Reports of a

Silicon Valley/Military Divide

Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

The Alleged Silicon Valley/Military Divide: Capacity

Our analysis shows a diversity of contracting postures (see Tables 2 and 3), not a systemic divide from Washington. Within a substantial list of namebrand tech companies, only Facebook, Apple, and Twitter look to be staying out of major military and law enforcement contracts. [5, 6]

The accusations of treason stemmed from Google's 2018 release of its worker-demanded AI Principles; because one of the principles involved a commitment to not building weapons systems, Google promised to not renew its contract providing custom-built drone object tracking AI for a Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) pathfinder project (Maven). [7, 8]  Months later, the company cited potential conflicts with their AI Principles, along with their missing government certifications, as their motivations for walking away from the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud competition. The missing certifications, as well as the near-certainty that the award would go to Amazon or Microsoft, indicated that Google was not so much exiting federal cloud contracting as limiting embarrassment from a loss.

This intuition was later born out through the company's deep involvement with the Department of Defense's efforts to include Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning in the modernization of its battle networks: the Defense Innovation Initiative. [9]  Google's former CEO, Eric Schmidt, has chaired two of its components since their inception: the Defense Innovation Board (DIB) and the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI). And, in May, Google Cloud poached the Executive Director of the DIB and then landed a secure cloud contract through its sibling, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). [10, 11]  On balance, Google's position became supporting the DoD's cloud and cybersecurity while avoiding direct contributions to weapons systems. [12]

Federal procurement data also suggests, contrary to popular narrative, that Palantir and Anduril are, financially speaking, modest players in the defense contracting space relative to Hewlett Packard (especially its spinoff, Perspecta), IBM, Microsoft, Dell Technologies, AT&T, Verizon, and Amazon. Even Accenture, through Accenture Federal Services, and Johns Hopkins University, through its Applied Physics Laboratory, rank substantially higher within the studied DoD and DHS agencies. [13]

We conclude that the US weapons and intelligence community dramatically overreacted to a prominent tech company democratically deciding to not contribute to weapons systems. [14]  In July 2019, as part of the Aspen Security Forum, Defense Innovation Unit director Michael Brown stated that coverage of Maven was "overblown" before pointing out that many tech companies, namely Amazon and Microsoft, understand that workplaces should not be democracies and that

"the place to exercise [concern over weapons systems] is at the ballot box and we need to support the government." [15, 16, 17]

The Alleged Silicon Valley/Military Divide: Human Rights

We argue that two of the primary tech defense contractors, Microsoft and IBM, helped normalize their industry's suppression of human rights in exchange for market access. Despite the human rights messaging of Microsoft's head lawyer and lobbyist, the company has proactively suppressed dissent in Bing for more than a decade, and its subsidiary, LinkedIn, is infamous for doing the same; in early 2010 Bill Gates pointedly criticized Google for -- as it turns out, temporarily -- taking a principled stand for human rights. [19]  IBM's "safe city" products are known to have involved a video surveillance system for strongman Rodrigo Duterte in Davao City. And IBM's CEO having directly led sales of cataloguing equipment for Nazi Germany, which directly contributed to the Holocaust, is still defended by the company.

Similarly, Perspecta, a close Hewlett Packard affiliate/spin-off that dominates our chart of tech defense contractors, incorporates components of both Computer Sciences Corporation, which helped charter CIA rendition flights to secret prisons, and QinetiQ North America. QinetiQ, the privatization of England's former Defense Evaluation and Research Agency, has had former CIA Chief who personally authorized his agency's use of torture on its board. [20]

Another tech defense contractor, Cisco, has been in court since 2013 for not only helping custom-build China's "Golden Shield" project -- commonly known as the "Great Firewall of China" -- but even purpose-building a censorship, video surveillance, and "forced conversion" module for suppressing a dissident religious minority. Some of Cisco's internal marketing materials mentioning this work even leaked the day before a Senate human rights hearing. And despite Google's 2010-2018 public stance against suppressing dissent, Google's former CEO, and primary interface to the DoD, Eric Schmidt, has defended complying with authoritarian demands since 2006. [21]

Companies and executives which comply with authoritarian demands are only openly criticized by the US national security community if they do not significantly interface with the DoD. When they are willing to partner with the DoD, as is the case with Eric Schmidt and Reid Hoffman, they are welcomed as leaders.

