> 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 president hired by a man in an ongoing battle with the president.
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 customer and you never hear their name.
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 location triangulation. This is a constantly updating map of every SSID in existance, including unique radio devices in a given location.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, now heads up the DoD's advisory board on new technology [3]
Allegedly, Schmidt also games politics, albeit unsuccessfully, he spent millions on The Groundwork trying to prop up Hillary's 2016 campaign only charging them ~$700k (at one point they had 70 SWE/SRE on staff with most focusing on her campaign's needs for an entire year, they were only a couple blocks away in NYC from Hillary HQ). The company he invested in, Timshel, folded the same year as Hillary lost the election. I'd bet anyone money he wrote off his illegal in-kind contributions as 1099 losses. Check out his emails with Robby Mook.
More history about Google's mapping products is available in Bill Kilday's book "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality". Kilday was a founder at Keyhole, the startup acquired by Google to become Google Earth.
Remember the Google I/O when the presentation included a mom waiting in a queue inside a park ride and maps calculated that it's enough time to have another ride and then go somewhere else?
This was the moment I got afraid of every single Android device that's already on the market, sniffing around for everything they can find.
If private people do this, they get jailed. If google does it, nobody gives a damn about it.
There is no privacy, as everybody around you is compromising it without themselves knowing.
> 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.
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.
Google’s official statement admitted to collecting payload data from unsecured WiFi networks but said it was a mistake from including a library with extraneous code. [1]
The statement also linked to a third-party analysis of the relevant code which concluded: [2]
“Gslite is an executable program that captures, parses, and writes to disk 802.11 wireless frame data. In particular, it parses all frame header data and associates it with its GPS coordinates for easy storage and use in mapping network locations. The program does not analyze or parse the body of Data frames, which contain user content. The data in the Data frame body passes through memory and is written to disk in unparsed format if the frame is sent over an unencrypted wireless network, and is discarded if the frame is sent over an encrypted network.”
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.
I have evidence: I used to date a couple of CEO secretaries, and they always told me when the spooks came to town. Often. And a lot of companies where you think to yourself "gee, that's pretty weird, why would they be interested there."
well why wouldn't they? Every government would love to have silicon valley. The question is why the rest of the world blindly trusts the narrative about data security
All these 3-letter acronyms exists to further American interests - for a long time that was primarily the military/industrial complex followed by oil/gas. We're now just seeing the focus switch to supporting big tech as a priority.
It's still distressing to see those intelligence agencies further entrench themselves into fields perfectly suited for a surveillance state. Their reputation makes trusting that they won't abuse it difficult.
It may suit national interest, but it bodes poorly for the public interest.
They help the companies, who help the Government in return. And the whole conspiracy is carried on via the revolving doors of influence and networks of who knows who.
Where the public suffers is that it's their tax money that funds this rather than going towards education, health, essential services, better wages, social and economic mobility - the list goes on.
>They help the companies, who help the Government in return. And the whole conspiracy is carried on via the revolving doors of influence and networks of who knows who.
Except now one of the ways the companies can help the government is with readymade worldwide surveillance. That is much scarier than anything Dole could offer.
>All these 3-letter acronyms exists to further American interests
That's a strangely Aristotelian view of organizations. It is as if you are suggesting that the 3-letter agencies have a fundamental essence outside of the intentions of the people who work there.
I think their point was that these organizations are supposed to be filled with public servants, civil servants, and military/former military whose aims are the furthering of American interests. That's why they were started, and for at least some period of time (not necessarily through recent history, but maybe?) that's what they were. Honestly that's part of the argument for public servants making less money than their private sector counter-parts, that a big part of their "compensation" is being part of these huge organizations "saving America" or whatever patriotic spin you want to put on it.
Compartmentalization allows for that. You operate with orders to accomplish X, and it is more than possible to hide why you are accomplishing X.
Typically it goes like this: lobbyist meets with policy maker, policy maker decides objectives for [a-z]{3}, [a-z]{3} undertakes missions in support of lobbyist's objectives.
Tech is in bed with the government everywhere on the planet, and has been for a long time. The question has never been about fairness, it is: who has your interests in mind?
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?
I could argue that I'm much more worried about the set of events my own government can set in action against me if they so choose.
The other government has less power over me because they are thousands of miles away and don't control the institutions that I need to function as a citizen.
That being said, the foreign government might be less afraid of using my information against me, since they would be less afraid of blowback.
It is increasingly "both, and do nothing about it" or "both, and be vocally opposed to it, and potentially cause issues for yourself x years from now."
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.
If you follow that thought through to other industries, what do you think Denmark learns of US military movement and equipment from the armies biggest heavy lifter, Danish Maersk shipping? It can't be much since outside the software world companies don't sift through every single piece of "cargo" and goes to show why you shouldn't trust foreign software companies at all, allies or not.
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 :-)
Weird Ron Paul fiat currently pseudo-rant notwithstanding, SAP is a good example but an outlier. Pick a random multinational [b|tr]illion-dollar software company and it's going to be American most of the time, and from San Francisco most of the time that it's American.
The government has used Big Tech forever. Oracle, Microsoft, Apple products have been used by NSA+CIA for about as long as those companies have had products. Yes, those companies sell to the government. They want to make money and the government has money.
There is a difference between selling your product to government and working with government.
I am pretty sure USA government buy's plenty of stuff from Chinese companies like everbody else does. Doesn't mean Chinese companies are working with it.
Even if they weren't explicit partners it seems highly likely that intelligence agencies would get covert access to the resources of the main web companies - they are just too tempting a target not to.
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’s leadership every other week to discuss the paper’s business strategy but has no involvement in its news coverage, Mr. Baron said. During his occasional appearances at The Post’s building, Mr. Bezos sometimes stops by a news meeting “just to thank everybody,” Mr. Baron said.
“I can’t say more emphatically he’s never suggested a story to anybody here, he’s never critiqued a story, he’s never suppressed a story,” the editor said.
“Frankly, in a newsroom of 800 journalists, if that had occurred, I guarantee you, you would have heard about it,” he added. “Newsrooms tend not to like those kinds of interventions, particularly a newsroom that’s as proud as The Washington Post.
“If he had been involved in our news coverage, you can be sure that you would have heard about it by now,” Mr. Baron added. “It hasn’t happened. Period.”
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.
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.
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.
Business decisions and climate are also the driving forces behind literally everything a company does.
The banality of evil doesn't forgive laziness in the construction of hypotheses, unless you're Fox News.
To spell it out, what leak / disclosure would constitute proof of GP's belief? A memo from the WaPo editorial staff which says "Pursuant to Mr. Bezo's comments on X, please assign Y to story Z, so that reporting will be more favorable"?
And barring a plausible method of provability / falsifiability, we're in "just asking the question" rumor territory with regards to the original assertions of malice. Which, personally, seems below the level of discourse I expect from HN.
>Business decisions and climate are also the driving forces behind literally everything a company does.
This is the extent of the "conspiracy" in Chomsky's opinion. When things like the Amazon firing of a union organizer happen, the reporter set to cover it is going to have more connections to the corporate side and a be accustomed to writing stories that will please corporate sponsors.
If a reporter is overly critical, the story will likely get a less favorable placement and that reporter won't get similar assignments in the future. There is no overt conspiracy, but there is editorial pressure.
They eliminated their Ombudsman position in 2013. Not to pick on them, as most publications, NYT included have as well. I'll read occasionally, but definitely don't trust any of these any more without checking sources.
Just being the owner taints their coverage even with no direct influence (again, we can't just pick on Wapo here either). "So Joe, want to spend our time on researching this piece critical of Amazon or one the other hundred stories?"
> 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.
Right, your news company is the only one that doesn't smell. Maybe you should adopt the motto "fair and balanced" to reflect how editorially independent and objective you are.
> Martin Baron, the paper’s executive editor:
The newspaper's editor says that he is objective? Zuckerburg also says facebook is all about user privacy. So it must be true.
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.
Well... You may have firsthand knowledge or claim to have firsthand knowledge, but the rest of us don't.
