U.S. Army awards $308M for digital investigation software

The Pentagon is spending up to $307.7 million on software that lets its analysts browse the darkest corners of the internet without leaving a trace, after the U.S. Army awarded California-based Authentic8 a department-wide deal for its Silo platform on Oct. 20.

Silo is designed for the kind of online detective work that military intelligence now depends on, from monitoring Telegram channels and extremist forums to tracking weapons sales on dark web marketplaces, while hiding the fact that the person on the other end works for the U.S. government.

The problem Silo tries to solve is simple: every time an analyst opens a website from an official network, that site can log the visit, fingerprint the browser and, in the worst case, push malicious code onto a military computer. Silo moves the whole browsing session onto Authentic8’s own cloud servers, so nothing from the website ever reaches the user’s machine, and it lets investigators choose where they appear to be connecting from, so a visit from an Army analyst in Virginia can look like an ordinary user in another country.

That capability has become more valuable as open-source intelligence has grown into a core part of modern warfare, with Russia’s war against Ukraine showing how much can be learned from soldiers’ social media posts, geolocated videos and commercial satellite images. Analysts who dig through that material regularly visit sites run by hostile governments, militant groups and criminal networks, where a careless click from a government address can tip off the target or expose the analyst’s own network to hackers.

The Army ran the purchase as a sole-source deal and received a single bid, after telling industry in August that its requirement was specific to Authentic8’s product and that it planned to buy directly from the company unless another firm could show it offered the same capability. The award gives commands across the Department of War one place to order Silo licenses, add-on tools and support, with the amount and location of the work decided order by order rather than fixed up front.

Authentic8 is already a familiar name in federal law enforcement and financial investigations, with the Department of the Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Secret Service among the agencies that have bought Silo for secure browsing and dark web research. The new contract expands an initial award made in September into a much larger vehicle that the whole department can use, which puts the Redwood City company’s tools on track to become a standard part of the military’s online investigation kit.