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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

Wow if there was one area where I thought the cloud would be the last to permeate, it was the federal intelligence and defense sectors.

I wonder what this means for Oracle/IBM/other on-site vendors over the next 2-3 decades.

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Look at it this way: the CIA/NSA are pretty much the only parts of the government who know enough about computer security to properly assess the risks of using something like AWS, and therefore declare it safe for them to use.

Any other department would just say "nope that sounds unsafe and I have no idea what to look into to decide otherwise", and so ignore AWS (or basically any other modern technology) completely.

The NSA's IT (overall, and security) has gone way downhill, by all accounts I've seen, in the past 20 years. It's no longer superior to good commercial practice in theory, just has more money for the same mission.

There have been lots of accounts of how badly they've botched acquisition problems, and it's all essentially run by contractors now.

Source? I'd be very interested to read more.

William Binney, and other reports about Trailblazer.

I've also talked to a lot of NSA IT employees. They obviously can't divulge anything classified or even sensitive, but are always happy to get back to the commercial world.

You might be interested in Parallel Homomorphic Encryption [PDF: http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/596.pdf], a Microsoft Research paper covering MapReduce on encrypted data.

It's entirely possible to move encrypted data into the cloud, process it, retrieve the results, then decrypt. Welcome to the future.

Yeah but… If you had a $600million budget, wouldn't you just call up Amazon and say "Hey, you know your Availability Zones and Regions? How much to build me a couple of them, along with all your management and accounting software, so we can run pretty much all of AWS (front and back end) inside our own data centers?"

It'd be much easier for recruitment, to be able to advertise for developers/data-scientists/sysadmins with AWS experience, than just about _any_ alternative…

That's probably what someone asked for. By the time it got approved, GSA signoff, and past contracts and vendor management, they have a micro instance in us-east-1 to run www.cia.gov off of.

It's "possible". The problem is that the number of known operations that works with homomorphic encryption is so far so small as to be mostly useless. It'll take a lot of research before it becomes practical, if it ever does, for anything but very specialised operations.

History has shown that the NSA is 15-20 years ahead of the commercial sector when it comes to cryptographic research.

"The cloud" in this case is simply a private data centre with whatever management and provisioning tools Amazon can provide. It's not the CIA using public resources on AWS.

It means very little for Oracle/IBM etc. Oracle has their own virtualization solutions in Solaris support for Zones, KVM etc. (and other cloud vendors have built on that - see e.g. Joyent's "SmartOS") but might be more interested in selling application appliances that can run on these solutions. IBM would love to sell in expensive consulting services to build private clouds like these too and have a lot of experience at scale with massive systems (and have existing deployments of mainframes of theirs with 1000+ Linux VM's on a single mainframe, as well as plenty of smaller solutions, as well as hybrid setups).

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