# Jack Poulson Mathematician-turned-journalist and one of the most rigorous accountability researchers working on the Silicon Valley–Pentagon pipeline. Where most defense tech coverage runs on access and press releases, Poulson works from procurement databases, court filings, leaked documents, and shoe-leather event reporting — building the public evidentiary record this knowledge base draws on. ## From Stanford to Google to Resignation Poulson earned a PhD in computational and applied mathematics (UT Austin, 2012), then held assistant professorships at Georgia Tech and **Stanford** before joining Google as a senior research scientist working on machine intelligence. In **August 2018** he resigned over **Project Dragonfly** — Google's secret prototype of a censored, surveillance-friendly search engine for China — becoming one of the highest-profile conscience resignations of the era, months after the [[Google Project Maven Walkout]]. His resignation letter and subsequent Senate testimony helped force Dragonfly into the open; Google later confirmed the project was terminated. ## Tech Inquiry In 2019 Poulson founded **Tech Inquiry**, a nonprofit that mines government procurement records to map the interface between tech companies, weapons manufacturers, and the U.S. government. Signature findings include documenting **250+ Google military subcontracts** after the company's post-Maven "AI Principles" era — demonstrating that Google's public retreat from defense work was largely cosmetic (see [[Google Defense Timeline]]). Tech Inquiry's interactive contracting-relationship search tools let civilians trace who sells what to which agency — open-source infrastructure for the kind of analysis this vault does manually. ## All-Source Intelligence Poulson's Substack newsletter, **All-Source Intelligence**, covers technology and national security with a focus on surveillance contractors and the influence industry. Notable work includes collaborations with journalist Lee Fang, including reporting on Moderna's monitoring of vaccine critics, and sustained coverage of covert surveillance and data-broker firms with military and intelligence contracts. ## Blackman v. Poulson: The Censorship Campaign Poulson's most consequential story may be the one about trying to silence him: - **2023** — Acting on a confidential source's police report, Poulson reported that **Maury Blackman**, CEO of covert surveillance contractor **Premise Data** (a firm with U.S. military contracts), had been arrested in 2021 on suspicion of felony domestic violence. Blackman resigned as CEO after publication. - **The lawsuit** — Blackman sued Poulson, Tech Inquiry, Substack, and Amazon Web Services for **$25 million**, demanding the articles come down because the arrest record had been sealed. Premise's lawyers filed discovery requests attempting to unmask Poulson's source. Freedom of the Press Foundation documented a parallel reputation-management campaign that exploited Google Search takedown mechanisms to scrub coverage. - **February 5, 2025** — San Francisco Superior Court granted the defendants' **anti-SLAPP motion**, throwing out the suit: Poulson's [[First Amendment]] defense defeated every claim. EFF helped represent him. - **January 2026** — Blackman appealed; EFF filed at the California Court of Appeal arguing the First Amendment protects journalists who publish truthful information about sealed arrests. The appeal was pending as of this writing. The case is a landmark test of whether surveillance executives can use record-sealing laws to retroactively criminalize journalism about themselves — a press-freedom story embedded inside a defense-tech story. ## RWKB Significance Poulson occupies the same structural position as the resistance figures in this vault: the insider who left and turned his expertise against the machine. He is the counter-archive to the [[Defense Tech Ecosystem]] — proof that the procurement state leaves a paper trail, and that one person reading it carefully can impose real costs (Dragonfly's termination, Blackman's resignation). Compare Meredith Whittaker's path from Maven organizer to Signal president. ## See Also - [[Google Defense Timeline]] — His findings anchor the post-Maven sections - [[Google Project Maven Walkout]] — The adjacent revolt; Poulson's resignation followed months later - [[Project Maven]] - [[Defense Tech Ecosystem]] — The world he documents - [[Google]]