Data Availability

Alongside this report, we are officially releasing the initial version of our procurement and lobbying explorer: techinquiry.org/lobbying/. In addition to providing summaries of over one hundred thousand companies' procurement and lobbying behavior, and lists of heavy-hitter vendors for over 100 government agencies, it includes custom nearest-neighbor utilities for finding lesser-known analogues of contractors.

Our manual curation of the noisy FPDS data is also made public in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) via:

• More than 9000 company name normalizations,
  
• Roughly 5000 corporate parentage links,
  
• More than 5000 explanatory websites, and
  
• More than 650 contracting/requesting agency normalizations.
  

And since this work was sparked by a need to understand federal procurement data well enough to properly submit Freedom of Information requests for contracts, we are also releasing the responses to our requests. They involve three tech companies (two based in Silicon Valley):

• A redacted contract, with Virginia-based Transvoyant, for the Air Force to test Transvoyant's software for a "Precise Predictive Logistics (P2L) Pilot" meant to produce a "LOGistics Common Operating Picture (LOGCOP)". The deliverables include:
  
  • "Situational (unit readiness, weapon system status) and battlespace (intelligence, political climates, adversary actions, weather) awareness in real-time and continuous" [emphasis ours],
    
  • "Visibility of missions (centralized repairs, supply chain, distribution networks) and operations (contingency and steady state) globally", and
    
  • "[The] ability to plan for operations now or anytime in the future, allows planners to adapt to dynamic situations that arise during currents operations and develop courses of actions (COAs)."
    
• A redacted contract, with Palantir USG, Inc., for the Air Force to test Palantir's Gotham software for "Supply Chain Visualization and Analytics" to produce a "LOGistics Common Operating Picture (LOGCOP)".
  
• The last response involves Pivotal Software -- a Dell Technologies subsidiary -- which is the largest recipient of funds from the Defense Innovation Unit. Pivotal's work on modernizing the Air Force's Air Operations Centers has been widely publicized, often alongside the tongue-in-cheek hashtag "#agileAF". While this FOI request, along with the other two, was submitted in September of 2019, the responsive documents for Pivotal are expected to arrive in the first half of July. Once they arrive, we will link to them here.
  

Lastly, we make public our lists of annotated subcontract award summaries, which we describe in detail in a later section.

Overview of the Federal Procurement Data System and its Curation

For an in-depth overview of the roots of U.S. federal procurement, dating back to the Revolutionary War, we highly recommend The U.S. Federal Procurement System: An Introduction by Christopher R. Yukins. But this report only involves the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS), which, since 2010, has been run by IBM through the General Services Administration. At roughly 1:30AM ET each day, anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 new award modification summaries are made available through an ATOM feed provided by the official source for FPDS data, fpds.gov. [22]

While FPDS is the definitive source for US federal procurement data, it is known to have numerous shortcomings, such as inconsistencies and and inaccuracies in award amounts, slow and incomplete uploads from contract officers (including 90 day delays for DoD procurement), and corrections frequently taking place years after the signing data. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report in late 2019 covering many such shortcomings.

One of the more delicate issues is that FPDS integrates the proprietary Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS), an assignment of a nine digit number to each business entity. Beyond accuracy and precision issues associated with DUNS, bulk dissemination of FPDS data is alleged to violate the intellectual property of the owner of the data, Dun & Bradstreet. [23]  As a result, we avoid overreliance on DUNS information (which includes some information on parent companies) and manually maintain our own vendor name normalizations and corporate parentage hierarchies.

