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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

#371

Post by doktrin »

ganoushoreilly wrote: post #16
netsharc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he got hired because AWS likes government and military contracts, and he has personal phone numbers of people who make that sort of decisions. And he doesn't have them through NSA data gathering, but because he can call these people and ask if they'd like to have a steak dinner and talk about why they should choose AWS...

While I agree in principle, it hasn't really worked out well for IronNet. Maybe they stabilized now, but all those relationships didn't really produce the amount of business they thought they would.

Without addressing the specifics of IronNet, the fact that one entity adopting this strategy experienced sub par results is pretty meaningless - mostly since hiring former senior military and government figures is basically standard practice in any organization that handles (or aspires to handle) federal or military contracts. Swap out 'federal or military' for basically any other organization or entity and the practice still holds true.

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

#372

Post by Semaphor »

Semaphor wrote: post #283
syshum wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Germany asked the US to leave? Taking all the US Money with it? Some how I doubt it. Maybe Germany (and the EU as a whole) should start paying for its own defense, and paying their agreed to share of GDP into NATO while they are at it

> Maybe Germany (and the EU as a whole) should start paying for its own defense, and paying their agreed to share of GDP into NATO while they are at it Huh, and here I thought it was 2020 and not 2024. Weird.

For the downvoters:

> Allies whose current proportion of GDP spent on defence is below this level [2% of GDP] will […] aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade.

From the 2014 NATO summit: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

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

#373

Post by uoaei »

ethbr0 wrote: post #333
srean wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not unfalsifiable. A verifiable leak will suffice. Perhaps what you meant is "what has not been falsified yet"

> The advertisers react to "wrong" coverage by withdrawing support Easily attributable to business decisions / climate. > the chief editor is very attuned so he assigns the right people to the right jobs before trouble starts Staff assignment as a smoking gun? That's going to be a stretch. > and the journalists so assigned naturally work quite sincerely Indeed, just people doing their jobs. Who, pray tell, is going t…

I invite you to consider Hannah Arendt's words on institutional pressures driving unethical patterns of behavior. These she referred to as "the rule of Nobody" and also "the banality of evil".

In this frame, "business decisions / climate" are exactly the driving forces which perpetuate such structures and outcomes.

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

#374

Post by doukdouk »

taftster wrote: post #368

I understand the general sentiment here, and don't disagree. But I think ultimately this is about dollars. There is a LOT of money in the government defense sector. AWS is in an excellent position to capture a lot of that money, but their primary competitor in this space, Microsoft, has been preventing a complete domination and monopoly by Amazon. With Alexander on the board, this will ultimately lead to different/be…

> Ultimately, this isn't a step towards more government surveillance.

Architect of (illegal) government surveillance gets influential role in a major Internet company.

I do not expect him to strongly criticize Amazon's privacy violations or questionable data collection. I fully expect him to be supportive of Amazon initiatives that will make for an easier government surveillance (even if only for improving their chances at getting government contracts).

Of course the US government cannot coerce Amazon any more with Alexander on board. Yet having powerful, government surveillance supporting, well versed in building systems of government surveillance, individuals on the board will surely have a very different impact than having a privacy rights activists on the board.

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

#375

Post by boomboomsubban »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #365
boomboomsubban wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of them particularly care about the average citizens interests, so treating the two similarly seems fair.

Who would you rather have logs of all your Internet activity: your own government, or another government thousands of miles away that is increasingly at odds with country's?

This is never an either/or situation, it is neither/both.

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

#376

Post by oarsinsync »

propogandist wrote: post #80
01100011 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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.

The issue was that they captured data from open APs, and that collection of data was deemed illegal wiretapping.

The mapping of WiFi networks to physical locations was not.

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

#377

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

koheripbal wrote: post #341
wlesieutre wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? I mean, there's this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its... > The online retailing giant has long asserted, including to Congress, that when it makes and sells its own products, it doesn’t use information it collects from the site’s ind…

That is an apples to oranges comparison. It is wildly different to scoop up data from your own Amazon.com platform vs BREAKING IN to a private AWS instance. They aren't even the same divisions in Amazon Inc, so it would be extremely obvious to everyone, very inappropriate, and most likely get leaked that it was happening.

Fruit is fruit, both can and do rot :)

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

#378

Post by hollander »

sjs382 wrote: post #76
fennecfoxen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, want to hear something else a little tinfoil hat crazy and also 100% true? - Checking out on Amazon was always encrypted. - Browsing on Amazon was not encrypted until quite recently. Add To Cart wasn't encrypted. - High end network equipment includes support for monitoring your browsing on the guest wifi to send URLs from you browsing Amazon to price-compare or buy. See, for instance, Cisco Analytics for Retail.

> Browsing on Amazon was not encrypted until quite recently. Add To Cart wasn't encrypted. What do you mean by this? HTTPS has always been supported for browsing and adding to cart.

Definitely not in the EU. It changed 5 or 8 years ago, but before that is was not encrypted.

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

#379

Post by derivagral »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #361
deathgrips wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we were like China, Joe Biden would be in jail. It's a different level entirely. Also please use some judgment when seeing America through the lens of our news media. They have every incentive to exaggerate stories so they can get more clicks and sell more ads. The police brutality at the protests is bad, but it's in a different ballpark than the Hong Kong protests. Here protesters don't have a reasonable fear of…

Regarding the reality distortion fields of Phox Noise and friends, what makes you think the news you get from the HK protesters are any different? Furthermore, please explain why the cameras were off when Jeffrey Epstein died? And the autopsy has been... err 'inconclusive'?

I think you could take the FBI's very different approach towards Ghislaine Maxwell as evidence that while the Epstein result was... questionable, there is some amount of vested interest in not just disappearing the related actors. Occam's razor, etc.

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

#380

Post by gigatexal »

ornornor wrote: post #175
ghgr wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I'm constantly surprised how many companies carelessly upload all their internal documents to Google Docs, S3, Dropbox, GitHub, Slack et al. I'd suggest that anything that's not supposed to be public never be uploaded to such services, specially if you are not from the US. The way to go even for small tech companies is self hosting, except maybe for email, due to GMail marking your emails as spam from what I…

My company self hosts everything. They’re so bad at it. Something is always down and we waste so much time with our shorty tooling. We even had this amazing idea that we could implement our own version of GCP from scratch. The result is dismal, we dread using it because it’s very unreliable, and it costs double or triple what GCP costs. We’re not a small company, we have about 1k employees and our business is softwar…

Yeah this is something I have seen. And a lot costs both in people and hardware go into things that aren’t core to your business.
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