Amazon v. IBM: The Redacted Lawsuit Over CIA Contract Publicly Available

When IBM recently persuaded the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review the CIA's award of a $600 million cloud computing contract to Amazon, the corporate steam from Jeff Bezos' world headquarters could be felt even in insular Washington, D.C. Amazon did not take the GAO's review of the contract lying down. Amazon legal counsel filed suit against the United States government, of which the GAO is a part, protesting the contract review.

The court papers Amazon filed were released today; a story about Amazon's month-old, hush-hush legal snit appeared in today's Seattle Times.

The most delicious part of the story involved Amazon's assertion that IBM was essentially unworthy of winning any crumb from the CIA data management pie. Why? The sore losers from Seattle claimed that Big Blue should not be permitted to enjoy "the undeserved windfall opportunity to make its otherwise uncompetitive, materially deficient proposal competitive now that it has AWS' price and ratings in hand."

It is ironic that Amazon, which is notoriously secretive and leverages tremendous competitive advantages from its data mining and collection efforts, should complain about another firm's "early information" and ability to undercut its competitor. Mr. Bezos does not apparently like that feeling at all. Don't be surprised if there's some quiet outreach from Seattle to sympathetic ears in the Amazon-friendly Obama Administration.