{
 "title": "New IDC HQ003420D0001 awarded to MICROSOFT CORPORATION for the amount of $0",
 "content": {
  "IDV": {
   "contractID": {
    "IDVID": {
     "PIID": "HQ003420D0001",
     "modNumber": "0"
    }
   },
   "relevantContractDates": {
    "signedDate": "2019-10-25 00:00:00",
    "effectiveDate": "2019-10-25 00:00:00",
    "lastDateToOrder": "2030-10-24 00:00:00"
   },
   "dollarValues": {
    "obligatedAmount": "0.00",
    "baseAndAllOptionsValue": "10000000000.00"
   },
   "totalDollarValues": {
    "totalObligatedAmount": "0.00",
    "totalBaseAndAllOptionsValue": "10000000000.00"
   },
   "purchaserInformation": {
    "contractingOfficeAgencyID": {
     "@name": "WASHINGTON HEADQUARTERS SERVICES (WHS)",
     "@departmentName": "DEPT OF DEFENSE"
    },
    "contractingOfficeID": { "@name": "WASHINGTON HEADQUARTERS SERVICES" },
    "fundingRequestingAgencyID": {
     "@name": "DEPT OF DEFENSE",
     "@departmentName": "DEPT OF DEFENSE"
    },
    "fundingRequestingOfficeID": { "@name": "DOD CIO" }
   },
   "contractMarketingData": {
    "websiteURL": "HTTPS://WWW.CLOUD.MIL",
    "whoCanUse": "DEFENSE",
    "emailAddress": "support@cloud.mil",
    "maximumOrderLimit": "1000000000.00",
   },
   "contractData": {
    "contractActionType": { "@description": "IDC" },
    "descriptionOfContractRequirement": "ENTERPRISE LEVEL, COMMERCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE (IAAS) AND PLATFORM AS A SERVICE (PAAS) TO SUPPORT DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE BUSINESS AND MISSION OPERATIONS."
   },
   "vendor": {
    "vendorHeader": { "vendorName": "MICROSOFT CORPORATION" },
    "vendorSiteDetails": {
     "vendorLocation": {
      "streetAddress": "1 MICROSOFT WAY",
      "state": { "@name": "WASHINGTON", }
      "ZIPCode": {
       "@city": "REDMOND",
       "#text": "980528300"
      },
      "countryCode": { "@name": "UNITED STATES" },
      "phoneNo": "5713532701"
     },
     "vendorDUNSInformation": {
      "DUNSNumber": "081466849",
      "globalParentDUNSNumber": "081466849",
      "globalParentDUNSName": "MICROSOFT CORPORATION"
     }
    }
   },
   "competition": {
    "extentCompeted": { "@description": "FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION" },
    "solicitationProcedures": { "@description": "NEGOTIATED PROPOSAL/QUOTE" },
    "numberOfOffersReceived": "7"
   },
   "transactionInformation": {
    "createdBy": "ANGELA.DEREN.HQ0034@WHS.MIL",
    "createdDate": "2019-10-29 13:24:08",
    "lastModifiedBy": "HABERLACHJ",
    "lastModifiedDate": "2019-10-31 16:12:48",
    "status": { "@description": "FINAL" }
   }
  }
 }
}

Three Measures of Contract Value

One of the significant complications in analyzing federal procurement is that there is no straight-forward answer for how to measure money-flow. One of the best such examples is the above JEDI award, which reports a minimum, or "obligated" award amount of zero, and a "base and all options" -- or "potential" -- value of ten billion dollars. That is to say, the minimum amount of the award was set to zero, and the maximum amount was set to ten billion, and the actual value could be anywhere in the middle. This was pointedly explained by the Department of Defense's Chief Information Officer, Dana Deasy:

"People think JEDI is a 10-year, $10 billion contract. It’s not – not necessarily. While that’s the maximum value and duration of the contract, the Pentagon has the option to terminate it after two years. There’s another end-it-or-extend-it decision three years later, and a third three years after that. The minimum the winning contractor is guaranteed to get? Just $1 million over two years."

