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Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

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Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#101
post #21
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that The Washington Post operates independently, and has strong editorial standards, something that a lot of "news" sites on the Internet today don't even pretend to have. The Post continues to publish articles about surveillance, as well as articles critical of Amazon. For example, here's reporting on an interview with Martin Baron, the paper’s executive editor: Mr. Bezos holds conference calls with The Post’…

That's not how editorial pressure works. Chomsky detailed it quite well, but in a few words: The advertisers react to "wrong" coverage by withdrawing support, the chief editor is very attuned so he assigns the right people to the right jobs before trouble starts, and the journalists so assigned naturally work quite sincerely. No actual orders to publish or withdraw articles need to happen.

Unfalsifiable conspiracies are my favorite kind!

There's got to be a natural law that, for any given situation, one can compose a scheme whereby no proof of anything would actually exist, but evil would still be done.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This: This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now At some point we need to just say it some of the largest tech companies are basically NSA+CIA partners and we're well on our way to having Big Tech completely integrated into NSA and CIA and DoD

The government created Silicon Valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo I have no evidence other than the sheer obviousness of it, but the ties still continue to this day. I have no doubt it is kept hidden from most employees due to the general political leanings of most Valley engineers. For instance, my work does a ton of work for the DoE and you hear them mentioned all the time. The DoD is also a custom…

JEDI has been headline news on CNBC for the last year. DARPA has numerous highly public initiatives and partnerships with SV darlings. Working with the DoD is almost never a secret, it just isn't sexy.

The government didn't create Silicon Valley, Robert Noyce and the rest of the Traitorous 8 did. They did however bankroll semiconductor fabs here and in Texas for a few years but the world is better for it.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#103
Will we see a “Drop Amazon” site (and social media campaign) on the lines of “Drop Dropbox” [1] now? Or is Amazon too big and too entrenched that it’s almost a lost cause? [2]

[1]: https://www.drop-dropbox.com/

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/technology/blocking-the-t...

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#106
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google bought Keyhole (now Google Maps) from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC firm [1] -- this was when Eric Schmidt was CEO. Maps was caught wardriving [2] with Google Streetview, linking Wifi access point names to physical locations early on. After getting caught, they settled for $13 Million last year. Now Google Maps and even location services on all Android devices uses wifi scanning and bluetooth scanning as part of loca…

Regarding [2], the sensationalized, alarmist way the media reported this was not remotely accurate, nor would the conspiracy theory angle on this story make any practical sense.

Sorry, what's not practical about Google increasing their location accuracy for the benefit of both the consumer and the government?

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#107
post #7
post #6

Whoever is running Amazon's PR is either really good and has determined this won't matter, or is really really incompetent. Based on how the PR for HQ2 in NYC went, I'm suspecting the latter.

Will it matter? The sheep (myself included) will still shop on Amazon.

What exactly does Amazon offer today that sites like walmart, ebay, target, etc don't? Maybe amazon 8 years ago was better, but today the gap is nonexistent.

walmart's checkout process and delivery/order history experience is silky, i was totally surprised by it when i started using them a few months ago.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#108

Will we see a “Drop Amazon” site (and social media campaign) on the lines of “Drop Dropbox” [1] now? Or is Amazon too big and too entrenched that it’s almost a lost cause? [2] [1]: https://www.drop-dropbox.com/ [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/technology/blocking-the-t...

Dropbox's founder said he would add end to end encryption as an option for the privacy geeks. Sadly, more than 13 years later, it still has not been implemented. Looks like it never will be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#109
post #8

> For those keeping score, not only does Amazon own the The Washington Post and oversees the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise, it now has on its powerful board of directors the most visible figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans for the better part of a decade. This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now. Man in a position to have reams of compromising intel on the current presiden…

> This sounds tinfoil hat crazy

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/we-all-wear-tinf...

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#110
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that The Washington Post operates independently, and has strong editorial standards, something that a lot of "news" sites on the Internet today don't even pretend to have. The Post continues to publish articles about surveillance, as well as articles critical of Amazon. For example, here's reporting on an interview with Martin Baron, the paper’s executive editor: Mr. Bezos holds conference calls with The Post’…

C'mon man. I have firsthand knowledge of an editor asking a contributor to remove mentioning Amazon in a story because it cast the company in a negative light.

If a random guy online uses an account created a couple of days ago to say he has knowledge of something without providing any proof or substance then everyone should just blindly trust him and take his word for it.

Right?

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