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Amazon Hiring More Than a 100 Who Can Get Top Secret Clearances

Posted by samzenpus on from the we-have-clearance-clarence dept.

dcblogs writes "Amazon has more than 100 job openings for people who can get a top secret clearance, which includes a U.S. government administered polygraph examination. It needs software developers, operations managers and cloud support engineers, among others. Amazon's hiring effort includes an invitation-only recruiting event for systems support engineers at its Herndon, Va., facility on Sept. 24 and 25. Amazon is fighting to win a contract to build a private cloud for the CIA. The project is being rebid after IBM filed a protest. In a recent federal lawsuit challenging the rebid, Amazon took a shot at IBM, describing the company as 'a traditional fixed IT infrastructure provider and late entrant to the cloud computing market.' Among the things IBM says in response, is that the government didn't look at Amazon's outage record. An analyst firm, Ptak Noel & Associates, concluded, in a report about the dispute, that CIA officials 'too casually brush off Amazon's outages' in evaluating the proposals."

5 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. A patheic thought by oldhack · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Finally a project that will hire some Americans.

    Yeah, it's pretty sad.

    --
    Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
    1. Re:A patheic thought by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I had a security clearance in the military. All it meant was basically that I hadn't been caught doing anything illegal, and that I wasn't old enough to have had to file bankruptcy because of family medical emergencies and mortgages. Nor was I old enough to have pissed off any neighbors enough for them to bad mouth me :)

      Being young can be an advantage for security clearances ...

      Almost certainly the type you had was a Secret clearance.

      Today more than ever, TOP Secret clearances are not only hard to get, they are hard to keep.

      If the clearance you had didn't involve am anal probe an deep deep investigation that involved actually physically talking to many of your friends, neighbors, and college buddies, you didn't have a TOP Secret, you had only a Secret, which almost anyone can get.

      --
      If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
  2. Conflict of interest much ?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Bezos owns the Washington Post.

    And now Amazon wants to get in bed with the CIA ?

    What a crock of shit.

  3. Quid pro quo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And the quid pro quo of these deals is Amazon handing over the purchasers data to NSA.

    So whether you buy a political book and can be flagged as politically active and worth monitoring, or you buy an environment book and can be flagged as 'eco terrorist potential candidate', all of that goes into the Stasibase.

    I was told by a contractor working for Sammy, Samsung is going to cancel their EC2 cloud contract to avoid legal liability in some countries, their phones connect to Amazon and their backend is done on Amazon. So Amazon must be getting hit by this NSA fallout and that will grow worse over time as the existing contracts run out and aren't renewed. So NSA gave them a sweetener I think in return.

    US trade deficit turned around in July and widened. Anyone wonder why? I know I contributed $700 of it at least simply by ditching US hosting.

    So companies will get more dependant on the NSA subsidies.

  4. Re:Polygraph Tests by DoctorChestburster79 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They always accuse you of using drugs. Always. They also try to beat you into a confession. Always.

    I got up and walked out of my polygraph at the CIA when I interviewed. I didn't want to come close to finding out how an organization treated its employees when it treated its prospects like that.

    My uncle worked for a major defense contractor in the '80s (he left that position right before one of the major mergers occurred in the '90s), and had to take a poly as part of his program's requirements. When asked about drugs, he said no, to which the examiner accused him of lying on the spot. The excuse the examiner gave was EVERYBODY my uncle's age had tried something, to which my uncle replied that he was probably the first person that HADN'T tried anything, willingly or otherwise.

    At the end of the exam, the examiner said this to my uncle: "Well, you passed, but I question your integrity."

    My uncle's internal response: he wanted to deck the SOB. I don't blame him for thinking that.