Just going by the standard that you set forth:
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.
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.
The link 404s. I think the correct link is: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/231-misconceptions-about-china-and-artificial-intelligence-helen-toner/