To understand a possible source for the million dollar floor on the contract value, we incorporate two further complications:

• Awards often cannot be analyzed in isolation -- they can have both modification awards (using the same PIID) and subawards (which reference the original award's PIID).
  
• There are not just lower and upper bounds on contract values -- the "obligated" amount and "potential", a.k.a. "base and all options" value -- but also a typically more accurate lower bound, called the "current", or "base and exercised options" value.
  

Figure 2: A subaward to the original JEDI award showing all three contract value types as one million dollars.

One of the several subawards to the original JEDI award is shown in Figure 2, with each of the three measures of contract value set to the same mysterious one million dollar floor value mentioned by Deasy. But we emphasize that one should not expect FPDS award data to always be correct: a 2017 Government Accountability Office report claimed that less than one percent of awards are fully consistent!

The takeaway should be that, when FPDS award data is consistent, the running totals of the contract values should satisfy the ordering:

Building a picture of direct contracting influence

We can now combine all of the previously discussed FPDS curation mechanisms to compute maximum ranks of direct financial flow between various tech-related companies and U.S. federal agencies -- which we treat as proxies for influence/impact. Brief summaries of many of the studied companies are available in a section of the appendix.

Agencies

For the sake of brevity, we will simply list the agencies of focus rather than providing short summaries. One exception is the Justice Department's Offices, Boards, and Divisions (OBD) unit, which is less widely documented. We recommend the book Badges without Borders (or the associated interview with Historic.ly), which details the history of the international, often explicitly anti-communist, policing programs once run through USAID's Office of Public Safety. These programs transitioned into the Justice Department's International Criminal Training Assistance Program (ICITAP) under the OBD agency. There are numerous recent awards from this program to Science Applications International Corporation and its subsidiary, Engility Holdings, for international policing in Indonesia, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.

For the Justice Department as a whole, we investigate rankings within:

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), [24]
  
• The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA),
  
• Offices, Boards, and Divisions (OBD), and
  
• The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP).
  

Several members of the Department of Homeland Security are of interest:

• The U.S. Secret Service (SS),
  
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),
  
• Customs and Border Protection (CBP),
  
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS),
  
• The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and
  
• The Science and Technology Directorate (S&T).
  

The largest number of agencies are from the Department of Defense:

• The U.S. Air Force,
  
• The U.S. Navy,
  
• The U.S. Army,
  
• The U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM),
  
• The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA),
  
• The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) and The U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM),
  
• The Washington Headquarters Service (WHS),
  
• The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA),
  
• The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),
  
• The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA),
  
• The National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM).
  

Lastly, we include rankings within several independent agencies:

• The State Department,
  
• The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID),
  
• The U.S. Agency for Global Media(AGM); formerly known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), and
  
• The General Services Administration's Federal Acquisition Service (FAS).
  

Even though we have restricted the analysis behind the influence rankings in Table 1 to direct contracts -- which misses, for example, a high-profile $25M (base and all options value) award between TRANSCOM and Amazon through ECS Federal -- we can interpret the results as underestimates. Given this caveat, we immediately notice that the Hewlett Packard network of companies noticeably dominate, with top-10 influence rankings in 8 of the 26 agencies. [25]

Equally as surprising is that consulting companies Accenture and Deloitte Consulting -- which contributed much of the award money to parent company Deloitte -- were more influential via direct contracting than essentially every tech company except HP and IBM. Next after the management consulting companies is the not-for-profit MITRE Corporation, which was built specifically to manage Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs); its high rankings should thus serve more as a benchmark than a surprise. We underline that it ranked first with the DIA, NGA, and DHS S&T, and second with the FBI.

If we restricted our attention to the "Big Five" tech companies: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, then a purely direct contracting analysis would suggest that Microsoft is the only significant defense contractor -- which, again, misses the numerous multi-million dollar Amazon Web Services awards passed through subcontracts (such as ECS Federal and JHC Technology). The question of how to account for more commoditized relationships -- namely, Intel, NVIDIA, and Apple hardware sales -- is more complicated, and we will partially address it in the next section.