When you saw that happening, did you just let it slide? Where did it happen? Was the story originally about Amazon or was it just an off-topic side remark that didn't really fit in?
Not everyone is willing to martyr themselves for a cause. Just because no such information has leaked yet does not mean it has not happened or that there will not be such leaks in the future.
Why should I stop sawing this branch I am sitting on, I havent fallen yet ?
> Why should I stop sawing this branch I am sitting on, I havent fallen yet ?
Your argument is that we can't prove the absence of a conspiracy.
Hence, a better analogy would be
"why should i stop sawing this branch? just because gravity has never left me suspended in thin air doesn't mean it can't or won't happen in the future"
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.
I think this varied by country. I was working on some HTTPS advocacy targeted at web sites before it was so ubiquitous, and I remember Amazon in the U.S. not allowing you to browse items with HTTPS probably sometime around 2010 (I think they would send a redirect back to the HTTP site).
>figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans
I like the way you included just 'Americans', may be because it's just the domestic spying which is against U.S. law, may be because you thought 'spied on Americans' hits harder for an American reader than just 'spied on everyone'.
But, for someone outside USA or China; there's absolutely no difference between U.S. tech or Chinese Tech w.r.t Privacy, what U.S. does privately, China does openly and that's not limited to just spying.
America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media. I'd take American hegemony over Chinese hegemony any day of the week.
This bullshit game of "which is worse" between the US and China, with both countries constantly moving the goalposts, is just tiring. Yes, China is currently worse. But with children locked up in cages and a massive prison-slavery industry, not to mention crazy NSA spying and so on, you're kidding yourself if you say the US is that far behind.
You can say, as a US citizen, that all this stuff doesn't affect you much. But I can tell you, from considerable first hand experience, that the average Chinese citizen says the same about China.
The difference is that here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it. One of the presidential candidates wants to tear down all the stuff you pointed out.
I can say that the surveillance doesn't affect me because it's almost unheard of for Americans to get arrested with evidence that the NSA collected. The NSA is not a law enforcement agency. In China arresting people based on data from surveillance is the norm.
> The difference is that here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it.
Edit: I am mostly addressing the organize against it part. USA has far better free speech protections than China
Do you ? As an outsider it doesn't really look that way.
After watching events and protest around BLM, suddenly all those rights have gotchas in them.
Watching USA protesters and Honkong protesters, and goverment respones to them, there were far more similarities than differences. (Well china was still worse, but not by as much as most USA people seem to think).
The biggest difference in USA and china at the moments is that in USA some Politicians still listen to people (if only mostly out of self interest)
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 getting sent to mainland China to be imprisoned for decades, gang raped by cops in jail, and murdered while cops fake your suicide.
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.
I see hundreds if not thousands people protesting and those of them who do not engage in acts of violence and property destruction have no problems. In fact, a lot of those who do engage in acts of violence and property destruction have no problems either - even if those are arrested, which happens very rarely, they are frequently released on the spot, and the charges are dropped. Only a handful of hardcore repeated offenders are even detained and charged. And with conviction and prosecution it remains to be seen if it ever happens even for most prominent and well-documented cases.
But the FBI has been trained to hide the source of information, probably because it is illegal in many cases (maybe comes from NSA)... they call it parallel construction but it probably should be called something much worst.
Under Biden's vice presidency, the NSA's collection of Americans' data reduced. Email metadata collection stopped in 2010 before the Snowden leaks, and phone metadata collection reduced after.
He seems consistent on this issue. Prior to his stint as VP, he complained about metadata collection by the GWB administration. https://youtu.be/h2qgU8kJt-0
Of course he complained about data collection by the administration his political enemies are running. The question is what happened when he was running it. So far you said "reduced" - reduced how? PRISM still exists, doesn't it? And there are many more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government_mass_survei...
So the question is not whether Joe Biden ever grandstanded on the topic - I'm sure he did, as every politician would. The question is what he had done about it when he was Senator and VP - specific actions attributable to him? Because if he has been consistent to paying lip service to the issue while not doing anything in practice - it is prudent to expect the same consistency to extend into the future.
Which email metadata program specifically, how you know Biden personally had anything to do with shutting it down and how do you know there's no other programs such as Room 641A, MUSCULAR, etc. that can do the same? Same for phone metadata - what Biden had to do with it and how do we know it actually was reduced and not just changed codename?
You haven't told me anything in fact except that some things supposedly happened while Biden was a VP.
> you're kidding yourself if you say the US is that far behind.
Living in Europe I have the pleasure of hearing these kinds of naive comparisons on a regular basis. Somehow it's always "the US is basically China and/or Saudi Arabia".
It's exhausting having to explain to people who are seemingly only capable of operating with a binary black and white worldview that there is a massive difference between certain shades of grey.
>America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media
Can you say for sure, that the phone will not be seized, imaged and/or bugged at the airport/border?
Anyways you are talking about differences in what they do with the data or the person to whom that data belongs and not contending the fact that tech companies from both the countries spy internationally.
In America you can buy privacy if you really want it. Buy a laptop here, install linux on it, and use a VPN. The NSA can't stop you if you really want privacy. This is illegal in China, where every VPN must be state sponsored and monitored.
See, that's what I'm trying to tell, What about 'Not in America'?
Before I proceed further, I want to categorically state that I don't intend to come off as supporting privacy violations by one country vs another; My argument over this entire thread has been that it sucks for someone not in any of these countries as they all spy on us and it's taken for granted in this kind of discussions.
That said,
>use a VPN. The NSA can't stop you if you really want privacy.
Because they have 'No logs' policy? Come on, don't be naive. Even the trillion dollar fruit company has been part of the program according to documents which hasn't been disputed.
>This is illegal in China, where every VPN must be state sponsored and monitored.
So you do agree that the Amercian VPN companies or any American company have double standards when it comes to China? Btw, almost every outsider in China installs a VPN to access content outside Great Firewall once they arrive, several U.S. services work without a VPN e.g. iMessage, Skype etc. I have heard of targeted deportation/arrests at airport, but never heard of random phone seizures at Airports.
Same advice, buy a VPN if you want the services that it provides.
>Because they have 'No logs' policy? Come on, don't be naive.
Contract with a VPN that is audited and resides in a legally favorable country. I hesitate to endorse any particular company, but they're out there. Maybe privacy just isn't convenient enough for you.
>So you do agree that the Amercian VPN companies or any American company have double standards when it comes to China?
What are you talking about?
>very outsider in China installs a VPN to access content outside Great Firewall once they arrive
You are allowed to do this at their law enforcement's mercy.
> several U.S. services work without a VPN
Surveillance wouldn't work very well if it made people quit using the services and network.
> I have heard of targeted deportation/arrests at airport, but never heard of random phone seizures at Airports.
I wonder why they don't feel the need to seize phones at airports. As an aside, I recall reading that the PRC forces Uighurs to install spying apps directly to their phones. That is, all the Uighurs who aren't in "Vocational Educational Camps" and have yet to flee to America, where the supposedly oppressive American surveillance state is a breath of fresh air.
Oh, I see. Yes. In America you are free to use whatever VPN you pay for, regardless of what country it's hosted in. The NSA won't prohibit it and cannot break it if it's using the right algorithms. If they wanted to intentionally examine your network traffic, that would require a court order. If they wanted to get past your VPN encryption, that would require targeted hacking of a US citizen, which is typically handled by regular law enforcement. The NSA doesn't primarily concern itself with US citizens because investigating them is, in short, a huge pain in the ass. If you have any evidence to the contrary I'd gladly read it.
No court order was necessary because AT&T consented to the NSA presence. Just like how your employer can hand over your corporate laptop to the police without needing a warrant. If you don't like it, consider dealing with another business and encrypting your traffic with a full tunnel VPN.
Yes. Secret courts are reasonable due process. Do you have an alternative method that wouldn't release damaging information?
Are you interested in talking about surveillance specifically or every talking point of the usual anti-American tirades?
> Do you have an alternative method that wouldn't release damaging information?
Yes, independent review by a board or committee separate from the defense intelligence complex who will help determine if the information is actually damaging or if it's just some bullshit a midlevel staffer at the Pentagon determined is 'damaging.'
