Andrew 🌻 Brandt 🐇Dec 15, 2022

Just before the invasion, #Ukraine made a deal with #Amazon #AWS to create a data warehouse for its government information and infrastructure: tax and property records, bank statements, and the like. Things that an invaded and occupied Ukraine might lose if Russia got their hands on the only copies.

They literally snuck Pelican crates full of SSDs into the country and spirited them back offshore after backing up 10 petabytes of important historic and legal records.

This paragraph, second from the end, really put a fine point on why Amazon did this: They were not beholden to, nor being held hostage by, any Russian operations...because they never had any:

Amazon didn’t have to worry about its relationship with Russia on the Snowball project. It doesn’t have one. “We didn’t have anything to turn off there,” Maxwell said. “We had never invested there. It’s a point of principle.”

Truly an amazing story from the #LATimes.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-15/amazon-ukraine-war-cloud-data

How Amazon is helping Ukraine in its war against Russia by putting its 'government in a box'

Amazon is helping Ukraine transfer critical government, business and property data into the company's data cloud.

Los Angeles Times
Show threadrancor
@threatresearch this is simply a good pr move, for the piss bottle company
Dec 15, 2022 at 8:10pmWeb
Show threadrancorDec 15, 2022

@threatresearch it's no secret that sending people to do "spy stuff" for a country that has the full wartime backing of the US Government is phenomenal PR.

I'm not saying this isn't possibly a good thing for them to have done, but I AM saying it's definitely something they expected great pr from, in context.

And, also - Amazon contracts directly with the US government, heavily. Those efforts are substantially boosted by this, regardless of who paid for it.

Show threadrancorDec 15, 2022
@threatresearch I am also incredibly suspicious of the timing of this story, additionally, considered Amazon has dozens of independent stories coming out from all angles about how they *canceled possibly hundreds of peoples new jobs*, in the middle of their relocation (uprooting their lives) to move closer to their new workplace.