jeff bezos amazon

Jeff Bezos' Amazon cloud went live for the CIA in August.

(AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

It looms over the road leading to Amazon's headquarters in Seattle. The 48-foot-wide billboard offers a query, but it's actually a challenge. "The $600 million question: What's the CIA doing on Amazon's cloud?" it asks.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos surely has noticed the massive sign, unless he arrives at work by drone.

Amazon recently took on the job of providing specially designed cloud-computing services for the Central Intelligence Agency under a $600 million contract, furthering conspiracy theories that Bezos' company is the 21st century's Trilateral Commission.

Activist groups RootsAction.org and ExposeFacts.org put up the billboard in hopes of getting Bezos to address the possible privacy repercussions of Amazon working with the CIA.

Amazon's business model "depends on accumulating and analyzing huge quantities of personal data," RootsAction co-founder Norman Solomon said in a statement. "Meanwhile, the CIA depends on gathering and analyzing data to assist with surveillance as well as U.S. military interventions overseas. The circumstances are ominous."

Solomon wrote in The Huffington Post in February: "Amazon now has the means, motive and opportunity to provide huge amounts of customer information to its new business partner."

He points out that the terms of the Amazon-CIA agreement are secret.

Does all of this sound like it's overstating the situation? The CIA does important work, focusing on overseas threats to U.S. national security. What, you might wonder, is the typical Amazon customer supposed to be afraid of here?

Amazon's silence, for starters, say the groups. Bezos is famously secretive, which no doubt recommended him to the CIA over cloud competitors like IBM. Amazon does not believe in the kind of openness that is common for other publicly traded companies. It does not, for example, issue periodic "transparency reports" that list the number of government requests for customer data, as many other tech companies do.

There's also the fact that over the summer CIA Director John Brennan had to apologize to the U.S. Senate's Intelligence Committee for spying on Senate staffers' computers.

The CIA's chief information officer, Douglas Wolfe, called the agency's Amazon cloud product "one of the most important technology procurements in recent history," an innovation that will revolutionize the way the CIA works with and shares data.

The Atlantic reported in July that the CIA, as you would expect, has not provided any information about the cloud's capabilities or potential. "Amazon," the magazine writes, "also declined to describe the cloud's technical capabilities." The cloud reportedly went live in August.

Despite all of this, the efforts of RootsAction.org and ExposeFacts.org are, at the least, quixotic. It's reasonable to assume, after all, that the CIA doesn't need a partnership with Amazon to find out about the company's customers. The activist groups' chief fear appears to be that Amazon would make it unnecessary for the intelligence agency to even break a sweat if it decides to stray from the straight and narrow (as it clearly did in the Senate case).

At any rate, Amazon gave itself significant latitude in how it handles customer data long before it signed up with the Central Intelligence Agency. Its privacy notice and terms of service are difficult to decipher and seem to give the company plenty of room to maneuver. This is, of course, standard operating procedure for big tech companies. "Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver nailed it when he joked, "If Apple put the entire text of 'Mein Kampf' in their user agreement, you'd still click 'Agree.'"

But Apple, as far as we know, isn't in business with the CIA. Amazon is. RootsAction.org and ExposeFacts.org, writes the affiliated Institute for Public Accuracy, are calling on Bezos "to make a legally binding commitment to Amazon's commercial customers that it will not provide customer data to the CIA."

So far, Amazon has not responded.

-- Douglas Perry