The Private Sector on the Front Line: Big Tech and the Risky Blurring of Commercial and Security Interests

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1. [SS from essay by Matt Kaplan, Analyst at Shield Capital; and Michael Brown, Partner at Shield Capital, a Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Security and Technology, and former Director of the Defense Innovation Unit at the U.S. Department of Defense.]

   On February 26, 2022, two days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, sent an urgent plea to Elon Musk to provide Internet access to the country through his Starlink system. The invasion, which Russia had preceded with a campaign of cyberattacks, had seriously disrupted Ukraine’s digital networks. By the very next day, Musk responded that Starlink was active in Ukraine and that the company would soon be sending more ground terminals to the country.

   Starlink, which is a subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX, was not the only Western technology company to come to Ukraine’s aid. By detecting samples of Russian malware before the war began, Microsoft had warned [Ukraine](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/regions/ukraine) about how the impending conflict could affect the country’s information systems. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft then migrated crucial government data to their cloud servers for safekeeping, and after the war began, Google and Microsoft offered continuing cybersecurity services. The European aerospace conglomerate Airbus, the U.S.-based satellite manufacturer ICEYE, and the space technology companies Capella Space, HawkEye 360, and Maxar Technologies have all been providing invaluable battlefield imaging and data. The analytics company Palantir has been aggregating this data to paint a more complete picture of the war on the ground.

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