Sirota: Biden administration’s reported $10B deal with Amazon ‘shrouded in secrecy’

Caitlin McLean - Saturday
 Provided by The Hill



David Sirota, founder of The Lever news outlet, said he believes a reported $10 billion deal between the Biden administration and Amazon is hidden in “secrecy.”

In late April, the news outlet Nextgov reported that the National Security Agency had re-awarded Amazon a contract for cloud-computing services.

“NSA recently awarded a contract to Amazon Web Services that delivers cloud computing services to support the agency’s mission,” an NSA official told Nextgov.

Sirota expressed concerns with the reported contract.

“We don’t actually know the details of this contract. It’s shrouded in secrecy, there’s a national security exemption for the details of the contract, but we know it’s a cloud computing contract,” Sirota said while appearing on Hill.TV’s “Rising.”

“There is a privacy question about what the NSA needs with a $10 billion build out of cloud computing. The mind can run wild about what that’s all about in terms of surveillance and data collection,” he added.

Sirota said the size of the contract is “huge.”

“There’s very few details about what that contract is and I think that people need to understand how big the contract is. Federal contracts go out all the time in the millions of dollars even hundred of millions of dollars. A $10 billion federal contract, even at the federal government level, that is a huge contract,” Sirota said.

Sirota said the size of the contract can provide some answers to as why the Biden administration awarded it.

“Whatever they are actually building out with that, whatever the NSA is doing with it, you can rest assured that it is a big thing,” he added.