

Amazon and CIA ink cloud deal - rmah
http://fcw.com/articles/2013/03/18/amazon-cia-cloud.aspx

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WestCoastJustin
There 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/>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0av2mvYq5I>

~~~
batgaijin
Why was this announced?

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hkmurakami
Wow 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.

~~~
dsl
You might be interested in Parallel Homomorphic Encryption [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.

~~~
bigiain
Yeah but… If you had a $600million budget, wouldn't you just call up Amazon
and say "Hey, you know your Availability Zones and Regions? How much to build
me a couple of them, along with all your management and accounting software,
so we can run pretty much all of AWS (front and back end) inside our own data
centers?"

It'd be much easier for recruitment, to be able to advertise for
developers/data-scientists/sysadmins with AWS experience, than just about
_any_ alternative…

~~~
dsl
That's probably what someone asked for. By the time it got approved, GSA
signoff, and past contracts and vendor management, they have a micro instance
in us-east-1 to run www.cia.gov off of.

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aashaykumar92
I 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
> 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.

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telecuda
We 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.

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michaelrhansen
Not 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
_Not 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
TLA?

~~~
epoxyhockey
Three 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.

------
skcin7
BarackObama.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>) 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
Off-topic: (foo)[url] syntax only works on reddit, on HN I usually put
something like this [1]

1\. url

~~~
Semaphor
It's markdown, a few more sites use that syntax. HN uses formatdoc which is a
very small subset of markdown.

~~~
gknoy
Thank 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> 2:
<http://arcfn.com/doc/app.html#markdown>

~~~
Semaphor
No problem, not sure if it's linked somewhere but there is this:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>

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siculars
Am I the only one who thinks this reads like an article in The Onion?

~~~
spoiler
I was thinking the same, actually.

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ynniv
It must be nice to spend $600M of taxpayer money without having to tell them
what you're spending it on.

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lignuist
This might make access to the rest of the data stored by Amazon more
effective.

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gojomo
Something 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-...](http://www.carpathiahosting.com/carpathia-hosting-announces-
new-virginia-datacenter)

------
spoiler
Frigging auto correct. I meant _terrorist dicks_.

~~~
jlgaddis
Once I got to the bottom, I finally realized what this was about:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5404746>

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Helianthus
...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
The fox is inside the henhouse now.

~~~
sliverstorm
The 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
>>> and not get all "NIH"

What do you mean by this? I did not get this reference.

~~~
jamesjporter
Haha I work in the life sciences and I thought the GP was referring to the
National Institutes of Health, which was confusing!

~~~
willismichael
At 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.

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youngerdryas
Amazon is about to lose a lot of tin foil hat customers, but they are probably
painful to have as customers anyway.

~~~
smokeyj
The tin foil type already assumes their images and routers are backdoored. Not
that.. I could relate..

~~~
youngerdryas
I 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
Come on. Just admit that the tech could be beyond consideration.

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bitwize
Well, there goes my trust for Amazon.

Also love how the GAO's IT director is named Dave Powner.

~~~
tptacek
It would be better if CIA just appropriated 3x as much money to build a cloud
infrastructure that was 1/5th as good?

~~~
rdl
That's utterly unrealistic. There is no way there would ever be only a factor
of 15 cost/performance difference in IT between a CIA contract and a leading
commercial entity in a competitive market. :)

