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Amazon and CIA ink cloud deal
- skcin7 14y agoBarackObama.com is hosted with Amazon Web Services as well. We can know by examining the domain servers when you look at the [whois record](http://whois.domaintools.com/barackobama.com http://whois.domaintools.com/barackobama.com) for that domain. (On a related note, the domain registrar used is GoDaddy) It makes sense - government needs to host their files somehow, as we are moving into this digital age. I don't see anything wrong with it, though it will further cement Amazon's standing as a big business superpower.
- andreyf 14y agoOff-topic: (foo)[url] syntax only works on reddit, on HN I usually put something like this [1] 1. url
- Semaphor 14y agoIt's markdown, a few more sites use that syntax. HN uses formatdoc which is a very small subset of markdown.
- gknoy 14y agoThank you! I've been wondering how people do italics and the like. Your post helped me find an HN comment [1] which discussed the Arc source code for highlighting. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=606843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=606843 2: http://arcfn.com/doc/app.html#markdown http://arcfn.com/doc/app.html#markdown
- Semaphor 14y agoNo problem, not sure if it's linked somewhere but there is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
- jlgaddis 14y agoThat tells you that barackobama.com is using Amazon's Route 53 for DNS services. This, however, shows that they are using AWS (EC2) for hosting: $ host -t a barackobama.com barackobama.com has address 50.19.226.77 $ host 50.19.226.77 77.226.19.50.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ec2-50-19-226-77.compute-1.amazonaws.com.
- thejosh 14y agoThere is a difference between a public facing website and what the CIA will use AWS for.
- bitwize 14y agoWell, there goes my trust for Amazon. Also love how the GAO's IT director is named Dave Powner.
- salman89 14y agoWhy? Because they gained enough clout to close a government contract? If anything, trust should go up.
- rdl 14y agoI 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.
- spoiler 14y agoIf 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.
- vidarh 14y agoBecause 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.
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- hkmurakami 14y agoWow 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.
- derefr 14y agoLook 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.
- rdl 14y agoThe 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.
- dsl 14y agoYou might be interested in Parallel Homomorphic Encryption [PDF: http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/596.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.
- Helianthus 14y ago...It sounds like the CIA is being a secretive, but normal customer. I came in here expecting firm proof that the CIA was using Amazon to spy on my Prime subscription. (I guess I assume they can do that anyway.) But where's my free outrage?
- rhizome 14y agoThe fox is inside the henhouse now.
- sliverstorm 14y agoThe fox was always inside the henhouse. The fox just agreed to pay discount prices for some of the chickens. Kidding aside, doesn't this seem like exactly the sort of move you would want your government agencies to make? Take advantage of free-market services where appropriate, and not get all "NIH"?
- geekam 14y ago>>> and not get all "NIH" What do you mean by this? I did not get this reference.
- sliverstorm 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here
- jamesjporter 14y agoHaha I work in the life sciences and I thought the GP was referring to the National Institutes of Health, which was confusing!
- willismichael 14y agoAt one point in time I knew some people that did contract work at National Institutes of Health, and the way they talked about it, NIH might as well stand for Not Invented Here.
- michaelrhansen 14y agoNot easy to be a vendor for Federal Intelligence with tremendous audit and compliance review, wonder how long it took for them to seal the deal?
- epoxyhockey 14y agoNot easy to be a vendor for Federal Intelligence I'm sure that a contract worth $600 million over 10 years would change one's tune. The depressing thing, as a taxpayer, is that this AWS contract is probably just a fun $60M/year toy for TLA's to play around with.
- jgross206 14y agoTLA?
- ynniv 14y agoThree Letter Agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc)
- epoxyhockey 14y agoThree Letter Agency. It's a generic term to refer to CIA, FBI and NSA. Though these days it can probably refer to many other members of Homeland Security.
- youngerdryas 14y agoAmazon is about to lose a lot of tin foil hat customers, but they are probably painful to have as customers anyway.
