Amazon’s frightening CIA partnership: Capitalism, corporations and our massive new surveillance state

When Internet retailer and would-be 21st century overlord Amazon.com kicked WikiLeaks off its servers back in 2010, the decision was not precipitated by men in black suits knocking on the door of one of Jeff Bezos mansions at 3 a.m., nor were any company executives awoken by calls from gruff strangers suggesting they possessed certain information that certain individuals lying next to them asking who is that? would certainly like to know.

Corporations, like those who lead them, are amoral entities, legally bound to maximize quarterly profits. And rich people, oft-observed desiring to become richer, may often be fools, but when it comes to making money even the most foolish executive knows theres more to be made serving the corporate state than giving a platform to those accused of undermining national security.

The whistle-blowing website is putting innocent people in jeopardy, Amazon said ina statement released 24 hours after WikiLeaks first signed up for its Web hosting service. And the company wasnt about to let someone use their servers for securing and storing large quantities of data that isnt rightfully theirs, even if much of that data, leaked by Army private Chelsea Manning, showed that its rightful possessors were covering up crimes, including the murder of innocent civilians from Yemen to Iraq.

The statement was over the top try as it might, not even the government has been able to point to a single life lost due to Mannings disclosures but, nonetheless, Amazons capitalist apologists on the libertarian right claimed the big corporation had just been victimized by big bad government. David Henderson, a research fellow at Stanford Universitys Hoover Institution, explained that those calling for a boycott of Amazon were out of line, as the real enemy was megalomaniacal Senator Joe Lieberman, who had earlier called on Amazon to drop WikiLeaks (and is, admittedly, a rock-solid choice for a villain).

The simple fact is that we live in a society whose governments are so big, so powerful, so intrusive, and so arbitrary, that we have to be very careful in dealing with them, Henderson wrote. That Amazon itself cited a purported violation of its terms of service to kick WikiLeaks off its cloud was a lie, according to Henderson, meant to further protect Amazon from state retribution. Did it make him happy? No, of course not. But boycotting one of the governments many victims? No way.

But Amazon was no victim. Henderson, like many a libertarian, fundamentally misreads the relationship between corporations and the state, creating a distinction between the two that doesnt really exist outside of an intro-to-economics textbook. The state draws up the charter that gives corporations life, granting them the same rights as people more rights, in fact, as a corporate person can do what would land an actual person in prison with impunity or close to it, as when Big Banana was caught paying labor organizer-killing, right-wing death squads in Colombia and got off with a fine.

Corporations are more properly understood not as victims of the state, but its for-profit accomplices. Indeed, Amazon was eager to help the U.S. governments campaign against a website that thanks almost entirely to Chelsea Manning had exposedmany embarrassing acts of U.S. criminality across the globe: the condoning of torture by U.S. allies in Iraq; the sexual abuse of young boys by U.S. contractors in Afghanistan; the cover-up of U.S. airstrikes in Yemen, including one that killed 41 civilians, 21 of them children. The decision to boot WikiLeaks was, in fact, one that was made internally, no pressure from the deep state required.

I consulted people I knew fairly high up in the State Department off the record, and they said that they did not have to put pressure on Amazon for that to happen, said Robert McChesney, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois, in an appearance on Democracy Now!.It was not a difficult sell.

And it paid off. A little more than a year later, Amazon was awarded a generous $600 million contract from the CIA to build a cloud computing service that willreportedly provide all 17 [U.S.] intelligence agencies unprecedented access to an untold number of computers for various on-demand computing, analytic, storage, collaboration and other services. As The Atlanticnoted, and as former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed, these same agencies collect billions and perhaps trillions of pieces of metadata, phone and Internet records, and other various bits of information on an annual basis.

That is to say: On Amazons servers will be information on millions of people that the intelligence community has no right to possess Director of National Intelligence James Clapperinitially denied the intelligence community was collecting such data for a reason which is used to facilitate corporate espionage anddrone strikes that dont just jeopardize innocent lives, but have demonstrably endedhundreds of them.

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Amazon’s frightening CIA partnership: Capitalism, corporations and our massive new surveillance state