We also notice the minor influence rankings of Palantir and Anduril relative to: management consulting companies, HP, Dell, telecoms, and even the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (which is responsible for the vast majority of awards to Johns Hopkins). Palantir's highest influence was within the U.S. Special Operations Command, who publicly praised Palantir's software during their years-long struggle to win the DCGS-A contract (and a subsequent "capability drop"). Anduril's biggest influences are observed as through DARPA, the Washington Headquarters Service, and Customs and Border Protection; direct inspection of their awards reveals, for example, a $250M (base and all options value) award through CBP for "autonomous surveillance towers" and a $100M (base and all options value) award requested by DARPA and contracted through the Air Force for "advance[d] battle management anduril phase 3 idiq". [26, 27]

A few of the agency columns are worth dedicated discussion. For example, Microsoft's second place influence rank within the Defense Information Systems Agency is entirely due to the $10B (base and all options value) JEDI award -- only Leidos ranked higher -- and so the award being transferred to Amazon due to a bid protest would give it the same position. The other top-ten influencers within DISA, unsurprisingly, included several communication infrastructure companies: Verizon, Cisco, and AT&T, as well as HP (IBM was 18th, and Dell was 26th).

The column combining the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command -- which we note only has a modest amount of reported awards -- contains top-ten rankings for Accenture (3rd) and Johns Hopkins (5th), but known NSA contractors Dell and AT&T were only 28th and 70th, respectively. The FBI rankings, like many others, show the professional services companies, Accenture and Deloitte, as heavier-hitters than tech giants. Nevertheless, Perspecta and IBM are both in the top 25, Verizon and Palantir are in the top 50, and Dell and AT&T are in the top 100.

As we will see in the next section, Palantir and Anduril's results are not significantly changed by incorporating subcontracts -- indeed, Anduril's are not changed at all -- and so, if they are setting the bar for what it means for a tech company to be a defense contractor, then HP, IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Cisco, AT&T, and Verizon are more than meeting it, even without incorporating their subcontracting passthroughs. And that Intel chips are a core component of most HP and Dell machines suggests we should already be able to justify its addition it into the list.

Our Approach to Generating Similar Contractor Lists

We built such a system on top of SciPy: a stand-alone Alternating Weighted Least Squares (AWLS) embedding and nearest neighbor extraction utility and a driver specific to the Federal Procurement Data System.

After the

to have unit Euclidean norm and then extract 20 to 30 of its nearest neighbors, in a cosine-similarity sense.

Examples of Generated Neighbors

Each of the "vendor" pages on the website associated with this report, techinquiry.org/lobbying/, contains a list of "Similar Contractors" within the "US Federal Contracting" tab that are generated with the algorithm described above. We show a few of the examples from our most recently trained model, which was trained on roughly the last year and a half of procurement data.

Cellebrite

Our first example is that of Cellebrite, a "mobile forensics" company which has allegedly been used by Michigan State Police to conduct unlawful searches. It has also been reported that Cellebrite sells its software to the governments of Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia.

The five closest neighbors produced for Cellebrite Inc., a subsidiary of Cellebrite DI Ltd., were:

1. Cellebrite DI Ltd.
   
2. Grayshift, LLC
   
3. Pen-Link, Ltd.
   
4. Avail Forensics LLC
   
5. Berla Corporation
   

Palantir Technologies

We return to investigate the answers to our original question: "Which companies contract like Palantir [Technologies]?". Our top-five results are:

1. XFinion Inc.
   
2. Ardent Management Consulting, Inc.
   
3. VIRE Consulting, Inc.
   
4. iWorks Corporation
   
5. Alethix, LLC
   

Anduril Industries

Similarly, the top-five results for Anduril are currently:

1. Orbital Insight, Inc.
   
2. Solid State Scientific Corporation
   
3. Omni Fed LLC
   
4. G2 Ops, Inc.
   
5. Entheleon Technologies, Inc.
   

"Access the most current visibility, intelligence, and transparency of the world’s physical activity ... all on one secure, private geospatial data platform.

