06: Amazon's Deals with Global Intelligence Agencies

through its home security technology. Today, though, we'll be looking at Amazon's dealings with the actual spy agencies, specifically America's CIA and the UK's m I five and m I six. To understand how Amazon works with these intelligence agencies, for we need to look into Amazon Web Services or a WUS. AWS will feature a lot in this episode, so let's hear what Amazon has to say about it. AWS is

the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. Millions of customers trust AWS to power their infrastructure and applications. Organizations of every type in size are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster. AWS gives you more services and more features within those services than

any other cloud provider. This makes it faster, easier, and more cost effective to move your existing applications to the cloud and to build anything you can imagine, from infrastructure technologies like compute, storage and databases to emerging technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, data lakes and analytics, and Internet of things. Building on AWS means you can

choose the right tool for the jar. With AWS, you can leverage the latest technologies to experiment and innovate more quickly. We are continually accelerating our pace of innovation to invent entirely new technologies you can use to transform your business. Our infrastructure is built to satisfy the security standards of

the most risk sensitive organizations. To put it simply, AWS is the world's most used cloud computing platform, the cloud being a technology that allows users to access the same files and applications from almost any device wherever they are. So what does Amazon's AWS have to do with the CIA. Well, in Amazon secured a contract to build the c I, a six hundred million dollar cloud computing technology that would service all seventeen of the U S Intelligence agencies. Those

agencies benefiting from Amazon's cloud technology are as follows. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Energy, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, Air

Force Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance, Army Military Intelligence, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Marine Corps Intelligence, and the Coast Guard Intelligence. Every one of those agencies is using AWS created services by Amazon, the same company who has had scandal after scandal regarding the improper use of the data, video, and sound files of millions of people across the world that they have stored in their cloud via their home

security products the Chat. Amazon's deal with the CIA to build them a robust cloud computing technology was first handled in secret. When it became public, there were a few interesting legal issues, as explained in an Atlantic article about the deal by Frank Concole Quote. After weighing bids from Amazon Web Services, IBM, and an unnamed third vendor, the CIA awarded a contract to a WS worth up to six hundred million dollars over a period of up to

ten years. IBM filed a bid protest with g a O that the watchdog eventually upheld in June, forcing the CIA to reopen bids to both companies for the contract. A legal struggle between Amazon and Big Blue ensued, and a WS filed a lawsuit against the federal government in July, claiming the g a O sus statement was a flawed decision.

In October, US Court of Federal Claims, Judge Thomas Wheeler sided with Amazon and overturned g ao's decision to force the CIA to read but the contrast, Big Blue went home. A WS claimed a victory under the deal's original financial specs. Nearly eighteen months after the procurement was first released, the CIA and Amazon went to work end quote. Now to give you an idea of how big this Amazon CIA deal was, let me tell you what the c i

A Chief Information Officer, Douglas Wolfe said about it. He called it, quote one of the most important technology procurements in recent history. End quote. Well, you might be thinking, well, it's the CIA simply leasing technology from Amazon. Bear in mind that the Amazon engineers oversee all the hardware for this CIA cloud tech. Why Well, because a w S actually owns the hardware, and they're the ones responsible for

maintaining it. That said, let's take a look at some of the previous security issues Amazon has had with online security, including hearts of its a WS technology. January, hacker broke the security of an Amazon owned online store, exposing the information twenty four million customers. December fourteen, hackers from Anonymous leaked thirteen thousand user names and passwords for Amazon accounts,

along with several other websites. November twenty fifteen, Amazon found a credible security risk was forced to reset the past words of thousands of its users. July hacker claimed to a brief an Amazon server to obtain the personal details of eighty thousand Kindle users. Amazon said the breach wasn't legit, to which the hacker responded saying the server was owned by Amazon and that the details could be used to

disable all of the leaked accounts. November eighteen, a major data breach of customer information was announced, in which Amazon claimed a technical issue led to customers private information accidentally being posted online. This information included customers names and email addresses. July, a Capital One server using Amazon's a WS was hacked by a former Amazon employee. Information of over one million customers was exposed, including social security numbers, bank account numbers,

credit card transaction records, and credit scores. The hacker was allegedly an AWS systems engineer. Amazon denied any responsibility for the attack. September, Amazon users in Japan begin to see the order histories, purchase details, shopper names, and delivery addresses of other Amazon customers. There were nothing to do with them. This lasted a few days until Amazon said they'd fix

the problem without fully explaining what had happened. January twenty, several Amazon employees were fired after it was discovered they'd been sharing sensitive customer data with a third party. Several customer email addresses and phone numbers were later leaked online. Again, Amazon has never fully explained what happened with this incident. February, a large AWS database that wasn't secured was discovered online. It held sensitive data or millions of customers in Europe

