Amazon's Jeff Bezos has us all in "the cloud"
Amazon's Bezos dazzles us with drones while his firm gets rich keeping CIA secrets.
Yes, I'm still boycotting "60 Minutes" until they do an independent probe of their Benghazi hoax, which I guess they're not going to do....truly appalling. For better or worse, every Sunday night when I do my weekly editing shift here at the Daily News I get to "watch" the CBS program through the stunned reactions in my Twitter feed, where people react with increasing revulsion as what was once a great journalistic franchise become a joke, alternating big-corporation puffery with right-wing propaganda.
Last night, Twitter tells me they went the puffery route...with Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, the new owner of the Washington Post.
There were oohs and aahs, I'm told, from credulous CBS reporters as Bezos revealed Amazon's bold plan to deliver books to your door by a drone, a plan that seems wasteful, ridiculous and might even be illegal. But if Bezos wants to learn more about journalism, he may eventually learn the term for what else he accomplished with his free ad on CBS, what we call "burying the lede."
Still, the biggest surprise for me came when Bezos, unprompted, referred to the planned cloud that Amazon Web Services is building for the CIA as a private cloud. He didn't even stumble on the word. Funny, since at AWS Re:invent last month, top AWS execs Andy Jassy and Adam Selipsky went to great pains to not characterize that installment as a private cloud. That's because the religion at AWS is that there is no cloud other than public cloud.
Yes, that's right -- the new owner of the Washington Post also heads a major CIA contractor. In fact, the U.S. spy agency is paying Amazon more -- $600 million, to be exact -- to keep its secrets than Bezos paid to buy the Post ($250 million) -- the newspaper that once at least made a pretense of trying to reveal the CIA's darker secrets. Indeed, ironically, both the Post AND CBS once basked in a scoop -- Watergate, perhaps you've heard of it? -- in which a key plotline was using the CIA to cover up Richard Nixon's crimes. Now, the wheel has come full circle -- and Katharine Graham is probably spinning in her grave at how this is going down.