"I came in here expecting firm proof that the CIA was using Amazon to spy on my Prime subscription."
While that's no doubt already happening, it's also abundantly obvious that Amazon is one of very few organisations that anyone, CIA or not, would go to for consulting/professional-services when setting up a large-scale in-house "cloud computing" infrastructure.
There's not a large pool of companies with demonstrated experience, apart from Amazon there's maybe Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Rackspace - I wouldn't add Apple to that list (since their "cloud" track record is pretty poor), from there you end up with vendor-lockin from options like IBM, Dell, and perhaps to a lesser extent Cisco.
Out of all of those options, Amazon seem to easily be the "best choice" if I were to be setting up a decade-long partnership to deploy a multi-data-center scale private cloud.
Most of the time government hires (and has for a long time) the traditional defense contractors or government-specialized small contractors to do their IT work. It is actually mildly impressive that a 'normal business' IT provider like AWS has broken into the government field.
Often these contractors, with experience in getting and administering federal contractors, will hire other contractors to do some of the other work. It's quite possible that's what's happened here.
"I came in here expecting firm proof that the CIA was using Amazon to spy on my Prime subscription."
While that's no doubt already happening, it's also abundantly obvious that Amazon is one of very few organisations that anyone, CIA or not, would go to for consulting/professional-services when setting up a large-scale in-house "cloud computing" infrastructure.
There's not a large pool of companies with demonstrated experience, apart from Amazon there's maybe Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Rackspace - I wouldn't add Apple to that list (since their "cloud" track record is pretty poor), from there you end up with vendor-lockin from options like IBM, Dell, and perhaps to a lesser extent Cisco.
Out of all of those options, Amazon seem to easily be the "best choice" if I were to be setting up a decade-long partnership to deploy a multi-data-center scale private cloud.