Edward Snowden on technology: what the evidence says · JRE #1368
SUBJECT: TECHNOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
Dell ended up getting beat out by Amazon. People, you know, some people aren't familiar with this. Many of them are. But Amazon runs a secret cloud system for the government. I forget what they've rebranded it now
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The core claim checks out: in 2013 the CIA awarded Amazon Web Services a secret cloud-computing contract worth up to $600 million, a deal that became public after a legal fight and is documented by The Atlantic and Wikipedia. Press coverage of the contract dispute (which centered on a GAO bid protest and federal lawsuit) names IBM as the losing incumbent bidder that publicly protested, not Dell, and no accessible tier-1 source names Dell specifically. However, The Atlantic reports the CIA weighed bids from AWS, IBM, and an unnamed third vendor before awarding to AWS, which is consistent with Snowden's account: he says elsewhere in this same interview that he personally worked for Dell as the senior technical official on its CIA sales account, making this a firsthand claim about his own former employer rather than secondhand speculation. The service is publicly known today (as AWS GovCloud / the intelligence community's C2S environment) rather than a covert program, though Snowden's framing of it as 'secret' reflects how the contract award itself was originally handled out of public view.