Microsoft urged not to bid for US military project

San Francisco: Following Google’s exit from a controversial US military Cloud project, an open letter claiming to be from an unspecified number of Microsoft employees has urged the tech giant to also back out of the military project. Potentially worth up to $10 billion, “Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI)” is a Cloud computing contract aimed to bring the entire military under the envelope of a single Cloud provider.

“The contract is massive in scope and shrouded in secrecy, which makes it nearly impossible to know what we as workers would be building,” an open letter titled “Microsoft, don’t bid on JEDI” said on the Medium portal written by “Employees of Microsoft”. “Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war. “When we decided to work at Microsoft, we were doing so in the hopes of ‘empowering every person on the planet to achieve more,’ not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality,” the open letter further read. (IANS)