IBM Protests Amazon-CIA Deal

Image source redacted
(Just kidding!)

It's rarely a good idea to wake up a sleeping giant. However, it appears Amazon's deal to provide data services for the Central Intelligence Agency has provoked computer and data titan IBM into action.

Big Blue, as IBM used to be known in what now seems like ancient digital history, launched a successful protest of the Amazon-CIA deal. According to the tech reporting site the register.com, IBM got the feds' General Accounting Office (GAO) into the act. Like any worthy Captain Reynaud, the GAO found reasons to compel reconsideration of the CIA agreement. (It's worth comparing notes on this story. To that end, read federaltimes.com's version of events. The site is owned by the Gannett media chain.)

Amazon's muscling into lucrative, long-term, no-questions-asked federal contracts clearly alarmed the relatively Old School corporate suite at IBM. What Amazon might not have fully considered was IBM's friends. And their friends also have friends. As the Donald Sutherland spook character in the movie JFK noted, "They fight back -- their way."

Image: forbes.com

Theregister.com post noted that IBM's protest comes at a most inconvenient time for Jeff Bezos' tech empire. Amazon may soon be tarred in the intelligence mining scandal, as Dropbox, which uses Amazon Web Services (AWS), may be fingered as another participant in the NSA data sweep.

The choicest part of theregister.com's post is its quote from the Amazon statement on the contract issue: "Providing true cloud computing services to the intelligence community requires a transformative approach with superior technology. The CIA selected AWS based on its superior technological platform..."