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Amazon is about to effectively receive a sole source DOD contract for 10 billion for "cloud services". They have been supplying AWS to intelligence agencies for

• mc32 8y ago
  Because politics. It’s an election year and people are manoeuvering for position. Obama had children in these detention camps, Feinstein and just about any democrat in government more than ten years has had tough stances on illegal immigration, but, now of course with Trump it’s different. Snowden, Assange both shed light on massive surveillance and the outrage lasted a week. Now Assange and Snowden are seen in a less positive light as well by the same people who hailed them as defenders of freedom and transparency. People are fickle.
  • learc83 8y ago
    Under Obama, occasionally we had a few children seperated from their parents and placed in detention camps. In the last 6 weeks we had over 2000 children seperated. There was a change in policy from: we don't generally presecute parents with children, to: prosecute all parents with children. You don't think that change could have had anything to do with people's outrage?
• confounded 8y ago
  Because a data center for the DOD is largely invisible. The suggestion that facial recognition cameras are pointed in the faces of ordinary Americans, just in case they do something the cops don’t like, is a pretty extraordinary proposition for a US consumer company to make. The Rekognition pitch is encouraging the use of a specific controversial practice, rather than abstractly aiding the general compute capabilities of a large (if controversial to some) government department.