In 2018, employees at Microsoft published a controversial letter arguing that the company should turn down a $10 billion business opportunity. The authors opposed Microsoft’s bid on the Defense Department’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract, arguing that they joined Microsoft to make a “positive impact on people and society,” not enhance the lethality of the U.S. military. That same year, a group of employees at Amazon followed suit lambasting their company’s support of surveillance technology for defense and homeland security purposes. Most notably, Google in 2019 terminated its artificial intelligence work for the department in Project Maven due to opposition from its employees.
While these stories are troubling, for many American tech companies, especially small startups, the true barriers to cooperation with the Department of Defense lie not in a misguided techno-moralism but more in the department’s self-imposed bureaucratic barriers, especially its Byzantine cyber security compliance processes. In the department’s current approach to cyber security, confusing, overlapping requirements are continually added by bureaucratic actors such…