Microsoft Corporation

Given that our nearest neighbors lists are generated entirely from contracting behavior, they produce lists of companies which contract similarly to the given company, rather than companies which are, in a vague sense, generally thought of as similar. This distinction becomes clear when we look at a very large tech company like Microsoft.

The most recently produced top-five list of vendors who contract similarly to Microsoft was:

1. Four Inc.
   
2. Dynamic Systems, Inc.
   
3. Forcepoint Federal LLC
   
4. Emergent LLC
   
5. Accelera Solutions, Inc.
   

Future Extensions of Embeddings

There exist namebrand tech companies -- for example, Google -- which do very little direct federal contracting, but perform a large amount of registered lobbying. We can therefore expect to improve the quality of "similar companies" recommendations by extending from our current procurement-only approach to one which includes Senate OPR LD-1/LD-2 and LD-203 filings. We have already included said filings in our website, but have not yet worked them into the embedding/neighbor generation pipeline.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Irene Knapp (@ireneista) for detailed help with this project's database (Postgres) and the web server's operating system configuration (NixOS). He would also like to separately thank Liz O'Sullivan (@lizjosullivan) and Shauna Gordon-McKeon (@shauna_gm) for detailed suggestions that significantly improved an early draft of this document. Lastly, he would like to thank Cornell's Center for Applied Mathematics, and the Balsillie School of International Affairs, for hosting him to talk about very early versions of this work.

Conflict of Interest Disclosure

This work was entirely self-funded. The author acknowledges that they were formerly an employee at Google, as was Irene Knapp. Likewise, Liz O'Sullivan formerly worked at Clarafai.

Company Summaries

• HP Inc. / Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) / Perspecta Inc.: Each of these three companies has roots in the (now defunct) Hewlett-Packard Company, which formed its HP Enterprise Services division after acquiring the remnants of Ross Perot's Electronic Data Systems in 2009; HP formally split into a personal computer business (HP) and an enterprise IT company (HPE) in 2015. The following year, HPE acquired the remains of the high-performance graphics company, SGI. And in 2017, HPE spun off its enterprise services segment, and merged it with the Computer Sciences Corporation, to form DXC Technology. About six months later, DXC spun out its public sector business and merged it with Vencore, which had previously acquired the North American division of a privatized British intelligence agency, QinetiQ, to form Perspecta. In mid 2019, HPE acquired supercomputer manufacturer Cray.
  
      Rather than summing the award amounts from HP, HPE, and Perspecta, we individually rank them and then take the highest ranking result (in almost all cases, that result is from Perspecta).
  
• Deloitte: Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited is a British accounting firm considered one of the "Big Four". In 2002, Deloitte acquired both the British and Canadian branches of Arthur Andersen, which was convicted of destroying documents in the Enron scandal. Deloitte has subsequently been under investigation by the UK's Financial Reporting Council for failing in its role as an external auditor of, Autonomy, which was the largest software company in the UK at the time of its 2011 acquisition by Hewlett-Packard. Almost immediately after Autonomy was acquired by HP, most of its value was written down as a loss, partly due to said accounting irregularities (in 2017, HP sold Autonomy to Micro Focus, and, in 2019, Autonomy's former CFO was given a five year prison sentence in the US for fraud).
  
• Accenture plc: Accenture was the consulting division of Arthur Andersen from the 1950s until it became a separate unit called Andersen Consulting in 1989, then an independent company in 2000, and then officially became Accenture at the beginning of 2001. After the Enron scandal became public at the end of 2001, Accenture issued a statement clarifying this timeline of its separation from Arthur Andersen. In 2002, the Government Accountability Office issued a report critiquing Accenture as one of the four publicly traded federal contractors incorporated in a tax haven -- alongside McDermott International, Foster Wheeler (now John Wood Group), and Tyco International (now Johnson Controls). In April of 2019, the DHS's Customs and Border Protection terminated a contract with Accenture's subsidiary, Accenture Federal Services, over having paid 297 million dollars for the company to process just 58 job applicants.
  