- smokeyj 14y agoThe tin foil type already assumes their images and routers are backdoored. Not that.. I could relate..
- youngerdryas 14y agoI am a bit of a recovering hatter, CSPAN junkie, misanthrope. It's pretty debilitating. Reality is too broad to fully grasp, just get a sense of it and filter if necessary.
- batgaijin 14y agoCome on. Just admit that the tech could be beyond consideration.
- theorique 14y agoThey probably fear the cloud anyway, and only run a server in a faraday cage in a bunker in their basement.
- fitzpasd 14y agoWhile they might lose the extreme tin foil hat customers, this deal will only serve to enhance their trustworthiness as a company. "The CIA trusts Amazon with THEIR data...heck, so should I." etc.
- lignuist 14y agoThis might make access to the rest of the data stored by Amazon more effective.
- WestCoastJustin 14y agoThere is already a AWS GovCloud (US) Region [1], which is segregated from the conventional/general regions. This region is specific to US government agencies with improved security. Maybe the CIA would like something special for US intelligence agencies (i.e. an AWS GovCloud (classified/top secret) Region)? There is obvious advantages to the cloud when it comes to government procurement/life cycle management headaches. There is also an Introducing AWS GovCloud on YouTube [2], it's worth a watch if you are interested. [1] http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/ http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/ [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0av2mvYq5I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0av2mvYq5I
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- batgaijin 14y agoWhy was this announced?
- aashaykumar92 14y agoI think we'll start seeing more deals like this. It is no secret that the government(at least the Obama administration) is, rightfully so, moving in a forward and open direction regarding technology. They are starting to accept the fact that government solutions can be found externally, and many times through citizens' softwares/ideas. If you don't agree, look at these facts: President Obama hired a CTO, the CTO opened up a fellowship program that is an applied-to program which purely looks to solving government problems. Now a CIA deal with Amazon. To me, this is all positive and forward-thinking...they can use everyday citizens and companies to enhance their operations securely and quickly. And yes, we just have to hope it is not used to spy but hey, I'd take the risk in trusting that they care more about our safety than spying on us all the time.
- gknoy 14y ago> we just have to hope it is not used to spy but hey, I'd take the risk in trusting that they care more about our safety than spying on us all the time. Given the federal government's past behavior regarding domestic communication, I think it might be more prudent to behave on the assumption that they ARE spying on us all the time. They tell us that they only look at the info they've collected about us if is connected with communications with overseas persons of interest -- but that implies that they will have already collected it. It's the only convenient way to have a well-populated history of activity for $Person.
- dsl 14y ago> moving in a forward and open direction regarding technology Don't confuse cloud and open. They refuse to even acknowledge it publicly, this is just another vendor contract for storage and compute resources.
- telecuda 14y agoWe sell to many federal/intel agencies and are seeing customers choose Amazon GovCloud over on-site storage 3:1. While security is of great importance, it has more to do with the trust in your business relationship than where bits are stored at the end of the day.
- flrpsrmblrb 14y agoI wonder if the CIA will have much of a sense of humor about it whenever their stuff goes down for hours and yet the AWS status page shows all green, perhaps at most with a tiny little "note" icon badging one of the green lights (if they are lucky).
- siculars 14y agoAm I the only one who thinks this reads like an article in The Onion?
- spoiler 14y agoI was thinking the same, actually.
- ynniv 14y agoIt must be nice to spend $600M of taxpayer money without having to tell them what you're spending it on.
- spoiler 14y agoFrigging auto correct. I meant terrorist dicks.
- jlgaddis 14y agoOnce I got to the bottom, I finally realized what this was about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5404746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5404746
- gojomo 14y agoSomething I find darkly humorous about cloud data centers marketed to certain government agencies is how prominently they advertise that they are "outside the 50-mile blast zone" from DC. Do they know something we don't? For example: http://www.carpathiahosting.com/carpathia-hosting-announces-new-virginia-datacenter http://www.carpathiahosting.com/carpathia-hosting-announces-...