It might look like something from the early days of the internet, with its aggressively grey color scheme and rectangles nested inside rectangles, but FPDS.gov is one of the most important resources for keeping tabs on what powerful spying tools U.S. government agencies are buying. It includes everything from phone hacking technology, to masses of location data, to more Palantir installations.
Or rather, it was an incredible tool and the basis for countless of my own investigations and others. Because on Wednesday, the government shut it down. Its replacement, another site called SAM.gov with Uncle Sam branding, frankly sucks, and makes it demonstrably harder to reliably find out what agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are spending tax payers dollars on.
“FPDS may have been a little clunky, but its simple, old-school interface made it extremely functional and robust. Every facet of government operations touches on contracting at one point, and this was the first tool that many investigative journalists and researchers would reach for to quickly find out what the government is buying and who is selling it, and how these contracts all fit together,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me.
I’ve used FPDS to reveal ICE paid Palantir tens of millions of dollars for work on “complete target analysis of known populations” (which then led to a leak from inside Palantir describing the company’s new work for ICE); figure out Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spent millions of dollars on software that uses AI to detect “sentiment and emotion” in online posts; and identify the multiple agencies that bought access to a massive, and warrantless, database of peoples’ travel histories.
FPDS was very basic, in a very good way. You could type in something like “Clearview AI” for example, and it would show all the government contracts that mentioned the facial recognition company. That included both contracts with Clearview AI, but also ones with larger government contractors that were reselling the technology and included “Clearview AI” in the item description. Often when digging through government purchasing data you’ll find some surveillance technology is not sold to agencies by the company directly, but by firms that have ongoing relationships with the government.
Then when FPDS displayed the results, it was incredibly easy to get the information you wanted at a glance. Each result was a single rectangle which showed the company that the contract was with, the agency buying the product, and, importantly for me, the broad category of product. This often included things like computer-related services, letting me very quickly figure out whether, as a technology journalist, that is something I should look into. FPDS also displayed new contracts before they appeared in SAM.gov.
The General Services Administration ran FPDS. The idea was to bring FPDS into SAM.gov, so there aren’t a bunch of different sites but a single platform for contractors or the public to explore.
I do use SAM.gov a lot too. But for a singular purpose: to find what agencies might buy in the future. On that site, agencies often post Requests for Information in which they signal the sort of spy tech they are interested in. It’s not a contract or sale, but an indication of what they want to get their hands on.
The thing is, SAM.gov is awful for finding what agencies have actually bought. Searches that would return clear results in FPDS are not available immediately in SAM.gov. You may have to tweak some obscure setting to get them to display. You might need to be logged in for some results (FPDS didn’t require this); for other results, it seems better to actually not be logged in. The results do not immediately show the category of the purchase, such as whether it was technology related or not. You have to filter the results by a specific agency if you don’t want just a bunch of noise, but the filters appear finicky and sometimes don’t work. And all of that is only if the data you’re searching for is surfaceable at all through SAM.gov.
As one site that connects agencies and contractors wrote recently, FPDS “has long been the master repository of federal contract activity, containing millions of contract actions that NEVER hit SAM.gov.” Now, maybe they will, but that doesn’t solve SAM’s search issues.
Also, whenever someone pastes a SAM.gov link into 404 Media’s Slack channel, co-founder and journalist Sam Cole gets a notification. “I get excited… someone wants to talk to me. Then it’s SAM.gov 😞,” she told me on Thursday.
The work of journalists and researchers certainly won’t be impossible with SAM.gov. But it is absolutely a less transparent system than the perfectly good one we had until this week.
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