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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

#321

Post by soraminazuki »

deathgrips wrote: post #236
paganel wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keith Alexander is a well-known perjurer [1], he should be behind bars, not earning millions sitting on the board of directors of companies worth trillions. There's nothing "not bad" about this move, at least for our society seen as a whole. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/nsa-re...

Why on earth would it be a good idea to reveal highly classified information to the entire planet during a televised hearing?

Why on earth would it be a good idea to classify highly important policy decisions that affects the rights of everyone?

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

#322

Post by koheripbal »

gigatexal wrote: post #119

Here in Germany I used to work for a company that swore off Amazon and other US cloud vendors because of things like this: the relationships between them and the government are too tight. They didn’t want German user data being compromised. It could have been FUD to do things on premises or what not but it seemed to make sense at the time and now with this...

I don't know... I don't think there's a strong business case or CSO case for ditching Amazon for ties to yhe US gov't.

What are the realistic odds that someone internally at Amazon is going to break into your instances to look at your data if you're just a regular business?

If you're in a German cloud, those risks are probably higher since your business has local competition, and if you're self-hosting, then your overall security risks are even higher.

This seems like a emotional choice, not based on realistic business or security sense.

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

#323

Post by tempodox »

eecc wrote: post #227

After all the clamor about Huawei, arguing about effectively surrendering national telecom infrastructures to the PRC Army, here we are. Surrendering essential logistical infrastructure, essential internet infrastructure and the Kindle dataset (useful for political profiling) to the US Intelligence. So, are there sanctions on the table for the US? /s

> Surrendering essential logistical infrastructure, ...

When all that happened, you can bet it wasn't as publicly visible as Alexander joining their board.

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

#324

Post by Hokusai »

INTPenis wrote: post #284
Hokusai wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels like the rampant capitalism in the United States, and lack of regulations, fuels the VC economy. Google, Apple, Amazon, ... are not startups, they are behemoths backed up by the USA government. Europe has many very good startups that are just purchased with USA dollars once they are successful. > we'd have to adopt the lax corporate regulations of the US That would only ruin Europe standards of living and…

>Google, Apple, Amazon, ... are not startups, they are behemoths backed up by the USA government. Europe has many very good startups that are just purchased with USA dollars once they are successful. What I meant was that they were startups at one point. I could have given other examples but there are so many that it's hard to decide. Dropbox, Reddit, imgur just to name a few. This site should know plenty of VC fuele…

> I could never see that system working here because bureaucracy slows everything down and forces corporations to do things like care for employees and pay taxes.

Again, you are getting it the other way around. Taxes to invest in education and Development and Research and high qualified citizens is what allows innovation and good companies.

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

#325

Post by koheripbal »

paganel wrote: post #161
sailfast wrote: post #71

Counterpoint to a number of posts already on here regarding the bad for privacy angle. Maybe not a terrible idea to have a board member with significant experience understanding the threat nation states and other larger private hacking concerns pose to one of the United States’ largest cloud providers? I understand this is all too incestuous, but I also can’t really say it’s a bad move.

Keith Alexander is a well-known perjurer [1], he should be behind bars, not earning millions sitting on the board of directors of companies worth trillions. There's nothing "not bad" about this move, at least for our society seen as a whole. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/nsa-re...

This is not pergury. He's obviously not able to reveal classified information in a public hearing.

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

#326

Post by gigatexal »

koheripbal wrote: post #322
gigatexal wrote: post #119

Here in Germany I used to work for a company that swore off Amazon and other US cloud vendors because of things like this: the relationships between them and the government are too tight. They didn’t want German user data being compromised. It could have been FUD to do things on premises or what not but it seemed to make sense at the time and now with this...

I don't know... I don't think there's a strong business case or CSO case for ditching Amazon for ties to yhe US gov't. What are the realistic odds that someone internally at Amazon is going to break into your instances to look at your data if you're just a regular business? If you're in a German cloud, those risks are probably higher since your business has local competition, and if you're self-hosting, then your ove…

Personally I have 100% confidence that the big clouds are not going to compromise customer data for their own benefit.

Perhaps Amazon did this on an abstract level to understand video streaming and the Netflix business to create Amazon Video but I doubt Amazon would have cared for the tiny startup I worked at here in Hamburg.

But the hysteria and the “but what if?” thinking is real and it was really codified in bank contracts. So much so that BaFin stipulated that the tech stacks could be audited and there was no way that Amazon was going to allow anyone in to look at it and such.

On the whole if it can be afforded my team is so much more productive being able to build on AWS than to spend all that time both building our product and the infrastructure to go with it. I’m just not that smart.

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

#327

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #188
modo_mario wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over ehre in Small Belgium it doesn't feel like it. In bed with big internationals for other reasons some of which local like de beers sure tho but that just smells more of corruption than anything protectionist or intelligence based

Because EU countries don't have mammoth sized, trillion dollar SW companies with a global monopoly. If your country's software industry is comprised mostly of 10-200 person web shops and consultancies there's no real gain for the Goverment agencies to be in bed with them.

Err... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP

Billion, trillion, shmillion, lose some, win some, it's all virtual. Not backed by anything real. I mean, you can see the house of cards falling down because of a sneeze right now :-)

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

#328

Post by fit2rule »

koheripbal wrote: post #322
gigatexal wrote: post #119

Here in Germany I used to work for a company that swore off Amazon and other US cloud vendors because of things like this: the relationships between them and the government are too tight. They didn’t want German user data being compromised. It could have been FUD to do things on premises or what not but it seemed to make sense at the time and now with this...

I don't know... I don't think there's a strong business case or CSO case for ditching Amazon for ties to yhe US gov't. What are the realistic odds that someone internally at Amazon is going to break into your instances to look at your data if you're just a regular business? If you're in a German cloud, those risks are probably higher since your business has local competition, and if you're self-hosting, then your ove…

Oh, come on. This kind of naïveté is contagious.

I'm pretty sure you can think of stronger business cases against Amazon/US-Milspec involvement in a non-American business.

Amazon, in the hands of Americas spooks, can do a lot of damage to the world of non-Americans; i.e. anyone the spooks decide to hate/target for usurpation. You think Germany is inured from such attention?

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

#330

Post by [deleted] »

gigatexal wrote: post #326
koheripbal wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know... I don't think there's a strong business case or CSO case for ditching Amazon for ties to yhe US gov't. What are the realistic odds that someone internally at Amazon is going to break into your instances to look at your data if you're just a regular business? If you're in a German cloud, those risks are probably higher since your business has local competition, and if you're self-hosting, then your ove…

Personally I have 100% confidence that the big clouds are not going to compromise customer data for their own benefit. Perhaps Amazon did this on an abstract level to understand video streaming and the Netflix business to create Amazon Video but I doubt Amazon would have cared for the tiny startup I worked at here in Hamburg. But the hysteria and the “but what if?” thinking is real and it was really codified in bank…

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