July 14, 2021- 10:30 a.m.
The $2.5 million deal, details of which were obtained via FOIA request, show Google’s Reston, Virginia, partner Carahsoft provided the tech giant’s cloud and AI tools to the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), which acts as a centralized command and control unit for the Department of Defense (DOD) homeland security efforts. The work was slated to begin in May 2020 and last for a year and is now complete.
The contract also allowed for widespread use of Google’s tools, integrating “with other DOD, federal, state, local, private and international agencies and organizations.” (Google declined to comment on the nature of its work because it isn’t authorized to discuss contracts without approval from the customer.)
There was no indication that the Google technology was used for anything other than the defense agency’s Covid-19 response. Jack Poulson, a former Google data scientist who quit over ethical concerns, still had concerns that without any red lines in the contract, it could have been applied for other means. He pointed to possible use cases for the Joint Task Force North (JTF-North), a division under USNORTHCOM that has previously helped support America’s border protection, the war on drugs and counterterrorism.
“Unless there is a clear contractual red line—which I have not seen in this case or for Google Cloud’s work with Customs & Border Protection—cost efficiency dictates maximizing the scope of the procured technology. In this case, incorporating JTF North border surveillance and war on drugs surveillance feeds would be obvious cases of concern,” Poulson, who now heads up the big tech ethics nonprofit Tech Inquiry, added.
Those Principles were created after thousands of Google employees rebelled over a controversial DOD contract called Project Maven, which was to apply Google’s AI to drone footage to detect objects like cars and buildings. After staffers wrote an open letter, which called for Google to never sell “warfare technology,” it stopped working on Maven.
