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 …

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Saturday 8th June 2013 08:47 GMT Pen-y-gors

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

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1. Saturday 8th June 2013 13:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Not only
  
  Not only can they spy on us, but they can buy stuff online while they do it!
  
  Can they claim it on expenses?
  
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  1. Sunday 9th June 2013 06:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re: Not only
    
    The Russians can sell their fighter planes and aircraft carriers online, and save USA a bundle.
    
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  2. Wednesday 12th June 2013 14:06 GMT Michael Wojcik
    
    Re: Not only
    
    Not only can they spy on us, but they can buy stuff online while they do it!
    
    And they get Amazon's recommendation system.
    
    "Spooks who spied on Register users also spied on: ..."
    
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Saturday 8th June 2013 11:16 GMT Don Jefe

Support

You've got to spend about $600M in order to get good support with AWS. The actual services are probably $15M.

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Saturday 8th June 2013 15:13 GMT tentimes

We've got Terry Taliban in our si.... uh no, it's down again :(

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.

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1. Saturday 8th June 2013 16:51 GMT Destroy All Monsters
  
  Re: We've got Terry Taliban in our si.... uh no, it's down again :(
  
  Because this thing will be running on the cloud for non-governmental rubes which may be up or down, instead of a special bespoke solution for the glorious Inner Party Master Race?
  
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  1. Tuesday 11th June 2013 14:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re: instead of a special bespoke solution
    
    We've got one of those special bespoke solutions for the agency where I work. Yeah, it's GMail instead of AWS, but guess what? Yeah, when the public GMail accounts are down, so are the government ones.
    
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2. Sunday 9th June 2013 06:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: We've got Terry Taliban in our si.... uh no, it's down again :(
  
  Guess those 3 separate providers would not include Azure.
  
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  1. Monday 10th June 2013 12:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re: We've got Terry Taliban in our si.... uh no, it's down again :(
    
    Azure is one of the best IAAS options on the market at the moment....
    
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Saturday 8th June 2013 16:25 GMT Anonymous Coward

1 basket please.

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)

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1. Sunday 9th June 2013 21:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: (I went too far with that)
  
  If you had stopped at Rain Forest servers, it would have been just perfect
  
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Sunday 9th June 2013 07:04 GMT Anonymous Coward

Saves time..

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

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Sunday 9th June 2013 21:44 GMT Anonymous Coward

Intelligence. Cloud computing.

Oxymoron.

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Monday 10th June 2013 08:30 GMT Giddy Going

Will this lead to compromised Privacy?

Now the CIA can look at collecting data from the bookseller to the AWS and correlate on Intelligence... Will this be damning on individual's privacy??

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