Big Brother is Being Increasingly Outsourced To Silicon Valley, Says Report (fastcompany.com) 70
The federal and local governments have long relied on private companies for defense and law enforcement technologies, from Lockheed Martin jetfighters to Booz Allen Hamilton data analysis. But increasingly, the government is expanding beyond the usual defense contractors to the company that also provides free shipping and online TV. From a report: "The ... thing that was shocking for me was to understand just how the federal authorizations are allowing Amazon to have such a monopoly over the storage of government information," says Jacinta Gonzalez, field organizer for immigrant advocacy group Mijente. Along with the National Immigration Project and the Immigrant Defense Project, Mijente funded a new report entitled, "Who's Behind ICE?: The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations." Its findings are based on documents such as contracts, memoranda, and corporate financial reports --which are publicly available but take a lot of digging to decipher.
While Amazon plays the leading role, the report also details the involvement of companies including Peter Thiel's Palantir, NEC, and Thomson Reuters in storing, transferring, and analyzing data on both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens. The U.S. government is moving its databases from federal facilities to cloud providers, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS), raising concerns about accountability.
While Amazon plays the leading role, the report also details the involvement of companies including Peter Thiel's Palantir, NEC, and Thomson Reuters in storing, transferring, and analyzing data on both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens. The U.S. government is moving its databases from federal facilities to cloud providers, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS), raising concerns about accountability.
Mijente (Score:3, Insightful)
You must be kidding me. Does AmiMojo work there?
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Unfortunately these days its hard to tell. People that would otherwise be rational people and probably enjoyable to conversate with just spew hate and garbage because someone else has a different stance on something. Nobody is allowed to be their own person anymore. You have to think exactly how they do or you get dehumanized. It's really starting to get repulsive. Its ok to be an individual and have your own thoughts and beliefs.
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If you are "pro-everybody", the term becomes meaningless. If you are not pro-everybody, it does discriminate and is bad.
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Also, the use of the term "pro-queer" is offensive.
I've noticed that you are quite easily offended about pretty much everything. Maybe lighten up a bit?
Black Lives Matter? Not to black people!! (Score:1)
"Black lives matter? "Up and coming" black rapper in 70% black Baltimore, who advocated nonviolence, murdered by black male" [blogspot.com]
If black people want their lives to matter to whites they first need to act like they matter to each other. Blacks account for 53.1% of all solved murders in 2017 (FBI crime stats) and primarily it's black males murdering other black males. Although it may "comfort" you to know that black people murder whites about twelve times more often than white people murder blacks. They're a
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I'm gonna say that has to do with less white people getting stopped by cops. I don't have time to find the numbers, FBI stats iirc. Its not because of racism either.
Re:Black Lives Matter? Not to black people!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you time travel here from the 1800s or something? Is your next argument going to be 'look at the shape(s) of their skulls [wikipedia.org], this proves they're primitive savages?'
Look, the following things are true globally speaking about crime: people with lower socio-economic status commit more crimes. Pretty much universally most violence, especially gang-violence, is committed by young, disenfranchised males. Got no job and no access to education? Why not join a gang or a criminal organization. I mean, people prefer not being poor to being poor, but if you've no means of entering the education system (for example due to higher education being too expensive) often criminal activity is seen by young males as the best/most efficient route upwards in terms of social mobility and wealth.
Look at developing countries and countries with higher murder rates than the West or the US. Southern america has a lot of problems. Do you think it's black people killing each other in the cartel wars in central and southern america? Do you think a high amount of black people is the reason for example Russia, and a lot of the other former Soviet states have such high violent crime statistics? Or could it possibly be that these are regions with extremely high poverty rates and income/wealth inequality which is fertile ground for social problems and organized violent crime and those who benefit from it?
However, I have read in the past that in the US the poverty level alone does not explain the differences in stats, because the black population is over-represented in the stats even when controlling for income. Now I'm not American and by no means a criminologist, but as someone who works with data, I'm always interested in a data-driven approach, so I did some googling about racial crime data and economics and came across this post titled racial differences in homicide rates are poorly explained by economics [wordpress.com], lets have a read shall we?
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If you gave a shit about your own skin mattering, you wouldn't be posting as AC.
Just what everyone needs: advice in race relations from a translucent asshole who squirts through risibly Spartan "condensed" matter, and who moans like an abandoned, one-eyed walrus in the attic on dark, damp nights, because his entire social life consists of roaming the countryside rattling chains, but he doesn't want his last moth-eaten bedsheet to end up smelling of mildew as that might arouse the sleeping scent-hounds of co
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Where does their community officially end?
Just ask them if they're "pro-america" or "pro-white" or "pro-male". The boundaries of their "tolerance" should become clear very quickly.
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I'm gonna add Stallman's Kind Communications guidelines to my sig. You clearly need reminding of basic stuff like only addressing things people actually say, not things you imagine they would say.
Good thing the competition pulled out (Score:3)
"The ... thing that was shocking for me was to understand just how the federal authorizations are allowing Amazon to have such a monopoly over the storage of government information,"
Good thing Google pulled out of the bidding to do anything about that! And Microsoft employees lobbying for MS to also pull out.
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Well. it the government spending money wisely. Rather than ICT how about a $500 cash to any citizen who points out a confirmed illegal, and $1000 if caught working illegally (the employer can pay that!). Hold a national illegal week dob-in-a-thon.
How about the IRS pay for Pacific and Panama paper fat cash rewards. One suspects mining the AWS cloud for emails and such indicating tax fraud would quickly pay for any 'wall'.
Amazon deserve the monopoly, they started with a 7 year lead. But all the IT informatio
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Indeed. This highlights the silliness of expecting corporations to "fix" a democratically elected government. The voters should be doing that.