As an American, I am deeply disturbed by the complete absence of transparency of these programs to Congress and the American people. And honestly I'm not convinced that the people running these programs have any ability to see the forest for the trees, or if they're not just some D.C. automaton skilled enough at groupthink and not asking questions to get the tippity-top security clearance.
Is it a drooling idiot running the program? Dunno. Classified.
Their spying on Americans is reviewed by judges and courts. They get warrants for every american they spy on.
The senate intelligence committee may (behind closed doors and under the oath of secrecy) inquire about just about anything the intelligence community does.
The president may at his or her sole discretion declassify any information.
Haven't you heard, the first rule of conflict is "all warfare is deception"? Try running a state with zero secrets and see how far you get.
Unfortunately, they only get warrants when civilians are looking over their shoulder. Snowden cleared that one up.
Those judges, and the members of the senate intelligence committee are most definitely not an independent committee. That's like calling the police commission an independent committee. Even if they were, how would we even know if they're not just rubberstamping stuff?
Congress is in the dark. Remember Niger?
"We don't know exactly where we're at in the world, militarily, and what we're doing. So John McCain is going to try to create a new system to make sure that we can answer the question (about) why we were there," he said. "We'll know how many soldiers are there, and if somebody gets killed there, that we won't find out about it in the paper."
When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was asked later on "Meet the Press" about knowing whether there were troops in Niger, he responded, "No, I did not."
If they don't even know where we have troops doing mildly classified stuff, how much do you think they know about black programs that are totally off the books?
The president has thus far decided things like, 'huh, the Coronavirus is a lot worse than everyone thinks...in February...better not tell anyone about it and we should do absolutely nothing to prepare' classified. Great guy to have in charge of that.
Think about the people we're actually fighting wars against? Do you think elaborate deception has made a sliver of difference in any conflict fought by the United States in the past 60 years?
We need transparency and civilian oversight. I'm not afraid of an Afghan Taliban fighter knowing our super secret plan to spy on the planet. I am afraid of a defense intelligence complex that has shown zero hesitancy in the past to spy on Americans and is increasingly operating in the shadows with little oversight outside of the White House.
This whole system is not engineered for the benefit of the American people. It's a juggernaut of bureaucracy and secrecy that serves a defense and intelligence community that is pursuing god knows what.
>Unfortunately, they only get warrants when civilians are looking over their shoulder.
Source on this?
>Those judges, and the members of the senate intelligence committee are most definitely not an independent committee.
What does independent committee mean to you? They are from entirely different branches of government. That's as independent as it gets.
The post you linked is from the Senate Armed Services committee which is not the legislative oversight for the NSA. Different people, different processes. Geriatric senators probably forgot we had troops in Nigeria because America has troops in untold dozens of countries. No one remembers the whole list.
If you think the Taliban is our biggest threat you should leave national security to the people who do it for a living.
This is the problem. I can't prove based on an objective source I can drop a link to, because it's all classified. That's literally the crux of the problem. When someone says 'trust us, we have all this evidence, but we can't let you see any of it because it's a secret,' does your skepticism not trigger in the least bit?
I can say that there are only 11 judges listed as being on the FISA court, and I don't believe that 11 people can personally oversee every instance of the NSA conducting surveillance on all potential Americans of interest around the planet. Maybe they can. Who knows, it's classified.
Congress is a different branch than the presidency, doesn't mean Mitch McConnell is an independent check-and-balance on the authority of the president.
It's literally their job to be aware of that. They have a staff whose entire job it is to keep them aware of that. If they can't keep track, what's the difference between them and the congressional committee that's supposed to be keeping tabs on the NSA?
The people who do national security for a living are in a bubble that facilitates the construction of boogeymen. And if they can't give me any credible evidence as to the existence of said boogeymen without saying 'sorry, that's all classified,' then why should I believe otherwise?
Right now I'm supposed to be scared of China, but I personally see no evidence that I should be more worried about them than my own president who covered-up the threat from Coronavirus in February, and then tried to blame it all on the Chinese as a diversion. Looks to me like the Chinese were actually trying to warn us in February, while the President was trying to cover it up:
If the Taliban aren't a threat to U.S. national security, then why was the longest war in American history fought on Afghan soil? Isn't that where all those 9/11 hijackers were from, and the country that bankrolled them? If they weren't from Afghanistan why didn't we sanction or invade the country they were actually from, and that gladly bankrolled the operation? Is that classified too?
They don't need a court order to sniff packets and do bulk collection. All that data goes into huge data centers. If they want to query that collected data for an American's information, they get a warrant. No human looks at an American's data before getting a warrant. You'd do well to familiarize yourself with their process, which is highly publicized.
There are other 3 letter agencies and 3rd country jails for that and That and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
I would not be hard to convince me that NSA inputs can place a person on these.
"Order" not sure, "recommendations" very conceivable. Anyway the issue is not NSA issue is the freedoms and protections offered by the country. If NSA doesnt but CIA does, its not any better.
You started with the claim that unlike China an US citizen is unlikely to get his/her privacy encroached on quoting all sorts of processes. I just gave examples where these processes didnt do much in preventing breaches of such encroachments. Add to that what we know is just a clouded view into the tip of the iceberg because of provisions of secrecy. If the clouded tip of the iceberg looks the way it does, it is not hard for someone not so deluded, or not so deprived of a full deck, to fill in what the rest of the iceberg could look like.
The examples you included do not show that Americans have their rights deprived without legal oversight. The exception is drone striking Americans who are overseas plotting imminent terrorist attacks.
That's an arbitrary opinion that you are holding on to. Being a target of warrantless search is not a sign of the land of the free.
If you disagree show me the proof of
> Americans who are overseas plotting imminent terrorist attacks
Show me the oversight over Anwar Awlaki's assasination that went ahead despite the fact that he had never been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime. Proof of oversight, if you please over the killing of his 16 year old son.
I can play the same game that you have been playing in asking nothing less than irrefutable proof that will stand in a public court. Hope you believe in upholding the same standards over yourself that seek in others.
If you cannot, then how is it different from other places where such proofs are not forthcoming after killings or incarcerations ?
So you just have the word of one activist? Sorry, that's not enough evidence for me to believe it. If the NSA wanted to unlock a random journalist's phone, they would be able to hack it.
It also links to another similar account a few days before that. And why would Egyptian activists make that up?
Plus, even if the NSA isn't regularly doing the kidnapping, torture, and killing themselves, they certainly help our other organizations do these things. Things like the disposition matrix, black sites, and locally with parallel construction all rely on their surveillance.
How did she know he worked for NSA? Did she have any way to verify he was an American or worked for the NSA? Do you think the NSA hires people who specialize in HUMINT? Why would he tell her he works for the NSA?
Too many unanswered questions. It's more likely she made it up because it gets people angry and that's what activists need to do.
If you have problems with other parts of our government, by all means criticize them and be an activist. Speak your mind and vote. Making up stuff about the NSA is intellectually lazy.
> America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media.
America won't even let you enter the country if you, or somebody on your feeds, criticized it on social media [0]
People who are too vocal in their opposition to the US government, or just been in the wrong places at the wrong times, have been plenty known to be abducted into torture black sites [1], if not straight up killed by a drone strike because literal SKYNET [2] interpreted their meta-data [3] as that of a terrorist.
And none of that is even accounting for the reality that the US has the highest incarceration rate on the planet, so if there's a place you will most likely be arrested during your vacation, then that's gonna be the US.
But I guess it's easy to forget about these parts of US hegemony while pointing at China over "social credit scores" putting people on no-fly lists.
The difference between 'recruiter' and a guy who sent some emails to some people is unfortunately a distinction that is up to some dweeb with more top-secret security clearances than medals on a North Korean general.
I assume it's the same thing in China, they just have more dweebs that can disappear people.
>"According to U.S. government officials, as well as being a senior recruiter and motivator, he was centrally involved in planning terrorist operations for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda"
We are better off with him dead. He was American, but his allegiance was to al Qaeda and he was planning to murder civilians.
