who don’t get “left behind by those who do.”25
In addition to corporate clients, AWS also provides essential infrastructure for various governmental agencies, too. These resources allow state actors to extend their surveillance powers and social control capacity even wider across the world’s population. For example, in 2013 Amazon received a $600 million cloud contract with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). While this contract’s purpose is not completely understood, it takes little imagination to speculate on the resources AWS is providing the world’s largest spying and foreign subversion organization. The CIA has a long, scandalous history of international meddling, disruption, coups, and assassination.26
Another major governmental contract that AWS has bid for is the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) for the U.S. military. Potentially a $10 billion contract, AWS and Microsoft were the two finalist bidders.27 The tech industry and the U.S.’s military-industrial complex have always been close bedfellows, especially in the recent decades of the U.S.’s “forever wars.”28 Unsurprisingly, Amazon PAC’s favourite target of donations are the members of the U.S. House of Representative’s Armed Service Committee, who received over a quarter-million dollars.29 In October 2019, the Pentagon announced Microsoft had won the contract, a decision that Amazon immediately responded to by filing a lawsuit, protesting that this decision was the outcome of U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal animosity against Amazon CEO Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, which has been critical of Trump’s presidency.30
Amazon has explicitly claimed that it supports immigrants. The U.S. government is in the middle of its most recent immigration crackdown, with deportations and detentions of undocumented immigrants on the rise since 2002 (peaking in 2013).31 Amazon is not serving as an ally to immigrants, nor is it playing a neutral role. Instead, Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) is an AWS client. Amazon provides essential resources in ICE’s detention and deportation regime. The AWS cloud hosts digital immigration case files (including all sorts of relevant familial and residential data) as well as biometric data on 230 million humans. This biometric data includes fingerprints and some face photos. Due to Amazon’s active assistance to ICE, immigrant rights activists, such as Never Again Action, have targeted Amazon. Among other actions, activists and Amazon workers protested on “Amazon Prime Day” (July 15, 2019) in multiple U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Seattle, New York City, and Shakopee, Minnesota, demanding Amazon stop doing business with ICE.32
As the examples from the CIA, the military, and ICE illustrate, AWS facilitates a state-corporate surveillance nexus.33 This nexus has incorporated technologies previously unavailable to government, via powerful and reliable computer networks. For disadvantaged groups, this surveillance capitalism not only makes their lives increasingly insecure, but poses a direct threat to their safety and freedom.
THE TOOLS OF CONTROL
Amazon’s 2018 annual report does not state any concerns over customer or user “privacy.” In fact, the only part of the report to address privacy pertains to how Amazon’s endangering of individual users’ privacy poses a risk to the company through increased governmental regulation and potential lawsuits and criminal penalties.34 In other words, violations of privacy threaten Amazon’s bottom-line first. This indifference to customer privacy is telling. Amazon’s many, widely used products (e.g., Echo, Rekognition, and Ring) place the corporation at the center of intense debates about individuals’ privacy. Amazon stands accused of both violating the privacy of its users and customers (including minors), of facilitating such violations, and expressing only mild concern over such violations.35
For example, Amazon sells a popular line of speakers called Echo. The many Echo models have a special feature: a voice-activated personal assistant. This assistant is personified as “Alexa” and answers any questions and requests that are made of it. If someone audibly utters the Echo’s “wake word”—by default “Alexa”—then it will respond to commands verbalized afterward. In order to do this, Echo is “always-on,” awaiting any activation request. Echo also records audio after the wake word is uttered and gathers information on the user’s location, sending this information to Amazon for review. According to Amazon, “Alexa should remember context and past interactions,”36 to help its artificial intelligence (AI) to self-improve. Additionally, Amazon employees manually review these recordings for the purpose of improving Alexa, too.
The Echo introduces a variety of privacy concerns that neither Amazon nor society at large has been able to successfully answer. Users do not choose whether Amazon records their instructions to Alexa—as this recording is automated, there may be people present in a room with an Echo device that are unaware they are being recorded by Echo. Consequently, Amazon controls an incredible cache of audio, constituting a potentially huge database of customer desires ripe for economic exploitation by the highest bidder. Problematically, users have discovered a surprising number of false-positive activations from non-wake words. In other words, Alexa may activate itself without actually being summoned by a user and then proceeded to record conversations and other speech that was never intended to be recorded. In the summer of 2019, it was revealed that Apple’s AI “Siri” had recorded people having sex and engaging in drug deals, all without the individuals’ knowledge; similar things have occurred with Echo. Echo’s AI can identify a user’s mood or emotions from their voice, and thus respond in kind. Since the Alexa assistant helps users to connect to other smart devices (which involve additional purchases), interactions with these devices are also recorded. Typically, a purchase request made to Alexa results in the assistant purchasing a product from Amazon.com, thus seamlessly integrating Amazon into consumption patterns. Thus, Echo facilitates a corporate marketer’s dream—having direct access to the unconscious and often only vaguely articulated desires of customers. This requires massive surveillance. When individuals share aspects of their personal lives—characteristics, preferences, interests, and aspirations—such data is easily commodified and sold to marketers and other corporations seeking to sell individuals additional products and services. This is what communication scholar Emily West refers to as “surveillance as a service,” and the Electronic Privacy Information Center argued before the Federal Trade Commission that Echo constituted “unlawful surveillance under federal wiretap law.”37
Amazon has developed a facial recognition platform called Rekognition. Unsurprisingly, some of the most interested and enthusiastic customers are governments. The potency of technology able to compare video-recorded individuals to information stored in state-based databases opens up a panorama of potential abuses. In addition to being able to recognize and identify individual’s faces, Rekognition can also identify clothing and discern gender. The platform can track many people (perhaps hundreds consecutively) through crowds, identify what individuals are doing, discern their emotional state (e.g., happy, sad, or fearful), identify non-human objects, and read words (e.g., on signs, license plates). Most concerning of all, is that Rekognition also can be used to flag “unsafe” or “inappropriate” things. Amazon has marketed Rekognition to local U.S. police forces; since AWS already hosts the body-camera and surveillance camera footage from many police departments, Rekognition can be an “add-on” feature for a mere $6–12 a month extra. Such robust and integrated facial recognition platforms are obviously able to assist authoritarian states, but “democratic” states are equally able to exploit Rekognition for their own unchallengeable advantage. Many obvious concerns have been articulated by civil liberties and privacy organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. These advocates fear that Rekognition raises the risks for already over-policed populations (especially the poor and people of color), can invasively track and manipulate immigrants, and be used to identify and arrest protesters and activists.
Amazon deflects such criticisms by instead pointing to Rekognition’s allegedly “positive” uses, such as finding lost children. The selective highlighting of an invasive technology’s “social good” is an old, established strategy,
