Right for Human Rights
This blog originally appeared on the Huffington Post In December 1981 soldiers of the Salvadoran Army’s Atlacatl Battalion entered the village of El Mozote, where they murdered hundreds of men, women and children. Although reports of the massacre appeared in the United States, Salvadoran army and government leaders denied them and, all too soon, El Mozote was forgotten. It wasn’t until 1993, when a reconstruction of these events by American journalist Mark Danner first appeared in The New Yorker , that the full story of the El Mozote massacre was brought to light and sent shock waves through the international community. I was aghast that it could take a dozen years for the world to believe the massacre had happened. The tough question that ran through my mind was: How can we as technologists in Silicon Valley help prevent this kind of atrocity? Delivering my opening remarks at the Martus' 10th Anniversary A decade later, in 2003, Benetech —the nonprofit tech company I f...