Research Fellows · Jack Poulson: Research · Bio
“Modern tech giants became central to U.S. warfighting.”
Research: Surveilling the Surveillance Industry
Jack Poulson · Executive Director, Tech Inquiry, US
Jack Poulson curates public contracting records across more than 30 U.S.-allied countries as part of investigations into the military and intelligence industries. Particular emphasis is put on cellphone location-tracking, facial recognition, and obscure-but-influential Pentagon subcontracting networks.
Tech Inquiry is publicly mapping out the domestic and international activities of the U.S. military, federal law enforcement, and State Department by fusing together ongoing purchasing activity with manually-tagged relationships and then providing a separate geospatial interface. Where possible, feeds for each entity are contextualized with a curated archive of leaked diplomatic cables and citations of relevant investigative reporting and books.
More specifically, Jack Poulson is working towards fusing together procurement feeds for every U.S. military installation and embassy, every federal prison, and every FBI, DEA, Marshals, ICE, CBP, and Coast Guard office. On top of this base, he is then mapping out U.S. Ambassadors and their relevant business and nonprofit relationships as well as previously reported CIA station chief terms and the organizational structure and management history of the U.S. intelligence community writ large.
The overall goal of the project is a better understanding of the relationships between the U.S. security state, its private contractors, and the nonprofits in which they fraternize. Thus, the more refined a knowledge base on the U.S. government becomes, the more context is provided to contracts with weapons and surveillance contractors of interest, and vice versa. While Poulson's past work has especially focused on cellphone location-tracking data brokers, facial recognition firms, and more general data fusion companies, he is in the early stages of extending his knowledge graph to include major military hardware and a manually tagged international arms sales -- with an eye towards the ongoing rise of autonomous weapons.
Jack Poulson
Executive Director, Tech Inquiry, US
Jack Poulson is the Executive Director of the nonprofit Tech Inquiry, where he leads a project for exploring international procurement and lobbying. He was previously a Senior Research Scientist in Google's AI division and, before that, an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stanford. He completed his PhD in Computational and Applied Mathematics at UT Austin in 2012 before serving as an Assistant Professor of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech. After two years as a Research Scientist in Google’s AI division working on recommendation systems and natural language processing, he resigned in protest of the company rolling back its international human rights protections and transitioned (back) into the nonprofit sector. His work focuses on data curation of the interface between tech companies and weapons manufacturers with the U.S. government and supporting civil society and tech workers in opposing related abuses.