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Double Take: Condoleezza Rice As Dropbox's Newest Board Member
Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State under George W. Bush, and defender of Bush-era (and onward) policies about surveillance by wiretapping and other means, has landed at an interesting place: she's just become a part of the small board at Dropbox. TechDirt calls the appointment "tone deaf," and writes "At a time when people around the globe are increasingly worried about American tech firms having too close a connection to the intelligence community, a move like this seems like a huge public relations disaster. While Rice may be perfectly qualified to hold the role and to help Dropbox with the issues it needs help with, it's hard not to believe that there would be others with less baggage who could handle the job just as well."
Some people are doing more than looking for an alternative for themselves, too, as a result.
She's pretty sharp, well connected, and understands how the government sees these types of date & service providers.
At a she's an awesome catch for any cloud company. Throw in her political awareness and it's even better.
Quick, let's boycott Dropbox so we can force her out of the company. Then after we've succeeded we can have a another Slashdot story lamenting how intolerant we've all become and we can point fingers at everyone else.
Better known as 318230.
I know you all think Bush and Obama are the same, but there's no way Secretary Rice has "close connections to the intelligence community" under the Obama administration.
If Brendan Eich could be forced out for a $1,000 donation, surely Ms. Rice can be for influencing privacy policy herself, something which is highly relevant to this business. In addition, she has defended her position since leaving office. I think the real question here is where does this end?
I really don't care, this is a private company and they can hire who they want to. That being said, I assumed dropbox already was infiltrated by the NSA.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
She was the provost of Stanford University, she's got a huge rolodex in government and SillyCon Valley. She's also obviously got a big background in IR and particularly working with Russia and Africa, which are both huge growth markets for Internet companies.
Her biggest crime was not asking all the right questions, and didn't have to swag necessary to challenge Cheney or Rumsfeld, not that she was particularly motivated. She's proven to be a pretty bad administrator and manager, but she's going on the Board, not into management.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Really? National Security Advisor who supports wire tapping sitting on the board for a cloud based storage solution company. Could your post be code for stupid.
I've been meaning to disable this for a while.
If she's on your board, I'll get that done now.
There is now zero room to trust DropBox as an entity.
Did she donate to a Prop 8 organization?
Apparently they never checked her stance on Gay marriage:
“I don’t ever want anybody to be denied rights within our country. I happen to think marriage is between a man and a woman. That’s tradition, and I believe that that’s the right answer. But perhaps we will decide that there needs to be some way for people to express their desire to live together through civil union.”
Condoleezza Rice — Dec. 20, 2010
I guess websites will have to protest and such and then she'll resign after 2 weeks right?
White male tears are my favorite beverage. :)
Let's say Republican Senator Susan Collins took this position instead. Then: No issue and no uproar.
The problem is not that Rice is a Republican, it's that she was a part of the most terrifying Republican administration in history, and oversaw defense of torture and mass-surveillance wiretapping programs.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
It's not that using Dropbox is now a bad idea because Rice is on the board.... It's that using any "Cloud Based Storage" is not a good idea. Savvy readers can probably already setup and host their own servers... Why do you want to risk your data to someone else who does it "for free"?
A conservative is incapable of understanding what racism means. Seriously. Ask them to define it and they get a convoluted bundle of CRAP.
Conservative: racism is discriminating based on race. For example, college admissions are racist if they use different requirements for different races.
Liberal: racism is the absence of penalizing whites. For example, college admissions aren't racist as long as they penalizes whites; if they penalize Asians more than whites, that's still not racism, since whites are still penalized in some way.
Both are simple: one seeks equality at the start of the process, the other equality at the end of the process, and both think the other hates equality, like almost everything else in the conservative/liberal divide.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.