Amazon has appointed former National Security Agency director Gen. Keith Alexander to its board, the company disclosed in SEC filings released yesterday. There are no reasons anyone could find this alarming.
Alexander headed the incarnation of NSA that — as classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed — engaged in rampant surveillance of citizens’ private phone records, email information, and internet activity. You know, clandestine domestic spying. The illegal kind.
“It turns out ‘Hey Alexa’ is short for ‘Hey Keith Alexander,’” Snowden quipped in a tweet last night.
While Alexander may not wield the NSA’s power any more, there are reasons to be concerned that a former spymaster is getting into bed with a company that controls enormous swaths of internet infrastructure. The analytics surveyor W3Techs estimates that Amazon Web Services is used to host roughly 6% of all websites, and by conservative estimates, a 33% share of the cloud market in total, well ahead of Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.
Among Amazon’s many web hosting customers are household names, including Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Spotify. The service is so ubiquitous that, when Dhruv Mehrotra, who conducts data investigations for Gizmodo, made a plugin to block connections to Amazon machines, it made the internet as a whole “pretty unusable.”
It’s not just Amazon’s scale that’s concerning, but the company’s intentions. Amazon has actively constructed neighbourhood surveillance networks via its Ring doorbells, feeding footage to police departments throughout the U.S.. Alexa doesn’t just listen for commands but keeps recordings, sometimes when it hasn’t been summoned. None of this even begins to touch the troves of data Amazon has at its disposal via its online advertising arm, or directly from customer browsing and spending patterns.
Bezos has also been happy to cosy up to government (and especially military) interests, even as other tech giants performatively shy away — chief among them the $US10 ($AUD14) billion Pentagon deal for cloud computing services which Amazon lost out on to Microsoft last year. Jeff Bezos wants that deal and is still battling over it, complaining that Trump’s personal grudge against him tilted the decision. (Oracle has also been fighting for it up until early this month.) It’s not clear if Amazon believes Alexander’s connections — either the ones he maintained from his NSA days or through the cybersecurity company IronNet he founded in 2014, which claims works closely with the defence and fossil fuel industries — might give the company a leg-up in obtaining this lucrative contract.
However, Amazon stressed in an email to Gizmodo that the company will be following strict conflict of interest rules for government contracting, implying, I guess, that he won’t be involved in any of the above.
Amazon went on to say that they selected Alexander for his experience in a top-level military position in charge of security, but Amazon’s pretty unclear on how exactly he’ll apply that expertise. While, yes, Alexander certainly does have what we might call unique experience in the realm of cyber security, Amazon also told CNBC that Alexander won’t play a role in managing Amazon Web Services. So, what exactly is this guy’s job? Maybe they’re just being nice and including him in their company. Probably nothing to worry about.