for Amazon and for other companies. Names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, payment histories, invoice links, and partial credit card numbers were all left unsecured. As well as this and Amazon Marketplace web Services authentication token was in the database. As well as an a w S access key I D. October twenty more Amazon employees were fired over a separate incident, but they've been leaking Amazon customer email addresses to a

third party one line. February one third party gained access to logitechs AWS cloud server, which contained backup files to customer management of risk and compliance data for security matters. October one hacker posted one d and twenty eight gigabytes of leaked files from Amazon's Twitch streaming service to a four Chan message board. The files included Twitches source code,

earnings numbers for streamers, and much more. For the job. Now, I know there was a long list, but it was worth going into detail when you consider it's all related to the company that ran a six hundred million dollar cloud text service for the c I, a arguably the most active intelligence agency on Earth. Now, if you're wondering where I'm going with this, things might become clearer when we take a look at some of the ways in which the CIA themselves have spied on people across the world.

This project mocking Bird in nineteen sixty three, for example, Mockingbird was a c I a wire tapping operation initiated by then President John F. Kennedy, the CIA secretly listened into the phone conversations of journalists to uncover their sources. Then there's the time in nineteen sixty nine when the CIA wire tapped anti war activists who were opposed to the conflict in Vietnam. Frankly, there are many examples of

US intelligence agencies spying on its own citizens. One of the most notorious was exposed by whistleblower Edwards Snowden, who showed through stolen documents that the n s A was spying on millions of Americans. Privacy is what gives you the ability to share with the world who you are on your own terms. Privacy is the fountain head of

all others. Front of speech doesn't have a lot of meaning if you can't have a quiet space, a space within yourself, within your mind, within the community of your friends with you to decide what it is that you actually want to say. Without privacy, you don't have anything for yourself. Arguing that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like arguing that you

don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. Now, if you believe that the n s a, the CIA and all the others have moved past all that and would never do it again. Then I guess sleep easy. However, I think it's worth considering that the next wave of technology will probably be used by intelligence agencies the same

way or the others were. What we do know is this, Amazon, a gigantic global company that pretty much openly has no scruples when it comes to abusing its workers and spying on its customers, has contracts were of the CIA to run a cloud network for the data of all seventeen of its intelligence agencies, agencies that also have no scruples on spying on people and harvesting data to serve its own purposes. But don't worry, I'm not about to go

all conspiracy theorists on you. But honestly, it is no secret that the lines between big tech government agencies and mega corporations are becoming increasingly blurred. Facebook and Twitter's constant compliance with both totalitarian regimes and global intelligence agencies has proved this time and again. As we can see, Amazon

is certainly no stranger to this game either. In less than thirty years since it was founded, Amazon went from a company that sells cheap books to one that builds cloud storage databases for the CIA and willingly gives the US police access to its customers home security networks during civil rights protests. When you put all of this into context, I think personally that it starts to feel like we're already running full pel into a grim corporate dystopia. But

that's me. I'm quite cynical now, Americans, don't worry. It's not just you lot that have Amazon team and not with your intelligence agencies. Unfortunately, the same thing is happening in my country in the UK. Last year in one it was revealed in the British media that the country's three main intelligence agencies had contracted Amazon's a WS to host classified data in a deal that the Financial Times newspaper said was quote aimed at boosting the use of data,

analytics and artificial intelligence for espionage end quote. The technology has been taken on by Britain's Government Communications Headquarters or g h c Q, and it will also be used by Britain's the intel agencies, the Secret Intelligence Service or m I six and the Security Service m I five. It will also be used by the Ministry of Defence in joint operations I think. The following quote from the f T sums up many concerns in Britain when it

comes to this deal. Quote. The contract is likely to ignite concerns over sovereignty given that a vast amount of the UK's most secret data will be hosted by a single U S tech company. The agreement, estimated by industry experts to be worth five hundred million pounds to one billion pounds over the next decade, was signed this year. According to four people familiar with the discussions. However, the details are closely guarded and we're not intended to be

made public end quote. At least when in the US the CIA did their deal with Amazon, the figures were out there for the public to see. For us here in the UK, we're not even allowed to know how much of our money as taxpayers went into this deal with Amazon, and they didn't even want the details to get out at all. Sadly, this level of secrecy and

audacity from our government is nothing new. Despite the utterly negligent lack of coverage on this in the mainstream media, the UK is actually slowly becoming an increasingly authoritarian country. This isn't a political earbashion either, don't worry, this is just an objective fact. Take, for example, the current government's plans to introduce something called the Police, Crime, Sentencing and

