Pentagon Wants Cloud Secure Enough to Hold Nuke Secrets
Pentagon Wants Cloud Secure Enough to Hold Nuke Secrets
By Frank Konkel MAY 14, 2018
The Pentagon’s JEDI cloud will be designed to store the
government’s most sensitive classified information, including nuclear secrets.
The Defense Department’s Joint Enterprise Defense
Infrastructure cloud will be designed to host the government’s most sensitive
classified data, including critical nuclear weapon design information and other
nuclear secrets.
The Pentagon is expected to bid out the controversial
JEDI cloud contract this week, and new contracting documents indicate the
winning company must be able to obtain the full range of top secret government
security clearances, including Department of Energy “Q” and “L” clearances
necessary to view restricted nuclear data.
In response to questions from Nextgov, Defense Department
spokeswoman Heather Babb confirmed “JEDI cloud services will be offered at all
classification levels.” Babb said military and defense customers “will
determine which applications and data migrate to the cloud.”
Amazon Web Services, considered a front-runner to win the
JEDI contract, is already able to host some Defense Department classified data
in a $600 million cloud it developed several years ago for the CIA.
JEDI, however, represents a massive jump in size and
scale. The contract could be worth as much as $10 billion over 10 years, with
Defense officials describing it as a “global fabric” available to warfighters
in almost any environment, from F-35s to war zones. Because government
customers could use the cloud for almost anything, it must be built to host
almost everything, Steven Aftergood, head of the Federation of American
Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, told Nextgov.
“It sounds to me like the government is covering all
their bases,” Aftergood said. “Everything we’ve got might be part of this
system, therefore you need to be potentially cleared for everything. And
‘everything’ includes information on weapons systems, operations, intelligence
and nuclear weapons.”
Aftergood said the Defense Department’s requirement for
individual “Q” clearances for personnel at the contractor that wins JEDI
suggests the cloud may be able to “host information pertaining to nuclear
weapons or classified information pertaining to the deployment and utilization
of nuclear weapons.”
Q clearances originated in the Atomic Energy Act of 1946.
They are typically granted to contractors or scientists involved in the
management or maintenance of the nuclear weapons complex and national
laboratories. Q clearances would be a rarity among employees at the tech
companies bidding on JEDI, though Aftergood said investigative requirements can
be shortened through “reciprocity” arrangements if contracted personnel have
attained similar clearances. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and General
Dynamics have indicated interest in JEDI.
The Pentagon has said it plans to award the JEDI contract
in September and to begin migrating Pentagon systems early next year.
Bloomberg, however, has reported that several companies have vowed to protest
the contract and potentially take the Pentagon to court over its decision to
award JEDI to a single cloud provider.
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