...based on classified information that we are not allowed to see, and may or may not exist.
You and I have no evidence that he was anything other than a loudmouth who bagged on the U.S. on the web and responded to emails from anyone who sent them.
Remember when Saddam had those tractor-trailer biological weapons factories driving around Iraq ready to release clouds of Anthrax on American civilians? That was also based on classified information from a US government official.
No, they just deny entry, or (try to) clone your data, insist on passwords/unlock of all sorts of devices, and so on. And email addresses/social media accounts, other online presences.
>But, for someone outside USA or China; there's absolutely no difference between U.S. tech or Chinese Tech w.r.t Privacy, what U.S. does privately, China does openly and that's not limited to just spying.
Maybe for someone outside the US and China who doesn't travel and never intends on traveling. On the flip side if you ever plan on visiting either country there is a pacific-ocean sized gap in what you'll face visiting the two countries. I can't recall the last time someone was "disappeared" for criticizing Trump on twitter. The same can't be said for those who criticize Xi on Weibo.
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...
Maybe. And even if he doesn't have the dirt on various people with power, including a bit lower down the food-chain. The idea that he might gives him an edge in those steak dinners.
It stinks no matter how you look at it. Actual criminal getting rich post crimes while Snowden who let us all know what a crook he is, is stuck in exile.
The rule of law and equality before it needs to be established.
"Bezos Taps Criminal To Strengthen Bid For Government Work"
Is about the kindest possible spin you can put on a headline for this story, right?
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.
> Amazon's chief executive officer (CEO) and founder, Jeff Bezos, is the company's biggest shareholder, with 55.5 million shares representing 11.1% of outstanding shares.
Maybe they were talking about options? You don't get voting rights by having options, you need to execute the options in order to get shares (and voting rights, in Amazons case).
Which would make him the majority shareholder. By a margin of 5% - almost double the next largest shareholder and more than the next dozen shareholders combined.
In other words: he has unilateral control of the company. Welcome to publicly traded companies. You don't need 51% to control the company.
He's a de facto controlling shareholder due to how comfortably secure his plurality is, absolutely. And he's got a significant amount of de jure control by being Amazon's President, CEO, and Chairman of its Board of Directors. It's under his control in many real senses.
But he's not a majority shareholder, since his percentage of ownership does not exceed 50%.
Bu that reasoning, if 1000 people each own 0.1% of a company, and one buys another out, then the person with 0.2% has "unilateral control of the company", implying that the other 99.8% could not stop the desires or action of the 0.2%.
This is nonsense. Any 3 of the 999 could stop the 1.
Your second link doesn't work. The first link shows some answers from Keith Alexander, but none of them were lies. It seems the author of the first article thought that PRISM is something different from what it was revealed to be.
In an exchange from March 2012, Johnson had an opportunity to question NSA Director Keith Alexander about precisely the kind of concerns that the exposé of PRISM confirms — that the signals intel agency can spy on content coming through American Internet servers.
I think it's pretty accurate description of what PRISM and other NSA programs allow NSA to do. Also:
Alexander categorically denied more than once in this clip that NSA even had the capability to conduct surveillance in the manner Wired reported
We now know not only they have the capability, they are actively using it. If claiming such capability does not exist is not a lie, then what it is?
> I think it's pretty accurate description of what PRISM and other NSA programs allow NSA to do — that the signals intel agency can spy on content coming through American Internet servers.
The part you quoted is correct, but he didn't claim otherwise. He said that they could not get Americans' data in that manner, which is true. Reread his exchange with Johnson in the article. ("Does the NSA intercept Americans’ cell phone conversations?") In other words, he did not lie.
The implication here requires a few things to be true.
1. The CIA illegally collected intelligence on Donald Trump prior to his election to the Presidency
2. This intelligence was specifically of a compromising nature to President Trump
3. This intelligence was retained and can be retrieved at a moments notice
4. The retired DCI, who is no longer a government employee, somehow retains his read ins, Need to Know or accesses or...
5. Has personnel working within the IC who do have access to this information that would give it to him.
6. That the DCI has provided the existence of this information to Jeff Bezos
7. Bezos then provides a PUBLIC position for this person on the Amazon board as a way to pay for access to this information that Jeff will then ostensibly have as a "secret weapon" to blackmail a sitting President
This type of conjecture is on par with other conspiracy theories which are so far from realistic that they defy logic to believe. I'd love to see the combined probability estimate for something like this.
Others have said it better - Hayden knows the DoD and IC process for IT basically better than anyone, and can help Amazon win more business.
Plus we've already had an impeachment trial. If there were damning, conclusive evidence that the CIA possessed on Trump, that would have been the time to present it.
While either is possible, your response reminds me of Russell's teapot because it's just as possible that Bezos eats dirt.
Without being able to falsify the claim, and by deferring to a claim that isn't the simplest possible explanation (he's got nothing), it makes me wonder whether other HN commentators will come to defend my "Bezos is a dirtmonger" conspiracy theory as well.
Oh god silly semantic games? really? Of course Bezos eats dirt because it's reasonable to assume without evidence to the contrary that Bezos eats food. It's reasonable to assume without evidence to the contrary that Bezos' food is no cleaner than yours and will contain some dirt.
Do we feel better about that now?
It's not reasonable to assume anything about the Intel Bezos has without evidence. Could be none. Could have hard evidence of crimes of the president and many senior politicians and public servants. Could be something in between those two. All are possible and there is no reason to discount any of it in the absence of evidence.
Good on you sticking up for the world's richest man who just hired a criminal though. It's important to maintian principle regardless of the optics.
Evidence is plain as a day to see: no "reams" of any kind have surfaced in 4+ years in spite of the entirety of the deep state working overtime to unearth them. While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, the latest switch from mere misinterpretations and quoting out of context to brazen whole cloth made up hit jobs that dozens of people deny _on the record_ suggests that the DNC is out of ammo.
The USA badly, badly needs a way to get better candidates for both parties. Is there anyone who thinks this is the best the Republicans have to do the job for the american people? Is ther anyone who thinks this is the best the Democrats have to do the job for the american people?
It’s getting to the point where most people’s mental health would probably benefit from ignoring all this. It’s all very bad and will probably push you into coming up with crazy conspiracy theories.
> This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now.
Nothing about Amazon hiring a former NSA director to its board is "tinfoil hat crazy". It's in fact perfectly rational, since Amazon is literally in the business of selling services to the federal government.
> Man in a position to have reams of compromising intel on the current president hired by a man in an ongoing battle with the president.
I want the NSA to know everything a US President does while in office. I want the NSA to know everything a candidate for US President does while they are running for office.
The President of the US is not a regular citizen. The cost of being handed almost unlimited power is that you forfeit the assumption that you will use that power always and only to the benefit of the country.
If Alexander has compromising intel on the current president there is only one man to blame for that - the man who put himself in compromising situations.
> I want the NSA to know everything a US President does while in office. I want the NSA to know everything a candidate for US President does while they are running for office.
Neglecting the fact that, according to Snowden, they already have that power, are you aware what power this gives the intelligence community and, by implication, the sitting president over elections and up-and-coming presidential candidates? Yes, Donald Trump is dangerous. But this doesn't mean we should employ even more dangerous tactics to control him.
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...
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've heard.
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 software.
I've come to appreciate the value of a really good, dedicated sysadmin. I used to think I was pretty good at it and that was fine, but I've come to realize that the skillset for an awesome sysadmin are quite a bit different than a developer, even though there is some overlap. And there is definitely a range.
Exactly! I'm a sysadmin (sometimes a Dev), but sysadmin is what i'm really good at. The most important thing is to see a solution from another perspective.
As a developer I completely agree. I have some knowledge of system administration, but I much prefer with dedicated professional where possible. It's partly just a different set of expertise, but I think it's partly also why it's best to have dedicated people doing QA work. The attitude required to do the work is completely different to dev work, and it's hard for one person to wear both hats.
Seconded. A sysadmin dedicates their professional life to deeply understanding systems, networks, and their interconnection. I am lucky if I can keep up with changes to my languages and frameworks as a programmer! Thank goodness there are sysadmins out there who can help us poor programmers out when our relatively basic understanding knowledge of linux fails us.
