Big Brother is Being Increasingly Outsourced To Silicon Valley, Says Report

The federal and local governments have long relied on private companies for defense and law enforcement technologies, from Lockheed Martin jetfighters to Booz Allen Hamilton data analysis. But increasingly, the government is expanding beyond the usual defense contractors to the company that also provides free shipping and online TV. From a report: 'The... thing that was shocking for me was to understand just how the federal authorizations are allowing Amazon to have such a monopoly over the storage of government information,' says Jacinta Gonzalez, field organizer for immigrant advocacy group Mijente. Along with the National Immigration Project and the Immigrant Defense Project, Mijente funded a new report entitled, 'Who's Behind ICE?: The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations.' Its findings are based on documents such as contracts, memoranda, and corporate financial reports --which are publicly available but take a lot of digging to decipher. While Amazon plays the leading role, the report also details the involvement of companies including Peter Thiel's Palantir, NEC, and Thomson Reuters in storing, transferring, and analyzing data on both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens. The U.S. government is moving its databases from federal facilities to cloud providers, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS), raising concerns about accountability.

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