"Why We Must Monitor the Sale of Surveillance Tech", 13 September 2021.

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In 2018, news broke that Google was secretly helping the Pentagon build artificial intelligence to ramp up its drone surveillance program through “Project Maven.”

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[Data obtained through Freedom of Information requests] told a complex story about the realities of defense and surveillance technologies... tens of thousands of contracts... became public each morning, as well as lobbying filings, public-corporate partnerships, and venture capital investments...

An entire subcontracting network surrounding Project Maven was hidden in plain sight...

Project Maven also tied into both social media and cellphone location-tracking surveillance... This so-called “Publicly Available Information” (PAI) is then aggregated... making heavy usage of data fusion software from the notorious surveillance-tech company Palantir...

An entire industry of civil society organization whitewashes this surveillance work... [N]umerous frequently cited research institutions—including... the data-driven Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS)—have subcontracted with the U.S. government alongside location-tracking data brokers...

AI companies such as Clarifai, Rebellion Defense, and Amazon are more overt about their defense work. Surprisingly, it turns out that tech giant Microsoft was the largest subcontractor on ECS Federal’s Project Maven awards... Despite Google ceasing its AI development, two of the key companies involved in Project Maven—both Rebellion Defense and Orbital Insight—have continued on the project with backing from Google’s parent company Alphabet...

Microsoft, Clarifai, and Palantir are major AI contractors for the Pentagon...