• IBM: International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is one of the largest employers in the world, and its IBM Cloud platform is a major competitor for federal cloud contracts. Some of IBM's inventions include the relational database and the Structured Query Language, which are both employed in this project. But the company has a history of profiting from severe human rights abuses. IBM's most famous founder, Thomas J. Watson, personally spearheaded the company's role in Nazi Germany's cataloguing systems for exterminating its Jewish population. More recently, IBM's international sales of "safe city" technology have involved the construction of video surveillance networks for strongman Rodrigo Duterte.
  
      In 2011, IBM acquired military intelligence software company i2 Group, which received $10M from Palantir after alleging fraudulent theft of its intellectual property. Conflicts with IBM's i2 intensified over Palantir's attempted replacement of the Army's intelligence integration software, DCGS-A -- members of the Army, and Congress, suggested DCGS-A weaknesses were the cause of the U.S. bombing of a Doctors without Borders hospital in Kunduz. Palantir ultimately won DCGS-A.
  
• AT&T Inc.: As chronicled in The Idea Factory, AT&T played a foundational role in the development of computing and communication equipment, beginning with its deployment in the early twentieth century of vacuum tubes as a means of amplifying long-distance telephone call signals. The company's long-running monopoly was partially due to its large-scale construction of US communication networks during both World Wars. One of the positive byproducts of their monopoly was a golden era of innovation at its Bell Labs, whose end loosely coincided with the 1984 antitrust decree breaking up the Bell System (the pieces have since reassembled into: AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink). The past two decades have revealed a darker side to AT&T's close relationship with the US government: numerous documents and whistleblowers have shown that the company has been eager to comply with large-scale warrantless surveillance and call monitoring.
  
• Microsoft Corporation: One of the "Big Five" tech companies, it famously won the -- still heavily contested -- Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud competition with its Azure platform. Along with Google and Yahoo (now Verizon), it cofounded the Global Network Initiative (GNI) in 2008, partially to avoid Congressional intervention in response to numerous international human rights violations. Despite its GNI membership, Microsoft followed Google's lead by complying with Chinese government censorship and surveillance demands when it launched its search engine, Bing, in China in 2009. Microsoft further took stewardship of the dissent suppression mechanisms in professional networking site LinkedIn after acquiring it in 2016. A 2010 report had similarly revealed that Bing was extensively suppressing LBGT-related content in Arab countries. And, after Google pulled back from proactively suppressing dissent in its Chinese localization of its Search product in early 2010, Microsoft's founder, Bill Gates, personally attacked Google's principled stand as hypocritical.
  
• Verizon Communications Inc.: Verizon has its roots in one of the "Baby Bells" resulting from the 1984 breakup of AT&T: Bell Atlantic. It expanded into Silicon Valley through the purchase of AOL in 2015, and then the non-Alibaba assets of Yahoo! in 2016, and the combined the two into a subsidiary known as Oath, which then rebranded as Verizon Media Group. In 2006, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo wrote an open letter to Yahoo!'s then chairman, Jerry Yang, arguing that the company had caused the arrest of journalist Shi Tao as part of their negotiations for their stake in Alibaba. As was widely reported in 2013, Verizon's Business Network Services division had been turning over "all call detail records" to the National Security Agency. Similar "warrantless wiretapping" had previously been reported. We also note that subsidiary Verizon Business performed an analysis of the hacking of intelligence consulting company Stratfor that is "key" to the Department of Justice's current indictment of WikiLeaks.
  
