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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Blocking direct competition is one thing, but what if Twitter starts blocking tweets about VW electric vehicles and promoting tweets about Tesla? It's a very strange setup - although not that different from Bezos' and the Washington Post removing all investigative journalism into the CIA / NSA while AWS seeks large services contracts from those government entities.

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Washington Post removing all investigative journalism into the CIA / NSA while AWS seeks large services contracts from those government entities

That happened?

The last major work of investigative journalism of that nature at the post was "Top Secret America" with lead reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin (2010):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Secret_America

Feel free to point to anything even vaguely similar since Bezos took over the post.

When was the one before? They also didn't publish one for 3 years after 2010 and before Bezos bought the Post.

AWS got $10 billion from the NSA last year. Do you really think Bezos' Washington Post is going to be publishing anything that might derail contracts of that value?

Why would NSA stop using AWS just because WaPo wrote something about NSA? It doesn’t make sense, really.

Only thing that should really matter to NSA in regards to using AWS is, does AWS offer the products they need, at the price they want to pay.

Maybe what matters to NSA bureaucrats making contracting decisions is knowing that Bezos will give them lucrative private sector jobs? Maybe exposing these public-private relationships between black-budget agencies and private tech outfits is something Post editors are now reluctant to examine in any detail?

> "Amazon today elected Keith Alexander, a retired four-star general of the U.S. Army, as it newest board director. Alexander was previously director of the National Security Agency and chief of the Central Security Service from 2005 to 2014. (Sep 9, 2020)"

Just a coincidence, nothing to see here.

>Maybe what matters to NSA bureaucrats making contracting decisions is knowing that Bezos will give them lucrative private sector jobs?

So wouldn't that mean the last thing they'd do is raise a fuss about what some random WaPo reporter, that Bezos has almost certainly never met, wrote which has probably not even gone viral? Just ignore it and give AWS the contracts...no?

To be fair, WaPo (much like NPR) was always more a place to go for geopolitics whitepapers masquerading as reporting, it was usually places like NYT, The Guardian, or Intercept the that did adversarial journalism. Bezos didn't change much in that regard.

(Though I did cancel my subscription when they kept insisting on doing tracking even after I paid the guy... if you're gonna be like that when I try to hand you money for your information, I'll steal it and not give you a shred of what you wanted except for a bullshit IP and a fingerprint that claims I'm running WebTV.)

> adversarial

Watergate.

Also my impression has been that NYTimes definitely does geopolitics - Earth laughably and famously turned "flat" in NYTimes editorial pages*, not the Washington Post's /g.

The Intercept can not possibly be classed in the same group (of which I am not exactly a fan, but fair is fair).

New York Times is the establishment's (the fabled East Coast Liberals of yore) ideological platform.

Washington Post is the establishments institutional (i.e. Congress, CIA, Pentagon, State Department, ...) organ.

Wall Street Journal represents the establishment's (petite) capitalist class -- this is why things like Theranos get pounded on by WSJ: the petite capitalist class depends on the fairness of the system. Things like Theranos (and FTX) damage the faith in the system.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/its-a-flat-world...

>Watergate.

Fair point, my bad -- I'm a millennial, that's before my time, I'm giving my thoughts as someone who became old enough to stop violating COPPA around "Indecision 2000".

>Also my impression has been that NYTimes definitely does geopolitics - Earth laughably and famously turned "flat" in NYTimes editorial pages

My impression was WaPo is run by the CIA, and NYT is run by like, at least nine eyes[1]. (With the usual France vs USA bullshit continuing on from the cold war playing out in the opinions pages)

>Wall Street Journal represents the establishment's (petite) capitalist class -- this is why things like Theranos get pounded on by WSJ: the petite capitalist class depends on the fairness of the system.

I can't comment either way on WSJ because heir paywall works too well LOL -- I haven't read it in years.

Forbes was good tho -- that's how I discovered one of my favorite journalists before they moved on to the Times. And I'm not exactly uh... petite... nor particularly capitalist myself. I'm a fan of democracy. Representative or otherwise, take your... pick... but capitalism is an economic system, not a political system, and conflating the two is the path to totalitarianism IMHO :-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#9_Eyes,_14_Eye...

archive.is - ft, wsj, foreign affairs. Have at it! FA has specially good fare, in fact, well worth the visit to the archives.

p.s. just read the whole thing. When did I conflate? Some do however reasonably point out that power comes out of the barrel of a gun and you need money for guns ..

>archive.is - ft, wsj, foreign affairs. Have at it! FA has specially good fare, in fact, well worth the visit to the archives.

Thanks, I'll use this.

>p.s. just read the whole thing. When did I conflate?

I'm just making conversation, it's not intended to be a debate where either side is going to be "correct" :-)

Both NYT and WaPo fail to allow true lateral thinking on their pages except for "special occasions".

>Some do however reasonably point out that power comes out of the barrel of a gun and you need money for guns ...

Power does come from the barrel of a gun, in a way, but people don't like to feel coerced. If you kill someone, their children, their parents, and their friends will be your enemies for life.

Real ultimate power comes from having untracable, encrypted communications paired with an opaque social graph, so your opponents won't know who to use that gun on other than themselves to end their sadness.

Anyways, we're far from where we started... thanks for the archive link... I will definitely use it.

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