Research Fellows · Jack Poulson: Research · Bio
“Modern tech giants became central to U.S. warfighting.”
Research: Surveilling the Surveillance Industry
Towards a Public Database for Investigating Western Special Operations
Jack Poulson · Executive Director, Tech Inquiry, US
Download Full Research Paper (28 November 2024)
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.
When building a knowledge base of entities and their relationships, perhaps the central question is of scope. A common trap for activists is to focus on a list of ‘bad’ organizations, such as spyware companies, and to avoid documenting relationships with ‘good’ organizations, such as the billionaires and nonprofits friendly to their political project.
An unreachable — but still worth pursuing — goal is to manually document all significant financial relationships involving influential and newsworthy organizations, particularly as they relate to weapons and information operations (of which surveillance forms a subset). This includes: every billionaire, every significant governmental organization, every U.S. military base, every U.S. embassy, every CIA chief of station, every U.S. Ambassador, and every influential company and nonprofit.
The more refined a knowledge base on a 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.
The author has instantiated this effort through the open source repository published by the nonprofit Tech Inquiry, which also seeks to expose a single searchable interface to every government’s public procurement and lobbying feeds, as well as national security-oriented public interest leaked dataset.
Tech Inquiry began with a singular focus on fusing proactively published government datasets with analysis of journalism but has come to appreciate the impact possible from incorporating historic leaks, ranging from Cablegate to Israeli government emails and Airman Teixeira’s so-called 'Discord leaks.’ In the case of documents with sufficiently sensitive personally identifiable information, textual searches still demonstrate their existence, but the ability to view the documents is restricted to vetted journalists.
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.