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Comment by morpheuskafka | Hacker News Reader

How come WikiLeaks is distributing this? I don't see any meaningful connection to government transparency or even corporate transparency... this has nothing to do with abuse of power, it is completely normal and rightful for a company to keep its infrastructure locations secret. Some of this could be found through public records, etc. and that fine to post, but internal operating procedures are not.

Sure, it's fun to look at. But the only people who will really benefit from this being leaked are AWS competitors and malicious actors intending to disrupt international communications.

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Amazon is making local governments to compete against each others for data center locations, so it's in the public interest to know the locations. For example, you can compare at the location, electricity cost, infrastructure, tax schemes and tax revenue etc. in local level and see how important they are for Amazon and maybe even estimate the benefit of having Amazon.

The location of Amazon data centers is not hidden from it's large competitors, or any adversary.

Another perhaps less known aspect of these tax giveaways is that the details are kept secret. They are often embarrassingly huge giveaways, that's one of the reasons they aren't public [1]. I wish we could stop corporate giveaways. I love the software work that amazon is pioneering, they are pushing the envelope, doing great work, enabling companies to grow and do new things. But they are one of the richest companies in the world, they shouldn't get tax credits, imho. I don't think this location info should make it risky.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hq2-candidates-keep-p...

I absolutely agree. Essentially, corporations with huge revenue streams get major tax advantages that are not available to local companies in exchange for "creating jobs".

It turns out that each of those jobs is so costly to taxpayers that the only real benefit is for the politicians that announce the "partnerships" (and the receiving company, obviously).

Here's a couple of interesting articles on the matter:

- https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/us/how-local-taxpayers-ba...

- https://www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-interactive/2018/jul/0...

Then shouldn’t they publish the documents showing those giveaways instead which surely makes more sense, doesn’t put AWS customers at potential risk and holds local governments accountable?

The simple thing is to put anything you get your hands on online under the opaque umbrella of public interest. The responsible thing to do is to run with it, find the local governments in those areas and file requests for the records of any transactions to be made public. That would be in public interest. Dumping anything that has a SECRET written on it is not always a good thing.

> AWS customers at potential risk

This line of reasoning is the one that powers at be want us to partake in. It normalizes surveillance in preventing some unknown danger.

Putting AWS data centers on a map is not a danger to customers.

I'm not sure why Russian intelligence cares about AWS datacenter locations.

This has largely been an "open secret" for a long time. If you want to know where an AWS datacenter is, ask local taxi drivers and pizza delivery folks. These things are huge, and very hard to hide.

Which assumes that you know the locale. I imagine that there is one in Ashburn, Virginia, maybe an hour's drive from here. But what pizza delivery operation would I ask? I guess I could hail a cab at Dulles and ask to be taken there.

The locale is "the region as announced publicly," and anyone who's in a position to use this information is going to pay more than one person to start digging. It's a crowdsourcing problem.

Doesn't the CIA have a contract with Amazon to use AWS?

So?

That is the connection to government transparency.

The CIA is storing massive amounts of our data somewhere, so shouldn't we have the right to know where?

I don't believe so, not if the risk to the general public is great enough.

The public is far more at risk with the CIA around to begin with, so long as it continues to carry out bullshit interventions around the world that so often come back to bite us. The primary impediment to enumerating these risks is the CIA's lack of transparency.

Why? Why does knowing where it is located a "right"? I feel US citizens have a right to know who is storing the data, and the parameters they must follow. Also you should have a right to know where the data is located, as in "in the USA". But beyond that, isn't having the actual address a security concern?

I don't think the CIA's version of AWS is stored in these datacenters. It's a totally separate region, likely with special physical security measures and oversight rules. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/announcing-the-new...

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/announcing-the-new...

Yes, the US government does, but the AWS Cloud for government is mostly (entirely?) not included here. This list is also highly incomplete otherwise unrelated to government as well (us-east-2 region isn't covered at all for example).

I don't know the answer, but the question works equally well flipped around. If they have it, why not release it? Hiding the information to ward of malicious actors and AWS competitors is security by obscurity, and not reliable. It's nearly impossible to hide a giant data center, so a dedicated person can track most of them down anyway.

I'd be more sympathetic if Amazon weren't holding a competition to see which city would give them the biggest tax breaks. It's only fair that everybody sees what other deals they're getting.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear and all that.

But also, voters might be interested to know if Amazon has a large mostly-invisible presence in their city.

It's not like you can hide a datacenter from aerial photos or space based photography. Giant air handling units and 1 megawatt+ sized generators are huge. You could theoretically camouflage one, but they're built in a cost-sensitive manner, it would cost millions to actually "hide" a datacenter from IMINT techniques.

From what I've seen Wikileaks releases all kinds of stuff that has nothing to do with the things you mentioned.

As for the AWS information, I'd be hesitant to have my data hosted at the one in Oregon, it's right next to a bombing range! One bombing mishap...

If you follow the AWS best practices you have nothing to worry. Hint: use multiple availability zones and regions

WikiLeaks may not have the mission statement you think it does.

It's from 2015.

It says it right in the article.

> Currently, Amazon is one of the leading contenders for an up to $10 billion contract to build a private cloud for the Department of Defense.

Amazon aims to partner with the DoD, that makes them quasi governmental.

Sure, but I'd have the same question if Wikileaks published the locations of all DoD internal server farms. What possible importance does that information have beyond its potential to compromise security?

> its potential to compromise security?

It's a bingo.

It's a trillion dollar company headed by the wealthiest man in the world with ties to the pentagon and owns the washingtonpost.

Why is it that whenever wikileaks leaks anything, people whine about it?

> AWS competitors benefit

Wikileaks desires a world in which there is high competition between web service providers so none of them gets too powerful. This is consistent with their objectives.

Wikileaks desires whatever putin tells them to desire.

Is there any evidence that Wikileaks works for Russia, as opposed to some other nation state, eg China or Iran?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Allegations_of_Russi...

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