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"The ... thing that was shocking for me was to understand just how the federal authorizations are allowing Amazon to have such a monopoly over the storage of government information,"
Good thing Google pulled out of the bidding to do anything about that! And Microsoft employees lobbying for MS to also pull out.
Yeah, it COULD have been a google or ms monopoly instead.
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Yeah, it COULD have been a google or ms monopoly instead.
Considering the contract is explicitly written to award more than one provider, that's not exactly likely.
Do you blame surveillance video for B&E? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who's Behind ICE?: The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations.
Why not publish a report on Who's Behind the County Sheriffs?: The Video Equipment Companies Fueling Breaking and Entering Arrests
Seriously, the deportation issue is a combination of people who do not respect the law and a broken immigration system which nobody seems to really want to fix.
Sure, progressives make a lot of noise about it, but you can bet that they have no interest in actually seeing it fixed, as at the moment it is one of the few things they can use to rally their base. Besides, when Democrats had both houses of Congress and the presidency, they did not lift a finger to fix the immigration problem. Here is an excerpt from Obama's 2010 State of the Union:
And we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system â" to secure our borders, enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nations.
Of course, if he said those same words today he would be branded a xenophobic racist by his own party. In fact, if I had not said up front that they were Obama's words from just 8 years ago, most would probably assume they were Trump's words from 8 days ago. And, of course, nobody wants to mention how ICE under Obama deported far more illegal immigrants that ICE under Trump. Clearly, the "abolish ICE" crowd only cares now because they don't like Trump.
Of course, the Republicans right now have both houses of congress and the White House and don't seem to have much interest in fixing immigration either.
It sure makes a handy political prop.
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a broken immigration system which nobody seems to really want to fix.
Perhaps because most of the "fixes" make the problem worse.
As someone who believes that freedom of movement is an inalienable human right, I certainly don't support any of Trump's proposals.
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Well, I don't know about movement being an inalienable right, but the problem with US immigration is that it's geared to provide employers in certain industries with cheap labor that falls outside legal protections.
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At some point you have to take a stand against the government doing things you don't agree with, or you become like IBM supporting the Nazis. IBM equipment was used to conduct censuses and round up people to be sent to concentration camps and be murdered. If the Nazis had not had access to that technology their operation would not have been so efficient, and their victims fewer in number. It's as black and white as that.
Doubtless IBM didn't know or suspect that was going to happen, but we can learn from the
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Don't U.S. states with large illegal immigrant populations have a vested interest in keeping those large illegal immigrant populations? Political power in the US House of Representatives is apportioned by total population, not just by citizen population. Only citizens can vote in elections, however. The effective power of a citizen's vote in a community with many people who can't vote is greater than one in a community comprised mostly of voting citizens. Isn't this is why the "citizenship" question on
Among the Issues (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, if the government used the resources of AWS for a basic "elastic compute" facility - i.e. to cope with surges in demand of their own in-house compute farms, and if (big if) all the applications that the government ran used a form of Application Level Enryption (ALE) that did not require the use of cloud-provider-owned HSMs, then this looks like a more-or-less conventional facilities outsourcing program.
But what if it's not so clear-cut as that? What if the government stores data in the could, long term? What if the government uses Amazon HSMs to secure their content? By implication, the risk here is that this would give Amazon administrators access to the government's data. Should that happen, the least dangerous thing I'd expect to see is Amazon starting to shut down accounts for anyone on a government watch list. The worst-case scenario is much more significant.
So a big part of the potential issue list for this sort of model will depend significantly upon the architecture that the Cloud providers agree to. Disclosure: I've worked for a very large financial institution that discussed cloud services with Amazon - and they absolutely refused to allow us to host our own HSMs in Amazon data centers. How likely are they to change that answer?
The second question, after the relative safety of the data once it's in the cloud, concerns the way that the government is setting about this sort of procurement. There was, if I recall, some interesting material in the documentation released by Edward Snowden. The short version of this story is that BAH were putting together a proposal to meet a government RFC, in which a BAH technician raised the concern that even though it would be possible to implement the solution as requested, there was no way that the government would be able to interpret all the data the new system would collect. A BAH Manager wrote back, "Look, you're technically correct, OK? But your job isn't to tell the client that their idea won't work, your job is to sell the client whatever the client asks for. Then, next year, when the client realizes that this solution doesn't work, we can sell them an upgrade to fix that problem..."
In other words, there is the danger that some of the providers that tender for this sort of business [and note: I am not for one moment suggesting that any company would certainly do this; rather, I am pointing out an implementation risk] might well be able or tempted to sell a solution to the government that just doesn't work. It's my experience that too often when a government runs a bidding process for a solution, the people responding to the bid know so much more about the topic than the person managing the bid, they run rings around them.
This is particularly relevant because of the subject matter likely involved here. I can easily see the government saying that the entire bidding and outsourcing process has to be classified because "national security", which means that proper accountability controls will be pushed aside.
That would not be good.
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This is one of those "devil in the detail" stories.
Yes, and the article rather vacuously conflated a number of issues. The federal government is using a lot of AWS services as their IT infrastructure under the FedRAMP program https://www.fedramp.gov/ [fedramp.gov], BUT - The data isn't just handed over to Amazon staff; the underlying IT infrastructure is provided by Amazon, and cared for by Amazon staff, but the responsibility for the data rests with the government workers (employees and contractors). To the best of my knowledge, Amazon doesn't get their fingers into
1977 was 40+ years ago (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure the spearhead of moving Big Brother to Silicon Valley was sometime around 1977 with Larry Ellison and Robert Miner holding the handle.