>Thank goodness there are sysadmins out there who can help us poor programmers out when our relatively basic understanding knowledge of linux fails us
Sometimes, and sometimes we have to ask the developer of that exact OS-subsystem/driver/firmware(AARGH!!) because it fails us too...and here we have a closed circle ;)
Unfortunately the market doesn't appreciate systems operations skills as much as software development, despite those skills being rarer and having a wider organizational impact in more industry verticals. Software developer salaries trend 20-30% higher at every single career stage than sysadmin/ops salaries, and at the top, there's usually management adjacent engineering track stages at larger firms for software developers like "principal", "distinguished", and "architect" which are not open to operations folks.
I was in ops for 13 years, and if you were to talk to any of my former coworkers they would bury you with praise for the quality of my work. Yet, I eventually chose to move into a management track because I had peaked my career about 7 years in and didn't realize it until later. There was nowhere I could go up, because I wasn't a software developer. Now I'm a manager that has technology understanding, which has a high value prop for many orgs all on its own, but I do sometimes miss "getting my hands dirty".
I've worked with a lot of software developers over the years, and while there are a handful who are really incredible, the majority of people are just mediocre. That's expected and okay. The same is true for Ops folks, as it happens, although generally it takes more competence to rise to "Senior" on the Ops side vs software. The thing is, "Senior" is as high as it goes for Ops folks. So you might meet really stellar Ops folks who are effectively titled and paid the same as a mediocre developer with 3 years of work experience. It's simply not sustainable, and the push towards moving everything to the cloud and off-premise is probably a symptom of this (not enough quality Ops folks to keep things on-prem) and exacerbates this (reducing need for quality Ops folks, driving down market demand, unless you want to work at a cloud provider).
Pretty much all of the other Ops people I've respected and admired over the years have moved into different career paths. I find the same is not true for software developers. So when younger people ask me about career paths, I always recommend software over Ops, if they are adamant they never want to go into management.
It's kind of sad, I suppose, but that's the way of it. I appreciate that there's a subthread on HN where folks recognize and respect the value of competent Ops folks, but I think you'll find that most are being pushed out of that career path.
Probably because of places like Netflix and Google where everyone is a software engineer they just happen to have different titles. If the industry wanted to counter the move to cloud raising the salaries of truly competent ops people would be a thing.
I see what you mean. If those 'value additions' can work on metadata, the separation of data and metadata might help some, but that will become complex very quickly.
> The result is dismal, we dread using it because it’s very unreliable, and it costs double or triple what GCP costs.
I'll be honest - you guys need to find a new technology partner then. Creating a private cloud that's reliable and offers the basic services that the major providers have is not difficult in 2020. Some of the aaS stuff can get tricky but is still entirely do-able.
Regardless, if they found a way to make your infrastructure MORE expensive than the public clouds they either have no idea how to negotiate or are really, really bad at their jobs. The public cloud is a lot of things - but cheap isn't one of them.
Presumably Kubernetes is the answer here, but you need to run a lot of things yourself that come for free with GKE. Also “just buy bare metal” ignores the massive effort involved in operating a data center.
I don’t think so. But knowing my company’s capabilities and proficiency, it was obvious it was never going to work. Would have been much more logical to buy from one of the many local providers who run their own data centers. It doesn’t really matter because in the end the solution is so bad that we try and use GCP anyway whenever we get the chance.
Depends on what is desired... theoretically using Proxmox and VMs containing CapRover hosting docker containers should get you everything you want... but the ability instantly scale upwards is difficult to do yourself.
> the ability instantly scale upwards is difficult to do yourself.
If your business involves any amount of low priority bulk compute, this gets much much easier. You simply let the low priority stuff fall behind while your order to Dell for new servers is being delivered...
Also, if you have compute that could be on-prem or could be in the cloud, you can set up a kubernetes cluster spanning both and let non-privacy-sensitive overflow to GCP as needed.
All of the above rarely comes out cost-effective though, because while the raw compute is cheaper to DIY-it, when you factor in the staff time to build, maintain, and deal with the shortcomings of your bodged-together on-site solution, it's going to come out much more expensive.
I use both MS and Google at various locations. The result is also dismal... But we can all be exasperated together and vent about how awful it is without upsetting anyone.
I work in banking in Europe, one of the internet-only ones. We have super rigid governance routines regarding cloud storage. You can’t store a single byte on any cloud service, even incidentally, without a thorough review ensuring that no customer data is present.
Meaning, e.g. there are specific, rigid rules regarding how Postman can be used while developing backend services, to avoid that customer info is inadvertently transmitted during testing.
Of course, it’s a PITA, but it serves its purpose.
You’d be surprised. We had security that rivaled even the standards required by the banks. Truly crazy high multiple physical key paired with vault and some faraday cage protected offline signing thing — I wasn’t privy to it all just saw bits of it while it was being implemented. Suffice to say it can be done and by going off cloud you get the flexibility to do things like this but... in the end it’s overkill
Perimiter security is not vouge but its better than publicly accessible on the Internet. I would argue if are not comfortable with security take it off the Internet and put it in a dmz. You still need security, but it's a more forgiving environment if you get it wrong between setup and pen test.
I work for a relatively small company (about 15-20 odd people) and we've got a server rack in the office. It's positioned in a very specific angle (with tape on the floor) along an AC unit because of cooling, but we self-host a lot of our stuff.
It's done on a budget as well so we're kinda forced to use open source software.
Weirdly enough we use Skype for work chat and Zoom for video meetings, so it feels a bit inconsistent.
This is what amazes me. I suspect there's an entire generation of developers and technologists that don't realize we used to manage infrastructure and deploy applications ontop of it.
It's like as if somehow, in many eyes, that's impossible now. Depending on your scale, it may be impractical given external hosting options but it's certainly not impossible. Lots of data centers rose and started automated processes of shared hosting and co-locating hardware which was a step forward. I remember working with Rackspace, Equinix, The Planet, etc. which further automated quicker server deployment, had applications for UPS resets/interrupts, etc. The more you moved towards a specific business's automation services, the less portable your infrastructure was outside that environment.
That continued on until you now have more sophisticated hosting like what AWS and GC provide. Now, abstractions exist for about everything in a data center and the trade off is that you now have to manage all that complexity through proprietary APIs, consoles, and so forth.
In addition, the tradeoff here is the more complex the infrastructure, the less easy it is to shift it to another provider. That may be fine for you, it may also not be. It's all definitely possible though.
Parent comment is talking about self hosting “Google Docs, S3, Dropbox, GitHub, Slack“. Running all those things (and more) instead of focusing on your core business is probably a mistake for most companies.
I don't think so. The company I work for is really focused on digital independence. Their core business is industrial electronic component design. The whole supporting office runs on libreoffice, thunderbird, mattermost and nextcloud, all hosted on company premise. They employ two full-time admins, one for the windows clients, the other one for the linux clients (which one can ask for) and servers. This whole setup is, according to them, surprisingly easy to manage and maintain, you just have to find a boss who's willing to try it. Maybe it's different when you're a software shop and really need s3 or something
As long as you have decent hardware (cpu/ram mostly) and reliable storage (netapp or something similar) you can get stuff done very easily.
Also, most people seems to not have noticed how fast computers and disks got recently and how resources you can pack into a single physical machine: you can nowadays fill a 2u, 2socket machine with 128c/256t (2x amd epyc) and literally terabytes of ram...
Parent comment is also talking about small companies. Below a certain size all those things (well, equivalent services, not those exactly) don't need more than a single server which is fairly painless. When you grow to a size where you need it at scale, that's where the pain starts.
You have to do some planning, but it isn't too hard. The most issues arise from compromises between security and convenience. Cloud services can offer both in the best case, but aside from O365, which is really sluggish, we are actually in the process of migrating back to on premise solutions.
Nobody attacks code repositories of non-software companies anyway, people are after CRM and ERP data. There is the occasional issue with malware from mails and special users, but a backup solution with 15min snapshots solves that issue. Although the latter can cost a bit and might be too expensive for smaller companies.