• Dell Technologies, Inc.: Dell Technologies is the result of the 2016 merger between Dell and enterprise storage company EMC Corporation (now Dell EMC); before going public at the end of 2018, it was the largest privately held company in the world. Reuters reported that whistleblower Edward Snowden began downloading documents while working as a contractor for Dell, and Snowden's memoir stated that he arrived at Dell through its acquisition of Perot Systems (which was sold to NTT Data in 2016). Pivotal Software, a subsidiary of virtualization company VMWare, which is in turn majority owned by Dell Technologies, has built drone strike and fuel allocation tools in collaboration with the Defense Innovation Unit spin-off, Kessel Run. These contracts are the subject of our near year-long FOI process that should complete in the coming weeks.
  
• Cisco Systems, Inc.: A networking company founded by two Stanford computer scientists and named after San Francisco, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world just before the dot-com bubble burst. In the early 2000s, Cisco sold the Chinese government routers that served as the backbone of its "Great Firewall" -- allegedly going so far as designing a custom video surveillance and censorship module to target a dissident religious group. And, in 2013, documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden detailed the NSA's process for implanting malware into Cisco products, leading to substantial declines in international revenue.
  
• Palantir Technologies, Inc.: Founded in Palo Alto in 2003 by Peter Thiel as an extension of PayPal's fraud detection tools into military and law enforcement contracting, the company ended up paying $10M to IBM's intelligence subsidiary, i2 Group, to settle allegations that Palantir fraudulently stole i2's intellectual property. As noted above, Palantir intensely competed -- and ultimately won -- against a consortium of defense contractors (including IBM's i2) to replace the Army's DCGS-A intelligence synthesis tool with its Gotham software (our FOI for Palantir's DIU contract to build a LOGistics Common Operating Picture (LOGCOP) is for analogous functionality).
  
      In the early days of the company, Gotham was presented as a tool for data-driven civic engagement -- which are disturbingly similar to some of the goals of the website behind this report -- via their (now defunct) procurement and lobbying analysis website AnalyzeThe.US. One of their other products, Metropolis -- which they ultimately replaced with Foundry -- was used by JPMorgan to spy on its employees' emails, phonecalls, web-browsing patterns, and GPS locations to attempt to predict disgruntled employees ("insider threats"). And, as reported by LatinX organizing group Mijente, Palantir, through its contracts with ICE's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit, has "played a key role" in the Trump administration's accelerated arrest and deportation of immigrants. One can find a detailed explanation of the history of the company's products from their CTO here.
  
• Oracle Corporation: Oracle, was incorporated in 1977 and named after the founders' work with the CIA -- who was their first customer -- on the Project ORACLE data storage system. As detailed by numerous sources, surveillance work remained critical to the company's growth, with $2.5B of its 2003 revenue coming from federal contracts. Oracle's intense growth led to a major downfall in the integrity of the U.S. Justice Department when the former Attorney General, John Ashcroft, left office in 2005 to form a lobbying shop, The Ashcroft Group, LLC (now TAG Holdings LLC), which accepted $220,000 from Oracle to help reverse an anti-trust hold on an acquisition that he had put in place.
  
      In 2012, Oracle was banned from a General Service Administration procurement vehicle after paying $200M to the GSA the previous year to settle an overbilling lawsuit through the False Claims Act (five years earlier, Oracle's PeopleSoft paid $99M to the GSA due to another overbilling case). Nevertheless, Oracle has been a litigious participant in the ongoing Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure bid protests, having hoped that its Oracle Cloud platform would be at least partially adopted rather than the award going entirely to one of its rivals.
  
• Anduril Industries, Inc.: Roughly three years after Palmer Luckey's virtual reality company, Oculus, was acquired by Facebook in 2014, Facebook was ordered to pay $500M to ZeniMax Media for his failure to comply with a non-disclosure agreement -- so they fired him. He was subsequently inspired by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund to transition into weapons contracting. One of the first projects of his new company, Anduril, was a contract with the Department of Homeland Security building surveillance systems for the U.S.-Mexico border. And, after Google publicly cancelled its work building object tracking AI's on top of drone surveillance footage for the Air Force's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center -- called Project Maven -- Anduril was one of the companies to take over the work. Other work has included counter-UAS and satellite surveillance systems.