Contract to Study Detecting Nuclear Tests with Smart Phones (2014-2015)

The State Department paid for a study on whether the accelerometers and microphones already inside ordinary smartphones could detect a nuclear test. Distributed sensing on that scale is a serious proposition for arms control verification, since a treaty is easier to monitor when several million phones are incidentally seismometers.

What came back under FOIA is not the study. It is the contract, filed under SAQMMA14M1816, and the released material runs to payment instructions, electronic funds transfer exceptions, and the mailing address of the Charleston Financial Service Center:

For vendors who are granted an EFT exception, the payment address on the invoice must match the remittance address in the vendor record cited in the award.

The request went in during November 2014, while the work was still being done. The answer arrived eleven and a half years later.