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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

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klelatti·

It’s possible of course that:

- the contract is with a UK AWS subsidiary

- uses UK based datacenters

- is subject to appropriate oversight by UK nationals

- excludes really sensitive intelligence data

Sure this adds a dependency on a non UK company but is it a security risk - possibly not. Is GCHQ dependent on US / Taiwanese manufactured semiconductors? Is that a risk - maybe but it’s a manageable one.

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- is subject to appropriate oversight by UK nationals

Have you seen the nationals allegedly running our country? We're screwed.

Very good point. At least the contract wasn’t awarded via a VIP channel overseen by Michael Gove. Or then again who knows …?

I’m not holding out much hope, truth be told!

Chancellor's Rishi family is actually doing business directly with Jeff Bezos, so...

Well its almost certain that

- This is an air gapped environment with effectively a unidirectional flow of software bits into the place at infrequent intervals

- Only cleared UK personnel operate it and the regular AWS workforce has no access except for escorted sessions in rare cases.

- No data leaves, i.e. not even operational logs etc

That's the standard for such installations.

It's probably the case that AWS have all the infrastructure developed to do all this already - expect the NSA would require this too?

Those types of jobs typically require the employees to get a security clearance.

Exactly, it's likely a very specific very tight contract. It wont be just sitting in a consumer AWS data center.

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