And doing this is so simple. Just host your own gitlab server, and version all your company's IP on git. For chat we use Zulip, which we also self-host.
And honestly moving to these tools from slack, confluence, etc. has been awesome.
Zulip threading model is great. So much better than slack.
And using markdown and jupyter notebooks for documentation on gitlab? Damn awesome.
- How much time do you spend on a week on maintaining your servers?
- How do you make sure that your servers are secure? Maybe you are being hacked every night, does your company have the means to check if there has been a security breach?
- Do you follow/apply the security patches for the OS you are using on the server and all the software you are using on the server?
- Do you have regular offline backups? What would happen if there is a fire in your offices?
These are some of the reasons to go for a cloud solution, especially when you are not a software company (hence you don't have many people who have the knowledge for setting up/maintaining such stuff) or when you don't have the resources to hire dedicated sysadmins.
Mostly yes. We obviously have sales, marketing, etc. as well.
> - How much time do you spend on a week on maintaining your servers?
I don't do devops. There is a team of people that works full-time on IT infrastructure. No idea how time they spend. Gitlab and Zulip servers are updated every couple of weeks. No idea how much time these cost.
> - How do you make sure that your servers are secure? Maybe you are being hacked every night, does your company have the means to check if there has been a security breach?
There is a team of people that work on cybersecurity monitoring. No idea what they do. Normal IT people just make sure that everyone's computer is encrypted, setting up people's credentials, etc.
> Do you follow/apply the security patches for the OS you are using on the server and all the software you are using on the server?
I don't do anything, somebody does this for me.
> Do you have regular offline backups? What would happen if there is a fire in your offices?
We have multiple locations and the backups are replicated across our own locations.
Thanks for the answers. The reason I asked these questions was because your previous reply started with "And doing this is so simple.". But having full-time teams of devops, cybersecurity and IT is not so simple or cheap after all.
And that's official policy; in a lot of places I've worked at, there's a lot of bring-your-own-device things; self-employed, consultants, etc who are quite casual about using things like dropbox and co to share company data.
I mean I like to think the data has no value to e.g. the US or competitors, and that the sheer volume makes it worthless, but I suspect that's just a lack of imagination on my part.
As the recent court ruling on privacy shield decided: no, it's not, you have to treat encrypted user data just like unencrypted user data, and giving it to US hosters violates EU privacy laws.
But you have to follow through. You can't stop at the cloud and happily use closed source software from (eg) Microsoft or Apple. Or letting people carry Google-powered microphone arrays into meetings in their pockets.
Are you sure you didnt spell "China cloud" and "Huawei" wrong? /s
Just because we (Germans, Europeans) are culturally closer to Americans and share certain values does not mean that we should have a double standard on our external affairs.
We are kicking out Huawei. When will we kick out Amazon, Google, Apple and Cisco?
Though I completely agree that the double standard is ridiculous, the reasoning behind it likely involves the complicated arrangement between Germany and the US military. China doesn't still have 30,000 troops "occupying" Germany.
You are, I believe, referring to the "American Service Members Protection Act" [1], signed into law in 2002 by Bush?
This law, still on the books, theoretically allows the president to order military action against the ICC in Den Haag (The Hague) should they ever try an American Service Member.
> The act also prohibits U.S. military aid to countries that are party to the court. However, exceptions are allowed for aid to NATO members, major non-NATO allies, Taiwan, and countries that have entered into "Article 98 agreements", agreeing not to hand over U.S. nationals to the court.
I put it in quotes in an attempt to highlight that it was not a formal military occupation. Their presence does show some level of influence the US military has and it is a threat to prevent Germany from making any truly radical moves.
> 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.
> 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.
Maybe when we (re)create our own electronics industry. Even China has problems with sourcing components (the TSMC/USA licenses case). It also doesn't help to be a collection of small countries that can be played one against the other by USA, China and Russia and possibly others.
OK, on some metrics. But I think nobody questions which country is still leading the world.
> And the division within the USA is as big or bigger than Europe. And, we cannot talk about China.
I don't agree with this or we're talking about different things.
The grip of Washington DC on the states of the USA is much stronger than Brussels' on the countries of the EU. The degree of sovereignty is very different. No matter the internal divisions inside the USA, first of all there is one USA. On the other side of the ocean first of all there are multiple competing EU countries, each of them trying to exploit the others and the EU and with different economics and foreign policy goals. About that, do (random picks among large states) California, Texas and New York have a foreign policy worth talking about?
I find that neither pragmatic nor ethically sound.
If you're in a security alliance with countries you share values and goals with, how can you not apply different standards in terms of data sharing? And how can you not react somewhat differently to any transgressions, mistakes and imperfections?
I know Trump has made this very difficult by making his personal whims indistinguishable from the interests and commitments of his country. In my view this is a form of corruption that does massive damage to the U.S. And yes, democratic control over security services has been rather tenuous at the best of times.
But I still see many good reasons not to impose broad economic sanctions on allied democracies. And I do see good reasons to side with them against completely illegitimate regimes that use their security services to keep themselves in power without a democratic mandate.
Of course there are many grey areas and a lot of valid criticism. But asking for Europe to officially impose economic sanctions on the U.S is not a proportionate reaction to that. The economic damage would far outweigh any additional freedom or security.
If you refuse to apply a degree of pragmatism and proportionality, other countries would then have to impose economic sanctions on Germany for their use of Staatstrojaner. Essentially, all cross border trade in digital goods and services would have to end globally. That can't be a good idea.
>Do you really feel the poor homeless person has more power in the US elections than in those you just compared it to ?
Yes I do. It follows from the simple fact that there are no free and fair elections on those countries. Freedom of speech in combination with elections gives us some power to change things. People in dictotorships don't have those powers, regardless of whether or not they are homeless.
> I mean, there are still monarchies in Europe. How are you suspect of the US and not the british if you are concerned about an over powerful executive.
Umm... the British monarchy hasn't held executive authority in centuries. They're window dressing like almost all European monarchs.
I think there’s a lot more to it than just sharing values. If my values are mutually exclusive with your values, then there’s a lot more reason to kick me out.
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.
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?
I think your being overly paranoid. The effort required to covertly break into an AWS instance and not have anyone in the sysadmin teams know is simply not worth it for 99.9% of businesses.
I run a simply mid-level business. Amazon doesn't give a crap about my data - that, above all, is what keeps it safe. I'm just not important enough to bother.
Well, you should understand this a little better, then.
Okay try this scenario: lets say I work for a German company that is kicking ass in a market that a spook-at-Amazon has heavily invested in - lets just say "personal transportation system X".
Because its Germany, the tech is amazing and consequently I'm going to sell this tech to Africa, because I like doing that, and not in America - because fuck America, that's why. Also, maybe China, maybe Kazakhstan. My tech, my choice.
Should I succeed in this endeavour, I'm immediately under threat of being NSA'ed by the provider of service I'd rely on, ordinarily, to render my research.
This isn't paranoia, it is due diligence.
Yeah, no thanks, Amazon. This heralds a watershed moment: a return to local services.
Just better to avoid the American spook-o'-sphere entirely, and play a local hand. Maybe even take the data centre guys out for grünkohl and senf some time, whatever.
Look - to understand why the hate for all the spook/control paranoia, Americans/Brits/5-eyes/et al., all you have to do is try to see it from the other side of the national identity for a second.
Germans are very, very rightly on the side of data protection.
The holes in the ground that used to be Gestapo buildings are not all parking lots! Some of them are memorials.
Also not paranoia: diligence.
(^WThis comment brought to you by the ACME-HNnnn-comment-slowdown-negotiator-system™ .. time wasted, is creativity! Disclaimer: Not German, am applying hypotheticals. Still not paranoia!)
> 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?
> 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 individual third-party sellers—data those sellers view as proprietary.
> Yet interviews with more than 20 former employees of Amazon’s private-label business and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal reveal that employees did just that. Such information can help Amazon decide how to price an item, which features to copy or whether to enter a product segment based on its earning potential, according to people familiar with the practice, including a current employee and some former employees who participated in it.
