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Comment by mattzito | Hacker News Reader

She's an independent board member. She does not have the ability, in practice, to do anything other than vote on compensation and various other corporate policies.

And if all it takes to get dropbox execs to turn over data is fiscal threats from a board member who is a former government employee, then they were going to give up long before Condi shows up on the board.

EDIT: and I just want to be clear. If you just don't like the idea of having someone who was involved with the war in Iraq/Afghanistan on the board of a company, you're entitled to your opinion (though I think it's pretty hard to be secretary of state or any other position of power in the govenrment without being involved in something evil).

But I find the idea that somehow Condi's presence on the board an indicator that they'll disclose my data to the government borderline ludicrous.

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But why is she a board member? Who hired her? You make it sound like she was forced on Dropbox by outside forces, and they completely disagree with her. In reality, Dropbox hired her, so they do not completely disagree with her.

It's not just about Rice, it's about what this says about Dropbox.

I did not mean to give the opinion that I thought Dropbox was forced to hire Condi. Nor did I intend to suggest that Dropbox agrees or disagrees with her.

Here's what I think. I think Dropbox said, "As we try to beef up our credibility with large enterprises and government agencies vs. Box.net and Google and other companies, it would be helpful if we had a board member with some street cred that we could use as a selling point with large CEOs, CIOs, and other senior tech people".

This is not an uncommon thing. At that point, you look out across the landscape of "famous people" you can put on your board. It can't be anyone who is affiliated with a competitor, and there's a lot of competitors. It has to be someone with name recognition who also is willing to be a board member and has some sort of leadership experience.

At some point, Condi's name cropped up with a few others, they met her, thought she was smart, she had the time and availability, and they brought her on.

I bet someone at some point said, "Hey, you know, are we concerned with the affiliation with GWB?" and they thought about it they said, "Hey, look, she was SECRETARY OF STATE, the first female african american one, she's a former stanford professor, she's a genius, surely people will recognize that this is different than her work with GWB"

Thank you. Mrs Rice isn't what would make Dropbox unsafe, it's their lack of encryption and other insecure practises. A quick DuckDuckGo search yielded these articles:

http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities-and-threats/dropb... http://www.wired.com/2011/05/dropbox-ftc/ http://thehackernews.com/2013/07/hacking-dropbox-account-vul...

(This is just a semi-random selection.)

You are seriously reaching here.

Let's assume, she is an ambitious person that will work for whoever is paying her.

Wouldn't it make more sense, that they hired her because they want her to lobby against the NSA? Who would be better qualified to get some results in those areas?

From Dropbox's perspective the wire-tapping saga is just bad for bussiness, and they want to make money. So, it makes sense, they would try to spend money to put a stop to it.

Who would you hire?

Agreed. Usually the motivation to have someone like Rice on your board, is to have more government connections, for the purpose of not doing what the government wants. i.e. Influencing the government, as opposed to it influencing you.

Edit: Admittedly this can be a bargain with the devil, and backfire.

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