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Big Brother is Being Increasingly Outsourced To Silicon Valley, Says Report (fastcompany.com)
The federal and local governments have long relied on private companies for defense and law enforcement technologies, from Lockheed Martin jetfighters to Booz Allen Hamilton data analysis. But increasingly, the government is expanding beyond the usual defense contractors to the company that also provides free shipping and online TV. From a report: "The ... thing that was shocking for me was to understand just how the federal authorizations are allowing Amazon to have such a monopoly over the storage of government information," says Jacinta Gonzalez, field organizer for immigrant advocacy group Mijente. Along with the National Immigration Project and the Immigrant Defense Project, Mijente funded a new report entitled, "Who's Behind ICE?: The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations." Its findings are based on documents such as contracts, memoranda, and corporate financial reports --which are publicly available but take a lot of digging to decipher.
While Amazon plays the leading role, the report also details the involvement of companies including Peter Thiel's Palantir, NEC, and Thomson Reuters in storing, transferring, and analyzing data on both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens. The U.S. government is moving its databases from federal facilities to cloud providers, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS), raising concerns about accountability.
While Amazon plays the leading role, the report also details the involvement of companies including Peter Thiel's Palantir, NEC, and Thomson Reuters in storing, transferring, and analyzing data on both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens. The U.S. government is moving its databases from federal facilities to cloud providers, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS), raising concerns about accountability.
"Imagine a movement that is not just Pro-Latinx...but pro-Black, pro-woman, pro-queer, pro-poor because our community is all that and more."
You must be kidding me. Does AmiMojo work there?
Albany, NY is 52% white. In that city every single homicide in 2017 [timesunion.com] had a non-white perpetrator and victim. Of course the article blames it on poverty as though there were no poor whites living there.
Such vibrant diversity! This story was relatively honest. For most of the rest, remember the new media code-word for "black males" is "teens" or "youths". Just like the many times a legal gun owner with a conceal carry permit stops a crime but it never gets reported that way, directly reporting the real criminality of blacks just doesn't fit the narrative.
Cue the Internet Tough Guys who talk about hanging folks (because they know this is true, can't refute it, and don't have the balls to be honest with themselves about it let alone be honest with anyone else). They don't like any FACTUAL information casting blacks in a bad light, yet they call others "faggots" all the time, yay tolerance! Yay hypocrisy! I'm sure they have convinced themselves this is logically consistent. For some reason they mention Trump. I don't personally care for Trump but if he causes them that much butt-hurt then at least he has that much going for him. Note they won't make ANY effort to say that I'm wrong because $facts, or talk about materially verifiable benefits of diversity. No, they'll just say they want to hang people. How convincing! Surely truth is on their side!!
I mean, they like to bring up Nazis. So let's examine that. Anyone who mentinos FACTS they find inconvenient must be a bad person, not fully human, right? So it's ok to advocate hanging them, harming them, etc., because they're not like the rest of us. Funny how this is the exact thinking the Nazis used against the Jews! Yet it's ok, this time they got it right. Right? Yet they still don't see the problem. No thanks, I'll stick to facts about race -- and there are a great many. Let the butt-hurt types defeat themselves by acting like everything they claim to hate while missing the delicious irony. But hey it's easy to feel tough behind a computer, isn't it?
Don't worry, treasonous nazi faggots will hang. We're going to get every last inbred one of you bitch tiki torch faggots, and we're going to mulch your families into your childhood yards and let immigrants squat in your derelict homes.
You nazi faggots are being replaced, we're going to literally rape you to death until you're gone. Get used to it snowflakes. #Obamacare death panels gonna kill you faggots fo real yo~!
They talked themselves into it, one privacy policy at a time.
Don't worry, treasonous nazi faggots will hang. We're going to get every last inbred one of you bitch tiki torch faggots, and we're going to mulch your families into your childhood yards and let immigrants squat in your derelict homes.
You nazi faggots are being replaced, we're going to literally rape you to death until you're gone. Get used to it snowflakes. #Obamacare death panels gonna kill you faggots fo real yo~!
And this may be my last post, if they catch me. IP address 192.168.50.43
A nation with borders is by definition something out of 1984? What am I missing?