If you're a regular business and Amazon doesn't want to launch a new hosted product competing with you, then maybe you're safe. But if they want your data, why not just take it while repeatedly insisting that they don't?
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.
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?
Going to go out on a limb and say that the NSA is going to have an easier time breaking into your on-prem servers.
Hiring a retired General for influence is as old as this town. People are reading too much into this. This doesn't make it more or less likely for Amazon/NSA/CIA/whatever to steal your data.
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.
> BaFin stipulated that the tech stacks could be audited
It's hard to imagine that this includes the code within a Cloud provider. If you're using a Windows server, are they expecting Microsoft to fork over MS source code?
This just sounds like an overly-conservative interpretation of the rules.
It basically rules out ANY cloud solutions - which is unreasonable and wouldn't ever hold up under scrutiny even if the Bank or regulators explicitly asked for it.
While AWS is a different operational unit than the shopping one, it is known that they didn't play fair with some vendors. In the end, they cloned some, and ruined some.
So the vulture culture exists in parts.
But it's hard to avoid the cheap offerings of US cloud. I'm from Sweden myself and I'm only speaking as a layperson who is observing the IT industry.
It feels like the rampant capitalism in the United States, and lack of regulations, fuels the VC economy. Making startups like Google, Amazon and others possible.
I can't imagine a company running on hundreds of millions in dollars of VC money with no real profit coming in, just hoping for an exit.
That's a very strange phenomenon, sort of like the .com bubble never burst but just got bigger.
I'm afraid that in order to see the same rapid development of cloud companies here in Europe we'd have to adopt the lax corporate regulations of the US. Which in turn would lead to other issues like workers losing rights.
> 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 open us more to be purchased by USA companies. The other way around is the way. It worked for China. Forbid non-European companies to purchase key software companies.
USA is not successful because capitalism, USA is successful were the government puts a lot of money: Military, I+D.
>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 fueled startups.
The point was not which startups to name as examples, the point was that lack of regulations make this whole VC system go around.
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.
But with that said, recent news shows that Sweden has given tax exemptions to Facebook and Amazon just like everyone else. To curry their favor. It's frankly disgusting.
> 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.
> USA is not successful because capitalism, USA is successful were the government puts a lot of money: Military, I+D.
This is incorrect. The current big tech companies became successful and massive without any special government deals. Google dominated search, Microsoft dominated all business and home PCs for decades, Apple and Google dominated mobile for consumers and businesses, Amazon beat them all to cloud and ate online retail with free fast shipping.
It’s only recently with JEDI that Amazon/Microsoft tried to attach directly to the government’s wallet in a big way. And even with losing that, it will be a drop in the bucket for either of them.
These companies were successful because they were allowed to move quickly and beat out competitors. The entire Internet industry blossomed and gave birth to these companies before the government even took the Internet very seriously.
> The current companies are only the "daughters and granddaughters" of massively government funded companies in Silicon Valley
Very good point. Many people forgets how much money the state invest, as it should, on technology and to create an industry. From ARPANET to the WWII computers (or NASA), technology needs a level of investment that only states can afford.
Eh. I don't get it. There have been so many postings and comments here on HN and elsewhere about how the cloud is NOT cheap, how they saw they burnt money there, and saved large amounts by doing it for themselves. Not to mention vendor lock in.
With the Schrems 2 ruling of this summer finding the Privacy Shield inadequate for storing personal data in US-owned clouds, your previous employer made the right choice for GDPR compliance.
Cloud Act and National Security Letters really fuck things up for American cloud providers with regard to doing business with European customers.
Everything was done on premises with a colo to house some servers. We ran kubernetes and had some really smart ops engineers do our platform for us. I was always of the opinion that those super smart engineers (much better than I was) were wasted on reinventing the wheel when we could have used an IaaS and they could have helped us on improving the product
Amazon is like the Huawei of the US. Strong ties to the government, too big to fail, massive influence over the world. It's like the cancer of capitalism and the way it operates together with the US government is very similar to whatever we call China's model of state. No doubt they influence state decisions in very undemocratic ways. This has nothing to do with Freedom, and it's worrying that such different government models arrive at such similar modes of action. They foster centralized, undemocratic power that infringes on individual rights such a the right to privacy... Is it just he way humanity is destined to be ruled? By constant waves of power concentration followed by revolution?
This is such a ridiculously primitive view of the world it beggars belief. By taking this view you are significantly reducing your security posture, no improving it.
There is an AWS Region in Germany. Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere.
AWS also provide you with the tools to encrypt everything and if done correctly means that Amazon no matter how "evil" they are cannot decrypt the data. Not only that, there is such a huge separation in access and rigour around governance that there is no way anyone within Amazon can simply login and see your data even if unencrypted.
Every single case of data being leaked from AWS is because the people working for the company that manage the data literally checked a box to make the contents public. Contrast this to "on-prem" where physical security can get compromised or the vendors of the physical hardware/software leave gaping holes or maintenance backdoors that get exploited.
Honestly these types of views are no more grounded in reality that flat earth conspiracy type views.
Your fancy view of the world is not as fancy as you think and your aggressive, disrespectful rhetoric is doing you a disservice.
The measures you've enumerated (EU zones, encryption, etc) are mitigations for working with a potentially compromised vendor and should be done anyway. Not using the vendor is such a blindingly obvious countermeasure that one has to be either unprofessional or have a hidden interest to dismiss out of hand.
> there is such a huge separation in access and rigour around governance that there is no way anyone within Amazon can simply login and see your data even if unencrypted.
I personally choose not to believe a company which puts on its board of directors a well-known perjurer [1].
We were talking about Amazon here, that discussion probably merits another thread. But yes, I do believe more in companies that don’t bring in ex-government crooks on their board of directors.
I think its much more likely that an American company with a former NSA head as a board member is much more likely to have an agreement like that, personally.
The arrangements brought to light through amongst others the Snowdon files did involve extremely few people at huge companies. We are talking a literal hand full, not '25.000'. Are you really suggesting there are no three letter acronym operators embedded into the large US tech companies? Modern US systemic tech industrial espionage was brought to light as far back as Echelon. so deriding people who are cautious about it as 'flat earthers' seems disingenuous.
> You think that 25,000+ employees that work at AWS have somehow been silenced into some grand conspiracy?
You seem to suggest that every single employee that works at AWS is aware of everything that goes on with the company.
Isn't just possible that despite of what we know about the architecture, this might not be the whole truth and concerns about involuntary inter region transfers might just be warranted?
My bigger worry would be continued data access. So even if the data is in Germany, access to it is still controlled by an US entity, which can be forced by the US government to shut off access. Given that the current administration seems to enact embargos on a whim, this doesn't seem too unlikely.
In my limited experience, Germans are more sensitive to personal privacy than other Europeans, even the rest of the world. To non-Germans they might seem paranoid. Maybe we can all learn from their historical mistake.
The problem I see with the DIY-attitude is that security is easy to get wrong and is moving target. The other opinion here is "keep it in the country". If someone really wants your data, the locale won't save you. And yet, if there is a breach, I could see an foreign company like AWS trying to hush it, where a German company would make a bigger fuss (diplomatic issue).
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/better insights for how Amazon positions itself in this government sector. Alexander can bring a ton of value, just with his contacts and networking alone, let alone the insight into how security and data operations work in the intelligence community.
Ultimately, this isn't a step towards more government surveillance. The government can't coerce Amazon any more with Alexander on the board or not; the rules are still the same. This is fundamentally about Amazon's desire to get in on the lucrative big dollar contracts that would otherwise end up going to traditional defense contractors like Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop.
> 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.
Totally this. It's highly unlikely Alexander will encourage overtly illegal practices within Amazon, but he will have full knowledge of the "gray" areas ripe for exploitation, and will utilize them to the best of his abilities.
Amazon won't be pushed into supporting more government surveillance, they will be paid to do it. That's one purpose of these lucrative contracts that traditional defense contractors can't fulfill.
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]
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.
