Reporting Highlights
- Raising the Bar: President Joe Biden asked tech companies to “raise the bar on cybersecurity.” So Microsoft offered the government free upgrades and the consultants to install them.
- Competitive Advantage: While the plan helped the government bolster cybersecurity, it also helped Microsoft tighten its grip on federal business and freeze out its competitors.
- Money for Nothing: Legal and contracting experts say the deals never should have come to pass, as they sidestep or even possibly violate federal procurement and antitrust laws.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
In the summer of 2021, President Joe Biden summoned the CEOs of the nation’s biggest tech companies to the White House.
A series of cyberattacks linked to Russia, China and Iran had left the government reeling, and the administration had asked the heads of Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google and others to offer concrete commitments to help the U.S. bolster its defenses.
“You have the power, the capacity and the responsibility, I believe, to raise the bar on cybersecurity,” Biden told the executives gathered in the East Room.
Microsoft had more to prove than most. Its own security lapses had contributed to some of the incursions that had prompted the summit in the first place, such as the so-called SolarWinds attack, in which Russian state-sponsored hackers stole sensitive data from federal agencies, including the National Nuclear Security Administration. Following the discovery of that breach, some members of Congress said the company should provide better cybersecurity for its customers…
In response to the president’s call for help, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pledged to give the government $150 million in technical services to help upgrade its digital security.
On the surface, it seemed a political win for the Biden administration and an instance of routine damage control from the world’s largest software company.
But Microsoft’s seemingly straightforward commitment belied a more complex, profit-driven agenda, a ProPublica investigation has found…
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