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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Well, there goes my trust for Amazon.

Also love how the GAO's IT director is named Dave Powner.

It would be better if CIA just appropriated 3x as much money to build a cloud infrastructure that was 1/5th as good?

That's utterly unrealistic. There is no way there would ever be only a factor of 15 cost/performance difference in IT between a CIA contract and a leading commercial entity in a competitive market. :)

Why? Because they gained enough clout to close a government contract? If anything, trust should go up.

I think he's assuming that since the CIA is now a big customer, Amazon will bend the rules and give the CIA access to data from other customers, or at the very least the CIA will now have better experience in how AWS works so they'll be able to attack AWS customers more effectively themselves.

If they wanted to experience how it works, wouldn't they just be able to sign up under an alias? Also, I am not American, so I might be out of the loop a little, but why does everyone consider CIA to be some big bad wolf like in the films? There are probably people risking their lives (maybe not in an action movie way) right now, trying to make the world a safer place from terrorist ducks.

Because the CIA has a long history of directly and indirectly supporting assassinations, drug trafficking, propping up dictators and other unsavoury actions that puts the CIA very high on the list of organisations that have carried out the most terror activities worldwide.

Sure, they also do good / important work. And it's hard to say if they're still as bad as they used to be, as it'll take decades before the most important details about what they're doing now gets declassified. But their history doesn't exactly give a lot of confidence.

as opposed to the FBI under Hover which did a lot of nasty things to US citizens as opposed to the CIA.

I am sure that CIA and SIS officers must get annoyed some times as how the FBI and SS (MI5) are normally the heroes and the CIA /SIS are the bad guys.

If you think the CIA wasn't able to get access to any information they wanted.... I mean, this doesn't change that. They were able to before, and can now. All major cloud providers work with various levels of government for law enforcement and anti-terrorism stuff.

If anything, this tells me that the CIA didn't actually have enough computing power and/or competency before to do it on their own.

What did you trust Amazon to do or not to do before, that you no longer trust now?

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