ON THE VERGE (2 OF 3)

Right to the headline story published by Mitchell Clark

Google’s reportedly bidding to be a military cloud provider

By Mitchell Clark Nov 3, 2021, 5:37pm EDT

(Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge)        

The Verge

 

"Google is reportedly “aggressively” working on winning a contract with the Pentagon, even though some of its previous Department of Defense work sparked major backlash from employees, according to The New York Times.

According to the report, Google’s Cloud division has reassigned engineers to work on a proposal for Google to contribute to the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program, which the DoD describes as an attempt to “achieve dominance in both traditional and non-traditional warfighting domains.”

The contract Google is reportedly looking into is one that will open to multiple companies to submit proposals and do work for, and the DoD estimates it could be a multi-billion dollar project. In a document describing what cloud providers will be expected to do, the DoD says that anyone hoping to win a contract will have to “enable access to crucial warfighting data” with a variety of classification levels (including Secret and Top Secret info). Additionally, the program requires that applicants be able to “provide advanced data analytics services that securely enable data-driven and timely decision-making at the tactical level.”

 

[. . .] Please take the time to read more background between-the-lines provided by sources

 

Obviously, military-related work isn’t completely off the table for Google, but given its history, it’s likely employees pay extra-close attention when the company is looking to work with the Pentagon. Google employees’ responses to Project Maven helped kick off organization within the company — union organizers cited it as one of the collective actions that inspired unionization. The union has responded to the Times’ story about the current work on the DoD bid on Twitter, pledging that workers will fight the contract."