The concern about accountability is that with the larger exposure surface more leaks will occur and more of what they are trying to cover up will come out... thus they will be held accountable far more often than when all the data is in-house and fewer know its details.
very interesting article http://rizkyherbal.com/obat-he...
"Black lives matter? "Up and coming" black rapper in 70% black Baltimore, who advocated nonviolence, murdered by black male"
If black people want their lives to matter to whites they first need to act like they matter to each other. Blacks account for 53.1% of all solved murders in 2017 (FBI crime stats) and primarily it's black males murdering other black males. Although it may "comfort" you to know that black people murder whites about twelve times more often than white people murder blacks. They're a violent people, plain and simple.
"The ... thing that was shocking for me was to understand just how the federal authorizations are allowing Amazon to have such a monopoly over the storage of government information,"
Good thing Google pulled out of the bidding to do anything about that! And Microsoft employees lobbying for MS to also pull out.
Blacks account for 53.1% of all solved murders
That's obviously only because cops are racists who work harder to solve crimes allegedly committed by african americans.
Who's Behind ICE?: The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations.
Why not publish a report on Who's Behind the County Sheriffs?: The Video Equipment Companies Fueling Breaking and Entering Arrests
Seriously, the deportation issue is a combination of people who do not respect the law and a broken immigration system which nobody seems to really want to fix.
Sure, progressives make a lot of noise about it, but you can bet that they have no interest in actually seeing it fixed, as at the moment it is one of the few things they can use to rally their base. Besides, when Democrats had both houses of Congress and the presidency, they did not lift a finger to fix the immigration problem. Here is an excerpt from Obama's 2010 State of the Union:
And we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system â" to secure our borders, enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nations.
Of course, if he said those same words today he would be branded a xenophobic racist by his own party. In fact, if I had not said up front that they were Obama's words from just 8 years ago, most would probably assume they were Trump's words from 8 days ago. And, of course, nobody wants to mention how ICE under Obama deported far more illegal immigrants that ICE under Trump. Clearly, the "abolish ICE" crowd only cares now because they don't like Trump.
Of course, the Republicans right now have both houses of congress and the White House and don't seem to have much interest in fixing immigration either.
It sure makes a handy political prop.
Him again?
I thought Peter Thiel was the gay guy that attacked Gawker after it mentioned he was gay, driving it out of business. Part of the defense people offered was that he does business in Saudi Arabia where being gay is a stoning crime enforced by the religious police. Claiming that Gawker put his life at risk by mentioning his homosexuality.
Yet a quick Google and I see he is attending the Saudi Arabia conference. Be sure to pop into the consulate and get the visa sorted Peter! And remember, it is a very very big arm deal, and Khashoggi was respected, and you? Not so much.
"Among the major companies and commercial figures still connected to the Future Investment Initiative [The Saudi conference a lot of people pulled out of] conference are Peter Thiel, a close ally of President Donald Trump"
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/activists-target-peter-thiel-and-other-powerful-americans-still-scheduled-for-saudi-investment-conference_us_5bc8caa9e4b0d38b58760f41
Blacks account for 53.1% of all solved murders
That's obviously only because cops are racists who work harder to solve crimes allegedly committed by african americans.
Yeah, you're so right about that. I committed a serious felony right in frnot of a cop just the other day. He looked me up and down, estimating my total melanin content. He was satisfied that I fit most definitions of "Caucasian". The outcome was obvious. Even though he could have put me away for a very long time, he let me off with a warning by saying "now don't do it again".
On top of that, it's obviously whites who have this "no snitching" culture that causes most white murders to go unsolved. Yeah that's totally whites, right.
What you *really* have to look out for are all those majority-white meighborhoods. I mean, if you take a wrong turn and end up in one of them, God help you. Random violence is so very frequent in those, you know.
You're often called "leftists" but I find there are insecure little people like you all across the spectrum.
That is wisdom. And while most people with strong beliefs are only too happy to spell them out, some actors are not genuinely left or right as they make out ... trolls driving the wedge further in.
You nazi faggots are being replaced, we're going to literally rape you to death until you're gone.
Genuine leftist discourse do you think?
That's obviously only because cops are racists who work harder to solve crimes allegedly committed by african americans.
