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November 27, 2020 By cs

CIA awards secret multibillion-dollar cloud contract

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has awarded its long-awaited Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E, contract to five companies — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM.

Under the C2E contract vehicle, the companies will compete for specific task orders issued by the CIA on behalf of itself and the 16 other agencies that comprise the intelligence community. The CIA did not disclose the expected value of the contract to Nextgov, but procurement documents issued by the agency in 2019 indicated it could be worth “tens of billions” of dollars over the next decade and a half.

“We are excited to work with the multiple industry partners awarded the Intelligence Community (IC) Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) Cloud Service Provider (CSP) contract and look forward to utilizing, alongside our IC colleagues, the expanded cloud capabilities resulting from this diversified partnership,” CIA spokeswoman Nicole de Haay told Nextgov Friday.

C2E represents the CIA’s next step in cloud computing, having awarded an existing contract — dubbed C2S  —to Amazon Web Services in 2013 to provide a variety of cloud computing services for the CIA and intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency and FBI.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2020/11/exclusive-cia-awards-secret-multibillion-dollar-cloud-contract/170227/

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: C2E, C2S, CIA, cloud, cloud computing, FBI, intelligence community, multiple award contract, National Security Agency

June 16, 2020 By cs

Former DEA official pleads guilty to $4 million contract-related fraud scheme

A former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) public affairs officer, Garrison Courtney, has pleaded guilty to defrauding at least a dozen companies of over $4.4 million by posing falsely as a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

According to court documents, Garrison Courtney of Tampa Florida falsely claimed to be a covert officer of the CIA involved in a highly-classified program or “task force” involving various components of the intelligence community and the Department of Defense.  According to the false story told by Courtney, the supposed classified program sought to enhance the intelligence gathering capabilities of the United States government.  In truth, Courtney had never been employed by the CIA, and the task force that he described did not exist.

To accomplish the fraud, Courtney approached numerous private companies with some variation of this false story, and claimed that the companies needed to hire and pay him to create what Courtney described as “commercial cover” in order to mask his supposed affiliation with the CIA.  Courtney also fraudulently claimed that the companies would be reimbursed in the future for these salary payments, sometimes by the award of lucrative contracts from the government in connection with the supposedly classified program.

Courtney went to extraordinary lengths to perpetuate the illusion that he was a deep-cover operative.  Among other things, he:

  • falsely claimed that his identity and large portions of his conduct were classified;
  • directed victims and witnesses to sign fake nondisclosure agreements that purported to be from the government and that forbade anyone involved from speaking openly about the supposedly classified program;
  • told victims and witnesses that they were under surveillance by hostile foreign intelligence services;
  • made a show of searching people for electronic devices as part of his supposed counterintelligence methods;
  • demanded that his victims meet in sensitive compartmented information facilities to create the illusion that they were participating in a classified intelligence operation;
  • repeatedly threatened anyone who questioned his legitimacy with revocation of their security clearance and criminal prosecution if they “leaked” or continued to look into the supposedly classified information; and
  • created fake letters, purporting to have been issued by the Attorney General of the United States, which claimed to grant blanket immunity to those who participated in the supposedly classified program.

In furtherance of his scheme, Courtney created a fraudulent backstory about himself, claiming that he had served in the U.S. Army during the Gulf War, had hundreds of confirmed kills while in combat, sustained lung injuries from smoke caused by fires set to Iraq’s oil fields, and that a hostile foreign intelligence service had attempted to assassinate him by poisoning him with ricin.  All of these claims were false.

Courtney also convinced several real governmental officials that he was participating in an intelligence “task force” and asserted that they had been selected to participate in the program.  He then used those officials as unwitting props falsely to burnish his legitimacy.  For example, he directed his victims to speak with the government officials he recruited in order to verify his claims, having separately instructed those officials exactly what to say.  Courtney thereby created the false appearance to the victims that the government officials had independently validated his story, when in fact the officials merely were echoing the false information fed to them by Courtney.  At times, Courtney also convinced those officials to meet with victims inside secure government facilities, thereby furthering the false appearance of authenticity.

