That’s interesting, what’s the point of reference that you’re using here for competence? I think stuff from eg the 1960s would be bad reference cases but anything more like 10 years from the start date of this program (after ~2005) would be fine.
You’re right that the leak is the crux here, and I might have focused too much on the paper trail (the author of the article placed a big emphasis on that).
The overall impression that I got from the program was that as it proved profitable and expanded,
The program expanded in response to Amazon wanting to collect data about more retailers, not because Amazon was viewing this program as a profit center.
it took on a larger workforce and it became harder for leaders to detect when employees were following their individual incentives to cut corners and gradually accumulate risks of capsizing the whole thing
But that doesn’t seem to have occurred. Until the Wall Street Journal leak, few if any people outside Amazon were aware of this program. It’s not as if any of the retailers that WSJ spoke to said, “Oh yeah, we quickly grew suspicious of Big River Inc, and shut down their account after we smelled something fishy.” On the contrary many of them were surprised that Amazon was accessing their seller marketplace through a shell corporation.
I didn’t see any examples mentioned in the WSJ article of Amazon employees cutting corners or making simple mistakes that might have compromised operations. Instead, they seemed to be pretty careful and conscientious, making sure to not communicate with outside partners with their Amazon.com addresses, being careful to maintain their cover identities at trade conferences, only communicating with fellow Amazon executives with paper documents (and numbered paper documents, at that), etc.
The program expanded in response to Amazon wanting to collect data about more retailers, not because Amazon was viewing this program as a profit center.
Monopolies are profitable and in that case the program would have more than paid for itself, but I probably should have mentioned that explicitly, since maybe someone could have objected that they could have been were more focused on mitigating risk of market share shrinking or accumulating power, instead of increasing profit in the long term. Maybe I fit too much into 2 paragraphs here.
I didn’t see any examples mentioned in the WSJ article of Amazon employees cutting corners or making simple mistakes that might have compromised operations.
Hm, that stuff seemed like cutting corners to me. Maybe I was poorly calibrated on this e.g. using a building next to the Amazon HQ was correctly predicted by operatives to be extremely low risk.
Thanks, I’ll look into this! Epistemics is difficult when it comes to publicly available accounts of intelligence agency operations, but I guess you could say the same for bigtech leaks (and the future of neurotoxin poisoning is interesting just for its own sake eg because lower effect strains and doses could be disguised as natural causes like dementia).
That’s interesting, what’s the point of reference that you’re using here for competence? I think stuff from eg the 1960s would be bad reference cases but anything more like 10 years from the start date of this program (after ~2005) would be fine.
You’re right that the leak is the crux here, and I might have focused too much on the paper trail (the author of the article placed a big emphasis on that).
Just going by the standard that you set forth:
The program expanded in response to Amazon wanting to collect data about more retailers, not because Amazon was viewing this program as a profit center.
But that doesn’t seem to have occurred. Until the Wall Street Journal leak, few if any people outside Amazon were aware of this program. It’s not as if any of the retailers that WSJ spoke to said, “Oh yeah, we quickly grew suspicious of Big River Inc, and shut down their account after we smelled something fishy.” On the contrary many of them were surprised that Amazon was accessing their seller marketplace through a shell corporation.
I didn’t see any examples mentioned in the WSJ article of Amazon employees cutting corners or making simple mistakes that might have compromised operations. Instead, they seemed to be pretty careful and conscientious, making sure to not communicate with outside partners with their Amazon.com addresses, being careful to maintain their cover identities at trade conferences, only communicating with fellow Amazon executives with paper documents (and numbered paper documents, at that), etc.
I would argue that the practices used by Amazon to conceal the link between itself and Big River Inc. were at least as good as the operational security practices of the GRU agents who poisoned Sergei Skripal.
Monopolies are profitable and in that case the program would have more than paid for itself, but I probably should have mentioned that explicitly, since maybe someone could have objected that they could have been were more focused on mitigating risk of market share shrinking or accumulating power, instead of increasing profit in the long term. Maybe I fit too much into 2 paragraphs here.
Hm, that stuff seemed like cutting corners to me. Maybe I was poorly calibrated on this e.g. using a building next to the Amazon HQ was correctly predicted by operatives to be extremely low risk.
Thanks, I’ll look into this! Epistemics is difficult when it comes to publicly available accounts of intelligence agency operations, but I guess you could say the same for bigtech leaks (and the future of neurotoxin poisoning is interesting just for its own sake eg because lower effect strains and doses could be disguised as natural causes like dementia).