Snowden: It turns out "Hey Alexa" is short for "Hey Keith Alexander." Yes, the Keith Alexander personally responsible for the unlawful mass surveillance programs that caused a global scandal. And Amazon Web Services (AWS) host ~6% of all websites.
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.
These are merely the crimes we know about for a fact. Having been caught out like this in a position of power the right thing to do is investigate him fully. It's scarcely credible that there's are the only crimes he committed in that position of power.
> reveal highly classified information to the entire planet during a televised hearing?
I mean he could just said that he cant't answer that question because its't highly classified and this hearing is televised to entire planet, instead of lying
Because if that information were released it would cause significant damage to the country. Why on earth is my company's TLS private key kept a secret from all the employees?
Companies regularly monitor employee activities on corporate networks and computers. They have a responsibility to make sure employees aren't using the company's assets to break the law, steal corporate information, leak private information, or irresponsibly download and run malware. If you tell employees exactly what the company is monitoring and the exact methods they use to monitor activity, the monitoring becomes useless because people will subvert it.
How can an ostensibly consumer and business targeted company company allow someone so anti-consumer on the board? Why doesn't anyone have the balls to say "this guy shouldn't be on our board because if we have someone in cahoots with the spooks on our board people will buy less dragon dildos and .223 fuel filters and the sketchy SAAS providers will use less AWS for their crap because their customers will be worried about the spooks exfiltrating their data"
Super curious about this as well, Amazon has advertised their "we're not an ad business" to me before when looking into whether they were reselling my shopping data. This man plays the person to not only sell it but also use it against me.
This is ridiculous. That board position was clearly given with the intention of getting more strategic advice on how to win more three-letter agencies business, it’s clear as sun (on a normal day that’s not today in California).
Well ... I just searched and it seems they are available there. I did not know that.
The real question is why is an ex-NSA agent working at a place that sells dragon dildos?
In all seriousness though, if Amazon can predict what consumers want, they will make more sales. An ex-NSA should have at least some experience in analyzing behavioral data and predicting what large numbers of people do.
No, no, no this is not about selling junk to people.
If you thought selling cheap junk to people was profitable, wait until you see what selling mass surveillance to the government pays. Everyone that said, it's an Orwell problem to have pervasive "assistant" devices was right. Look how many billions NSA poured into scanning and indexing everyone's mails and calls in Utah. Now you have OP and a few days ago Amazon PR objected calling Echo a "microphone": all these dumbasses paid for these things and now it's really here.
In my opinion, it's highly unlikely the ex NSA chief has any kind of worthwhile expertise in "predicting what large numbers of people do". He's a director, not some kind of universal expert or superhero.
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
All those countries that migrated their national data into AWS with assurances data was not within arms length of the US Spying Apparatus are slowly waking up to the fact that their data is in fact within arms length of the US Spying Apparatus.
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.
Its not like they have no competition- if people end up trusting walmart more than amazon we could see a shift happen. And again - HQ2. That was a huge miscalculation that resulted in actual problems for them - they're not able to get everything they want.
What kind of problems? If it didn't affect their customers, then it's not really a problem is it? Sure, if they have to find somewhere else to house people that's just a logistics issue. Problems come when income goes down.
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.
eBay, OfferUp, Craigslist, and local stores have all offered great experiences since I stopped giving Amazon money. I haven’t had the feeling of “going without” - to the contrary, I’ve picked up a bunch of materials for our family recently and we are staying relatively sane even with a 2nd-grader in the house. I find myself waiting slightly longer for some items, but in many cases also able to get significant discounts by shopping used. Convenience is the same; I even still pick up ecommerce purchases from our apartment complex’s Amazon Hub locker (haha).
Amazon is far from essential; they can be beaten handily on price, quality, and sustainability by hand-picked suppliers, and frankly in many cases I prefer the experience of buying things from humans. I went to a local hardware store the other day (I live in Los Angeles) and when shopping I asked about some pallets outside and was invited to take them, saving me easily $40 in lumber and making me feel more valued as a customer than Amazon “guaranteed [except not really and with no consequences for failure] 2-day shipping” has ever made me feel.
For people who value the feeling of connection to their community and their supply chains, Amazon doesn’t make sense. For those who would prefer to disconnect from the environment and humans that supply them with what they need and want, Amazon is competitive but not unbeatable.
Not installing any Alexa’s in my new house. They suck anyway. Literally no practical use cases after 3 years other than being surveiled upon. Oh, and “what’s the weather on the other side of this sheet of glass I’m standing looking through? “ Lol
I don't think cloud service linked smart speakers are a wise idea, but I visited a family (before COVID, when you could still visit a family) that was making tremendous use of it: playing music, setting alarms, looking up recipes, ordering stuff from Amazon, and I think looking up reference material and doing arithmetic. Three generations of family members had all clearly made it a nearly unconscious habit. So I don't think this technology can be dismissed as useless to everyone.
This kind of revolving door stuff has been going on for as long as there has been government and private industry. It's just as scary as ever, but no more.
The good news/bad news reality is Alexander is looking for a big payday after years in government service -- not assist the government is using Amazon for its own surveillance purposes, or assist Amazon in becoming better at surveillance.
There is this joke in the series 'Person of Interest' where it's stated that Social Media was specifically invented for the purpose of data harvesting by the 'NSA'. I think it's the same for cloud computing.
It is about money. High-level government employees used to retire and work for contractors that sold directly to the organizations the government retirees came from. That is called a revolving door and occurred with both military and civilian employees. The practice of the revolving door is recognized widely as unethical.
To avoid concerns about ethics, many high-level government employees retire and join either investment groups or boards of directors. This puts them once removed from the money chain, but still allows them to line their pockets by leveraging the power they accrued while working for the government.
Amazon does business to secure pentagon/etc. information. It is useful to have someone on the board who thinks about nation-state level cyber threats in this context.
Well yeah. Government contracts have insane margins for virtually all private sector companies that can get their hands on them. I used to work at a manufacturing company that made car parts and military equipment. The military contracts had margins that were easily 2-3 times what the car parts made. And they required the same amount of labor, work, and time.
This is normal for most companies, they love to add former Generals, politicians and other connected people to their board. It helps with foreign countries, government contracts, investigations in USA and all.
Amazon does have devices listening in every home.
Is the concern here that hiring Keith Alexander would make it easier for government to get people's conversation data?
I think I'd be more worried that he might discourage investments that could help Amazon better protect its foreign customers against U.S. and partners' espionage efforts.
Or perhaps affect Amazon's procurement with non-transparent motives. Suppose these is a certain microarchitectural vulnerability in one vendor's hardware but not another's. If Amazon could be induced to buy the vulnerable hardware over the non-vulnerable hardware, that could help people who knew about the vulnerability spy on AWS customers. Or if there were a company to be rewarded or punished for its decision to cooperate or not to cooperate with some covert activity, the reward or punishment could be done through procurement decisions.
Or perhaps affect Amazon's lobbying at home or abroad about privacy legislation or something.
(It's not obvious to me whether the danger is particularly greater from a former DIRNSA than from someone with undisclosed connections to a spy agency. Maybe Alexander's recommendations would get extra scrutiny!)
Not that it matters though - phones are [already a vector](https://www.wired.com/2014/06/nsa-bug-iphone/) for the government to listen to you. I'm not sure this news really changes anything - the government already works with large US companies to spy on people, and then makes sure they're not allowed to disclose it to the public.
Also, I think Kindle is a great product, and wouldn't consider it a useless spying device. Each to their own though.
That's correct. I just think saying "most aren't buying" gives the impression that it's not popular, when in fact it is a pretty widespread product. Not to mention Alexa being added into tons of other products such as smart thermostats, home theater speakers, etc. The number is only growing.
This is why I keep one of each in my home. By having an Echo, Google Assistant, and an iPhone, I figure I'm able to give everyone access to my data, making it worth less. (</s>)
Reminds me of Operation Paperclip in the United States.
After WWII ended and in amidst a “space race” with Russia, German scientists and other high ranking officials were recruited and placed into well paid positions within the government - most notably NASA. Records of any war crimes they may have committed during WWII were wiped away/ignored.
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 president hired by a man in an ongoing battle with the president.