Well at least the CIA are open about it
As opposed to the FBI/NSA who already have complete access to everything in the AWS cloud anyway and then deny it and use a secret 'court' to threaten to jail anyone who talks about it
Amazon Web Services has confirmed to The Register that it is set to build a massive cloud for the CIA. IBM, however, is still in the running, after the company's protest at the choice of Amazon was recognized by the US Government Accountability Office. In a statement emailed to The Reg late on Friday, Amazon Web Services …
I am a developer and wouldn't touch AWS after doing a years research on several providers. AWS had at least 6 serious outages last year, for hours at a time, taking Heroku and Netflix with it. On one of those occasions (xmas eve for several hours) it was something along the lines of one of Amazon's minimum wage drones pulled the plug on something.
You would think that the I of CIA would point them somewhere else... I'm using 3 separate providers, all with substantially better uptime than Amazon. And I didn't have teams of analysts help me with the decision.
Well, I just have to say that I believe I.B.M. has many, many, many skeletons in their closest with the government's name on it, so shouldn't the government just stick with what they know that works instead of sprinkling it around?
Of course being the company name is "Amazon", this does help with projects pertaining to "Guerrilla Warfare". Shoot, you can even work the name of the CIA's cloud to be "Mist", running on "Jungle Servers". (I went too far with that)
That will be a massive time saver. First of all, they already have a connection (it's one of the 3 letter agencies so no doubt there is a cable labeled "FISA" somewhere already), and if they just give them open access to what their clients are using it saves the pesky stage where they have to notify a provider that they want access - they're already in!
/sarcasm