In 2017 48% of NYC cannabis convictions were for Blacks and 9% were for Whites. It's clear that in NYC hardly any white folk smoke the weed, yeah?
amazon isn't silicon valley.
Did you time travel here from the 1800s or something? Is your next argument going to be 'look at the shape(s) of their skulls, this proves they're primitive savages?'
Look, the following things are true globally speaking about crime: people with lower socio-economic status commit more crimes. Pretty much universally most violence, especially gang-violence, is committed by young, disenfranchised males. Got no job and no access to education? Why not join a gang or a criminal organization. I mean, people prefer not being poor to being poor, but if you've no means of entering the education system (for example due to higher education being too expensive) often criminal activity is seen by young males as the best/most efficient route upwards in terms of social mobility and wealth.
Look at developing countries and countries with higher murder rates than the West or the US. Southern america has a lot of problems. Do you think it's black people killing each other in the cartel wars in central and southern america? Do you think a high amount of black people is the reason for example Russia, and a lot of the other former Soviet states have such high violent crime statistics? Or could it possibly be that these are regions with extremely high poverty rates and income/wealth inequality which is fertile ground for social problems and organized violent crime and those who benefit from it?
However, I have read in the past that in the US the poverty level alone does not explain the differences in stats, because the black population is over-represented in the stats even when controlling for income. Now I'm not American and by no means a criminologist, but as someone who works with data, I'm always interested in a data-driven approach, so I did some googling about racial crime data and economics and came across this post titled racial differences in homicide rates are poorly explained by economics, lets have a read shall we?
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
I'm gonna say that has to do with less white people getting stopped by cops. I don't have time to find the numbers, FBI stats iirc. Its not because of racism either.
Buy taco sauce on Amazon and get ICE instead.
In your phrenology link, there is a conspicuous absence of skull/race comparison photos. It shows a bunch of Ye Olde parchment drawings instead. Not a single photo of a skull, anywhere. Do you know why? Because profile photos of a negroid skull are *visibly* different in morphology. Much closer to an ape than any other race. Ask a forensic anthropologist.
This is one of those "devil in the detail" stories.
For example, if the government used the resources of AWS for a basic "elastic compute" facility - i.e. to cope with surges in demand of their own in-house compute farms, and if (big if) all the applications that the government ran used a form of Application Level Enryption (ALE) that did not require the use of cloud-provider-owned HSMs, then this looks like a more-or-less conventional facilities outsourcing program.
But what if it's not so clear-cut as that? What if the government stores data in the could, long term? What if the government uses Amazon HSMs to secure their content? By implication, the risk here is that this would give Amazon administrators access to the government's data. Should that happen, the least dangerous thing I'd expect to see is Amazon starting to shut down accounts for anyone on a government watch list. The worst-case scenario is much more significant.
So a big part of the potential issue list for this sort of model will depend significantly upon the architecture that the Cloud providers agree to. Disclosure: I've worked for a very large financial institution that discussed cloud services with Amazon - and they absolutely refused to allow us to host our own HSMs in Amazon data centers. How likely are they to change that answer?
The second question, after the relative safety of the data once it's in the cloud, concerns the way that the government is setting about this sort of procurement. There was, if I recall, some interesting material in the documentation released by Edward Snowden. The short version of this story is that BAH were putting together a proposal to meet a government RFC, in which a BAH technician raised the concern that even though it would be possible to implement the solution as requested, there was no way that the government would be able to interpret all the data the new system would collect. A BAH Manager wrote back, "Look, you're technically correct, OK? But your job isn't to tell the client that their idea won't work, your job is to sell the client whatever the client asks for. Then, next year, when the client realizes that this solution doesn't work, we can sell them an upgrade to fix that problem..."
In other words, there is the danger that some of the providers that tender for this sort of business [and note: I am not for one moment suggesting that any company would certainly do this; rather, I am pointing out an implementation risk] might well be able or tempted to sell a solution to the government that just doesn't work. It's my experience that too often when a government runs a bidding process for a solution, the people responding to the bid know so much more about the topic than the person managing the bid, they run rings around them.
This is particularly relevant because of the subject matter likely involved here. I can easily see the government saying that the entire bidding and outsourcing process has to be classified because "national security", which means that proper accountability controls will be pushed aside.
That would not be good.