Through the scheme, Courtney also fraudulently gained a position working as a private contractor for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC), a branch of NIH that provides acquisition support services to federal agencies.  Once he had installed himself at NITAAC, Courtney gained access to sensitive, nonpublic information about the procurements of other federal agencies being supported by NITAAC.   Courtney thereafter used that information to attempt to corrupt the procurement process by steering the award of contracts to companies where he was then also on the payroll, and used the false pretext of national security concerns to warp the process by preventing full and open competition.

Courtney’s sentencing has been scheduled for Oct. 23, 2020.

Source: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-dea-official-pleads-guilty-elaborate-4-million-fraud-scheme

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: abuse, CIA, DEA, fraud, misrepresentation, NIH, NITAAC

May 2, 2019 By AMK

CIA considering cloud contract worth ‘tens of billions’

After six years in a classified commercial cloud built by Amazon Web Services, the CIA wants more commercial cloud capabilities from potentially multiple companies.

The agency is in the early stages of planning a contract for commercial cloud computing services that will be worth “tens of billions” of dollars, according to contracting documents presented to select tech companies by the CIA in late March and obtained by Nextgov.

Dubbed the Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E, the two-phase initiative will “expand and enhance” the commercial cloud capabilities it first contracted for with Amazon Web Services in 2013.

That contract, called C2S and valued at up to $600 million over 10 years, provided commercial cloud capabilities such as data storage, computing and analytics to the CIA and its 16 sister agencies within the intelligence community.

“Since that time, cloud computing has proven transformational for the IC–increasing the speed at which new applications can be developed to support mission and improving the functionality and security of those applications,” the CIA contracting documents state.

Whereas C2S has been managed by a single company, the CIA expects to “acquire foundational cloud services” from multiple vendors in phase one of C2E, which is good news for companies like IBM, Microsoft, Google and others expected to compete for the contract.

Keep reading article at: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/04/cia-considering-cloud-contract-worth-tens-billions/156222

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: Amazon, CIA, classified data, cloud, cloud computing, cloud service provider, commercial cloud, Commercial Cloud Enterprise, intelligence community

November 8, 2018 By AMK

DoD task force addresses the growing threats to critical technology

Amid an alleged campaign of hacking by the Chinese government, efforts are taking place to prevent the exfiltration of data and protect sensitive information that is stored in the U.S. government and the defense-industrial base.

In a memo dated Oct. 24, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis announced the creation of the Protecting Critical Technology Task Force to safeguard critical American technology.

“Each year, American businesses lose hundreds of billions of dollars while our military superiority is challenged,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan said in a statement. “Together with our partners in industry, we will use every tool at our disposal to end the loss of intellectual property, technology and data critical to our national security.”

The PCTTF will report to Shanahan and Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the joint chief of staff. It includes representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Security Service, according to an industry official briefed on the matter.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/2018/11/02/a-new-dod-task-force-addresses-the-growing-threats-to-critical-technology/

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: CIA, cyberattacks, cybersecurity, cyberthreat, DoD, DSS, hackers, intellectual property, technology

August 23, 2018 By AMK

Someone is waging a secret war to undermine the Pentagon’s huge cloud contract

As some of the biggest U.S. technology companies have lined up to bid on the $10 billion contract to create a massive Pentagon cloud computing network, the behind-the-scenes war to win it has turned ugly.

In the past several months, a private investigative firm has been shopping around to Washington reporters a 100-plus-page dossier raising the specter of corruption on the part of senior Defense Department and private company officials in the cloud contract competition. But at least some of the dossier’s conclusions do not stand up to close scrutiny.

The dossier insinuates that a top aide to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis worked with Mattis and others to steer the contracting process to favor Amazon Web Services, or AWS—and enrich the aide. The aim of the dossier seems clear: to prevent the deal from going solely to AWS, the odds-on favorite in part because it operates the CIA’s classified commercial cloud. Far less clear, however, is who backed its creation and distribution.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/08/someone-waging-secret-war-undermine-pentagons-huge-cloud-contract/150684/

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: CIA, cloud, competition, DoD, IT, JEDI, Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, Pentagon, technology

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