Outlook
May 19 EDTech meeting - Item 6 Carahsoft Technology contract From humaira afzal
Date Tue 5/19/2026 1:03 PM
To Gao, Beilei <[email protected]>,· h4ampton, Tyron <[email protected]>; Madison, Steve <[email protected]>; Lyon, Jason <[email protected]>,· Rivas, Jessica <[email protected]>
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Dear Members of the Economic Development and Technology Committee, I very much appreciate that, due to concerns about Department of Homeland Security contracts, Council Members pulled the Carahsoft Technology contract for cybersecurity monitoring and technology from the consent agenda (on 4 May 2026) and sent it to the EDTech Committee for further consideration. Doing so demonstrated that Council intends for the recent resolution on protecting immigrants in our community to be not just words, but also the start of a meaningful shift towards prioritizing vendors who do not have business relationships with the DHS. The City already has other solid choices for vendors without DHS ties. I urge you to not pursue the Carahsoft Technology and to consider one of the other "DHS-free" highly ranked vendors instead.
Carahsoft profits from selling, implementing and providing technical support for software that is used to cause harm to people. That includes selling Al powered surveillance technology from Cellebrite (used to hack, unlock and access data from phones - all without a warrant) and Zignal (Al powered monitoring and "threat" analysis of billions of social media posts daily) to the Department of Homeland Security. The federal government has made it very clear that they that software will be used to track down immigrants. The same surveillance technology will also increasingly be used not just against immigrants, but also women seeking health care, protestors, Muslims, journalists, or people protecting their communities, etc., but also against anyone that that the current administration deems a "threat". We are rapidly approaching the point where anyone who publicly posts or says anything negative about the president or his policies is a "threat".
I was disappointed that the May 19 staff report simply doubles down on purchasing from Carahsoft Technologyu rather than addressing the option of purchasing from one of the other high-ranking vendors. Bulletproof Solutions (with a score of 83.01), for example, scored just
0.48 points lower than Carahsoft (83.49) in the staff's rankings of the 14 proposals and does not appear to be selling surveillance technology (or anything else) to DhlS.
Staff has not presented a compelling reason why the City should sign a contract Carahsoft - a company which profits from selling surveillance technology to DHS - as its cybersecurity protection vendor rather than one of the other companies that have a comparable score and are not profiting by selling the tools of oppression to DHS. The fact that Carahsoft does not create the technology is irrelevant. I urge you to ask DolT staff to return with a different proposal.
Switching to a different vendor would not require starting the entire process over again or significantly delay the implementation of more extensive cybersecurity measures. Moreover, DolT staff could have kept the process moving by including consideration of one or two of the other vendor proposals in the report rather than continuing to promote just Carahsoft despite the concerns raised by council on 4 May.
I also encourage you to provide more guidance to Staff (in all departments, not just DolT) regarding the contractor disclosure requirement and the importance of the City striving to work with companies that do not profit from business relationships that are antithetical to the City's values. Developing more structured guidance will inevitably involve importnat discussions of criteria and scoring and the more mundane, yet important, details of the process of reviewing vendor proposals.
Humaira - District 7
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