Jack Poulson, Executive Director, 2022-09-13
Tech Inquiry spent roughly the last year working on a 150 page report combining thousands of international government contracting records with bid protest decisions, reporting on (multi-)billion dollar classified contracts, and tax filings to better understand and contextualize the relationships tech giants have with the United States and its closest allies. We would love to share it with you, but both of the funders censored it, each for a different reason.
Tech Inquiry has always struggled with the tension between research and campaigning: We were originally founded by a group of tech whistleblowers who helped reveal their companies’ human rights violations – including drone warfare and suppression of dissent. But over time we developed an expertise in the fusion of government contracting data with broader public records. Campaigns often make use of our work, but we are deeply committed to objective analysis. Not just because this is what intellectual honesty demands, but because subjective analysis is easier to smear and dismiss.
Due to the incredible political influence of trillion dollar U.S. tech giants, Tech Inquiry has struggled to rely entirely on individual donations and has repeatedly been removed from -- or kept out of -- coalitions due to refusing to be managed by politically connected foundations. We were thus cautious but optimistic when an international network of unions (UNI Global Union) pitched us last year on documenting international government cloud contracts. While UNI would officially run the project, the funding would come from Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a nonprofit arm of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
UNI’s interest, as well as the official Request for Proposals, focused entirely on Amazon. Indeed, UNI is one of the members of the #MakeAmazonPay movement, which Tech Inquiry would happily endorse. But due to our experience with the importance of contextualizing critique of tech giants, we were able to increase the scope of the contract to a study of Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet. UNI agreed that broadening the focus would increase the quality of the study, even if it was evaluated purely under the metric of shedding light on Amazon.
In June of this year, Microsoft announced a labor neutrality agreement with the Communications Workers of America – which has undoubtedly become the most successful tech organizing union. According to the announcement, “The foundation of the agreement is a commitment to mutual respect and open communication.”
Just as Tech Inquiry was completing its year of work, our Executive Director received a call from a UNI official informing him that it would be “a political problem” if Microsoft ended up in the headline. Due to the neutrality agreement, Microsoft was now “a friend of the labor movement”. (A later phone call elaborated that CWA is an affiliate of UNI and helps pay UNI salaries. And that any critique of Microsoft could lead to one or more UNI employees being fired.)
Tech Inquiry firmly decided against protecting Microsoft by subverting its analysis and delivered its draft to UNI at the end of August. Both UNI and FES had demanded a pre-publication review and, after roughly a week, it was relayed by UNI that both organizations demanded that their funding be hidden from the final report unless it underwent modification. UNI’s demands were clear: either remove all material except the critique of Amazon or hide UNI’s funding. (It was suggested that Tech Inquiry wait six months before publishing its analysis of Microsoft and Google.)
FES’s concerns – as relayed by UNI -- were that Tech Inquiry’s report made reference to billion dollar cloud contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Israel Defense Forces. During the last year, Tech Inquiry’s research into Israeli procurement from American tech giants led to our discovery of Google’s training materials for its component of the $1.2 billion Nimbus contract with the Israeli government (which included explicit reference to the Israel Ministry of Defense). This discovery led to The Intercept elucidating the scope of Google’s Nimbus contract. Ultimately Tech Inquiry was informed that both the Israel and U.S. offices of FES had demanded disassociation from the report.
Tech Inquiry believes deeply in tech worker organizing as an accountability mechanism for trillion dollar American tech companies. Indeed, we worked with UNI precisely because we believe that grassroots worker power should be preferred to top-down management from billionaire-connected foundations.
But even the exposure of the most powerful tech labor union helping to suppress critique of a two trillion dollar company is often smeared as ‘anti-union’. As a result, Tech Inquiry has one less board member than it had before news broke. We have worked hard to stay supportive of tech labor organizing while remaining neutral on CWA itself.
The tech labor ecosystem is hotly divided on the question of whether it is acceptable to publicly critique even the problematic actions of major unions, and Tech Inquiry was forced to choose between subverting its tech accountability mission or being cut off from a large fraction of the tech labor movement. We chose not to hide either Microsoft’s secretive influence on labor unions or our biggest ever source of funding. (Our overall year-long contract with UNI and FES was for $49,000, and we have received a similar overall amount of individual donations.)
When the demands from both of our funders were combined, we would have been unable to publish our complete analysis of any of the three tech giants. We hope that the price Tech Inquiry is paying to expose this information – both financially and in terms of our relationships – is worth the clarity. The current redlines appear to be Microsoft, apartheid, and understated critique. And pushback only increases as you combine the ingredients.
As it was explained to Tech Inquiry, the lesson learned is on “the power of facts”: UNI was unwilling to provide a statement of disavowal precisely because our report was objective. Refuting public records of the actions of a trillion dollar tech company would have revealed uncomfortable truths about the politics of neutrality agreements.
Note: In light of UNI's subsequent public statement that Tech Inquiry is now allowed to independently publish our report, we have uploaded the final copy of our report. The Intercept earlier published a leaked version of our report.