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The Alphabet Workers Union said, “There is no way to ensure that Google handing powerful software to powerful people won’t be used in a way counter to our values.”
Few people in the Biden administration have as much personal experience with the dangers of surveillance technology as Colin Kahl. He was notoriously targeted by the spy-for-hire firm Black Cube three years ago. Agents gathered his personal information—where his kids went to school, the make of his car—and then used aliases and fake companies in an attempt to lure his wife into partnering with a black-ops agent on a program at his daughter’s school.
Kahl had worked on the Iranian nuclear deal as a senior Obama official, and was teaching at Stanford at the time. To this day, it’s not clear who hired the firm to go after him. He was furious with their tactics. “There’s the outrage that anybody would target former government officials and try to dig up dirt on them in their personal capacity to try to discredit the policy positions they had in government,” Kahl told NPR at the time.
Today, Kahl is the number three official in the Pentagon and oversees big-picture planning. As tech companies strengthen their relationships with Washington, leaders like Kahl have the chance to prioritize civil liberties and put in place guardrails to ensure that the kind of spying that happened to him doesn’t happen to others. But instead, Kahl appears to be brokering deals with the very tech companies that facilitate this activity.
Kahl flew to California this month to meet with Silicon Valley representatives who are creating products for intelligence, law enforcement, and defense agencies. He tweeted about the trip, but did not disclose whom he sat across the table from. The companies initially didn’t want the details made public. But in response to repeated requests from the Prospect, a Defense Department spokesperson said that Kahl met with dominant platform companies Apple and Google; the investment groups Graph Ventures, Lux Capital, and UP Partners; the machine-learning company Scale AI; and the surveillance tech company Palantir Technologies.
These Silicon Valley outfits are eager to win lucrative federal contracts while staying out of the spotlight.
Kahl surely grasps how bad actors could use a searchable surveillance system to target vulnerable people, but the meetings suggest a willingness to value military edge over human rights. These Silicon Valley outfits are eager to win lucrative federal contracts while staying out of the spotlight. They want to avoid accountability from their own tech workers, who don’t want to enable killer robots or military spy networks. They want to conceal their defense and intelligence work from everyday users who worry about their civil rights.
One of the purposes of Kahl’s fact-finding trip was to facilitate “close cooperation” between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley companies, “to remain on the cutting edge of military technology for years to come,” spokesperson Lt. Col. Thomas Campbell wrote in an email. None of the firms involved in the meetings agreed to interview requests.
“It’s vital that discussions about society-changing technologies like artificial intelligence address civil rights protections from the very start,” said Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “While the government foresees benefits from AI, these systems also pose undeniable risks to equality, privacy, and free expression.”
Most worrisome from a civil liberties perspective was Kahl’s meeting with Palantir. CEO Alex Karp describes it as “the software of the future today.” Indeed, if Palantir can do everything it purports to do, then it’s on the spectrum of the film Minority Report, in terms of culling massive government data sets to essentially create a shadow profile of everyone.
This indiscriminate mass-surveillance tool is powerful. “We’ve seen these same technologies such as Palantir used by the Trump administration to identify and target undocumented migrants for deportation,” said Michael Kleinman, who monitors Silicon Valley for Amnesty International. “We cannot rely on after-the-fact exposés about how this technology is used to protect our rights. At that point, it’s often too late.”
This isn’t the first time a senior member of the Biden administration has been entangled with Palantir. Before joining the administration as the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines earned $180,000 in consulting fees from the company. She removed the role from her public profile last summer when she joined the transition’s staff. The Biden team understands how contentious Palantir is but remains willing to work with them.
Kahl’s outreach with Google might be a way of repairing relations after recent controversies involving the Pentagon artificial-intelligence program (known as Project Maven) led to a worker revolt and the tech giant’s eventual withdrawal from building a custom AI system. Kahl invited Google to the Defense Innovation Unit, a Pentagon outfit headquartered in Mountain View, California, that serves as an embassy for defense interests and has contracted Google to build its cloud network. He spoke with Google about how to improve relationships with tech companies, address what President Biden has called “extreme competition with China,” and how the DOD can harness disruptive technologies.
Google workers responded to Kahl’s visit with concern about new tech potentially being used to lethal ends. “Alphabet workers have been required to work on unethical government projects that are counter to their values without transparency into what that work is being used for,” Christopher Schmidt, a representative from the Alphabet Workers Union, told me. Even bringing up discussions of government contracts has in the past been cause for getting fired. “Without that transparency, there is no way to ensure that Google handing powerful software to powerful people won’t be used in a way counter to our values,” added Schmidt.
The venture firm Lux Capital was the only group to publicly advertise its meeting with Kahl. Lux has deep links to defense and intelligence companies, and met with Space Force Gen. John Raymond earlier this month. Lux chases Department of Defense contracts, according to sources familiar with its investing, and its portfolio companies include the Trump-adjacent autonomous-vehicle company Anduril, satellite companies like Planet Labs and Orbital Insight, and AI startups like Primer and Clarifai.
Earlier this month, Lux raised $800 million for a new fund, but the glowing coverage of the announcement failed to mention its eagerness to pursue controversial new technologies. Revolving-door connections have been greased, according to sources, by the former head of special operations, Gen. Tony Thomas, who in 2020 joined Lux as a venture partner.
Also in that meeting with Lux were lesser-known investment groups Graph Ventures and UP Partners. Both are funding products and companies that overlap with the Defense Innovation Unit, including investments in autonomous vehicles that would be useful for defense and intelligence.
That may be good for the military, but Americans may lose civil rights in the process. The opportunities for intrusive and persistent surveillance presented by Palantir’s technology and other new companies are terrifying. Reining in technological tools before law enforcement gets too comfortable working with them is critical for a national-security strategy that puts Americans first. For now, federal officials seem to be prioritizing the development of new technologies over safeguards.