Court Bill. It's a long bill, but to sum it up, it's effectively an openly authoritarian plan put forward by the Tory government to criminalize protests, even completely peaceful ones. It will give police the powers to shut down any protest based on extremely vague parameters such as noise levels. So if it passes, you could literally be legally arrested by the police for simply banging a drum at a protest. The bill has passed its first round of votes and

will almost definitely be made into law. Once that's passed, the data collected on all protesters will no doubt end up processed in the new AWS cloud contracted to Amazon by the British government for an undisclosed fee. In this hypothetical situation, you could argue that Amazon would essentially become a tool for the blatant degradation of a free society. I mentioned all of this because I think when you look at the grand scheme of things, it all starts

to tie into each other. I think that becomes even clearer when you look at what some of this new Amazon a WS built technology will be used for. It will quote enable spiers to share data more easily from field locations overseas and power specialist applications such as speech recognition, which can spot and translate particular voices from ours worth of intercepted recordings end quote. As we know, governments often use spy technology like this to keep tabs on its

own citizens. Got you saying? The executive director of Privacy, International charity that defends and promotes the right to privacy across the world, said the following quote. This is yet another worrying public private partnership agreed in secret. If this contract goes through, Amazon will be positioned as the go to cloud provider for the world's intelligence agencies. Amazon has to answer for itself which country security services it would be prepared to work for. Ends quote. I think he's

got a good point there. Now very in mind, this Amazon a w S deal is all backed by Jeremy Fleming, the director of g h c Q, who was said he wants to put artificial intelligence at quote the heart of British spy agencies. Now trust me, it's not just me who sees a problem with this a w S spy cloud. Even British MPs have kicked up a fuss

in Parliament over it. Politicians from Labor, the British opposition party, have demanded that PRETP tell the Home Secretary explain why Britain will be using a US based company for our most secretive information. They're also asking if any risk assessment

was done before this deal was put into motion. One Labor MP named Conor mcgin wrote in a letter saying quote these reports are deeply concerning and raised serious questions about the wider security safeguards in place when it comes to the potential risks of outsource in critical elements of UK national security infrastructure to non UK based companies end quote. Now, if you look at the history of Britain, outsourcing is

hardly something politicians have cared about before. For example, Margaret Thatcher, the now deceased former Prime minister, decimated the north of the country through outsourcing. But I digress now. The response from the government to the Amazon a w S UK spy cloud was frankly a bit blunt and unhelpful. A British government spokesman said the following quote, I'm not going to comment on the technology used by intelligence services for

both security and commercial sensitivity reasons end quote. Amazon, for their part, declined to comment entirely. Now, I think one thing that's worth considering once all these a WS spy agency clouds are up and running is what if there's a major outage. Well, in December twenty one, there was a major a WS outage, Amazon's web server suffering a crippling outage today delivery trucks halted for a time and

taking parts of the Internet with it. The problem not only affecting Amazon, but reportedly many other major services, including Netflix, Disney Plus, and some of the smart devices right in your own home. That massive Amazon server outage temporarily crippling some of the world's most popular online services. It went through over the JIB. The service was down for several hours after a loss of power at one single data center in the US. The knock on effect was massive.

The PlayStation network went down, Zoom went down, Slack went down, so did Hulu, Disney, Imager, Epic Games, Grinder, Asana, Netflix, and many more applications and sites. It affected many services for hours, and this was actually the third a WS outage in the space of four weeks. What happens if the secret intelligence clouds of the world's most powerful countries get an AWS style outage. My guess is it would be much worse than not being able to play Halo

for a few hours. So we know Amazon is spying on customers in their homes and is now helping actual spy agencies spy on people across the world. Now, let's be real. The world is a big, bad place and there will always be some need for espionage. Otherwise, every hostile country would have the drop on each other, Militants would be able to attack innocent people at will, and it will probably be more chaotic than it already is.

But I think we have to ask ourselves, knowing what we know about Amazon, do we really want them to become the new Big Brother. Well, as we've spoken about in this episode, that becomes a really we won't even have a choice in the matter. On the next episode of Mega Corp, we'll be looking at Jeff bezos quest to dominate space and the questionable dealings of his Blue origin commercial rocket company. Megacorp is made by my production company H eleven for Cool Zone Media. It's written, researched,

and produced by myself, Jake Hanrahan. It was also produced by Sophie Lichtman. Music is by some Black, graphics by Adam Doyle and sound engineering by Splicing Block. If you want to get in touch, follow me on social media at Jake Underscore Hanrahan. That's h a n A h A n