Your comment is very well thought out, I'd like to add, one of the drivers of the single mother issue and violence was the crack epidemic of the heroin epidemic of the 70's and crack in the 80's resulting in the '"tough on crime" movements which arrested lots of black men for trivial amounts of drugs and sentenced them to many more years than a white person would receive (see sentencing differences between cocaine and crack until recently) This removed fathers from the community for a decade+. Racially biased policies and policing compounded the singe motherhood issue. If white people are treated the same for heroin today as blacks were in the 70-80's, I'm certain we'd see similar outcomes, instead heroin is treated as a health crisis now.
I'm not saying there's no causation on the murder/single-motherhood correlation, but it definitely seems like it could be a chicken-egg feedback loop situation. Obviously, you're much more likely to grow up without a dad in a community where he is much more likely to be murdered.
I'm pretty sure the spearhead of moving Big Brother to Silicon Valley was sometime around 1977 with Larry Ellison and Robert Miner holding the handle.
If you gave a shit about your own skin mattering, you wouldn't be posting as AC.
Just what everyone needs: advice in race relations from a translucent asshole who squirts through risibly Spartan "condensed" matter, and who moans like an abandoned, one-eyed walrus in the attic on dark, damp nights, because his entire social life consists of roaming the countryside rattling chains, but he doesn't want his last moth-eaten bedsheet to end up smelling of mildew as that might arouse the sleeping scent-hounds of common sense (spoiling his one true joy in life: duping naive, sleep-deprived misanthropes into into bedwetting their flannel jammies over a frantic misapprehension that the call is coming from inside the house) .
Oh, the agony of solitary troll confinement. We feel your pain. And your MO. And your BS. And your BO.
See, this is why I come to /.
Well done, Kiuas.
Trotsky-slut spew got outsourced to Silicon Valley on the backs of Brin and Page. We see and hear it like drumbeats from the media.koms and their poodles.left ... so .... why not MAD and VECTOR ?
I don't have time to find the numbers
They are cited here.
I'm gonna say that has to do with less white people getting stopped by cops ... Its not because of racism either
Assuming, for the sake of argument, a) the personal racial attitudes of the cops are in no way responsible for this and b) that there is no racial differential in rates of cannabis use, then the racial sub-group which makes up ca 25% of the city, in making up 48% of cannabis arrests, is unambiguously suffering under some serious structural disadvantage (even if the disadvantage is disproportionately residing in neighbourhoods with more snitches). There's some kind of analysis in NYT, but no numbers / graphs (that are displaying for me) sadly. Their conclusion:
[W]e discovered was that when two precincts had the same rate of marijuana calls [i.e. complaints to police], the one with a higher arrest rate was almost always home to more black people. The police said that had to do with violent crime rates being higher in those precincts, which commanders often react to by deploying more officers.
BTW, same AC who was conversing with you above.
Classified data in a freaking third party CLOUD??
I'm not sure the military can credibly delegate the physical security of military data.
I like our tech titans, but at the end of the day, these players are just in it for the money. If somebody held a gun to the head of some cloud engineer, they'd divulge passwords; you know they would. Offer somebody like that twenty million bucks and they'll surrender the keys to the kingdom.
We need our military data guarded by true nationalistic psychos who work for honor more than money, and who would immediately report any attempt at bribery, and take secrets to their grave as appropriate.
I'd be fine with Amazon or Google forking their system and physically locating something entirely on secure military bases, because they really do have some cool tech, which really does have some strong military IT applications.
But if they're talking about hosting it offsite..... then somebody needs to put down the crack pipe and get real. Even air gapped systems are hard to secure in today's world.
Well, the biggest use of data analysis, hiding posts so that nobody will ever see them, censor tons of Facebook and Twitter messages, and of course deleting whole accounts, is so far the Mighty http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/ .
And yes, AC is led by some representatives of Nato countries, instant policy decisions being managed by USA and Israel.
Twitter and Facebook also do have their own small censoring departments, but that is not where the actual beef comes from.
Yes, even data analysis can be bought from Silicon Valley, but that is one of the many tools used by AC. AC has direct and unfeathered full access to any of the big players, lets say "just to help with your heaps of daily workloads". ... or is that something that Reuters, AP, MSNBC, CNN and Fox managed not to tell the people?