Much of Amazon's subcontracting is through firms like Four Points Technology, JHC Technology and ECS Federal. The majority of Microsoft's arrangements examined in the report aren’t directly made to Microsoft, but rather through a network of subcontractors that most people have never heard of or at least wouldn’t think to include in a list of military tech providers, including well-known companies like Dell but also far more unrecognized companies such as CDW Corporation, Insight Enterprises and Minburn Technology Group. Poulson had to navigate layers of obscurity in analyzing the contracts. “As we saw in the case of Maven, Dragonfly and other products, once people create a modular component in a tech company, there’s really no way to track where that goes,” Whittaker said. Out of all the companies that surfaced in Tech Inquiry’s research, Microsoft stood out with more than 5,000 subcontracts with the Department of Defense and various federal law enforcement agencies since 2016.
“But only when you look at the details of the contract, which you can only get through Freedom of Information requests, do you see the workings of how the customization from a tech company would actually be involved.” “Often the high-level contract description between tech companies and the military looks very vanilla and mundane,” Poulson said in an interview.
Procurement contracts tend to be terse, Poulson said, masking the depth of the ties between tech companies and federal law enforcement agencies and the Department of Defense. He found that the majority of the deals with consumer-facing tech companies involved subcontracts, a relationship in which the government contracts with one company, which in turn contracts with another company to complete obligations it doesn’t have the resources to fulfill. The Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies accounted for the largest share of those contracts, with tech companies accounting for a fraction of the total number of contracts. Poulson analyzed more than 30 million government contracts signed or modified in the past five years. and foreign governments that aid in efforts to track immigrants, dissenters, and bolster military activity. Poulson has publicly opposed collaborations between American technology companies and the U.S. Tech Inquiry's research was led by Jack Poulson, a former Google research scientist who quit the company in 2018 after months of internal campaigning to get clarity about plans to deploy a censored version of its search engine in China called Project Dragonfly. government, as well as an important detail about why such contracts are often difficult to find. The report offers a new window into the relationship between tech companies and the U.S. On Wednesday, newly published research from the technology accountability nonprofit Tech Inquiry revealed that the Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, have secured thousands of deals with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Dell, IBM, Hewlett Packard and even Facebook that have not been previously reported.
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