What kind of IDIOT would buy Amazon Echo?

Amazon is really pushing their new Echo device, a voice-controlled computer that -- I kid you not -- stays permanently connected to the internet as it recognizes your voice and makes a record of everything you say.

Echo was born from a simple idea: create a computer, controlled entirely by your voice. This idea required some incredible invention. It had to understand natural language requests, from many voices, from across a room, even when music is playing. It also needed to be informative, entertaining, and useful—while always getting smarter.

With seven microphones, beam-forming technology, and noise cancellation, Echo achieved this goal by enabling far-field voice recognition.

Why should we worry about this? Well, last year we learned that Amazon was in bed with -- do I even need to tell you? -- the CIA.

This summer, a $600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services for the Central Intelligence Agency over the past year will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community.

This computing cloud, which allows the CIA and the NSA to share information instantly, is the same cloud that Echo will be connected to 24/7. This article spells it out...

All 17 agencies that comprise the U.S. intelligence community will be making use of Amazon's cloud, including, selected at random, the NSA, the DEA, the Department of the Treasury, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and Coast Guard Intelligence—which you'd think you would have heard of by now.

There's almost assuredly a long view with Amazon's CIA data center, too terrible to contemplate, ideas pinging around, brainstorming sessions on how best to leverage a dense mass of black op debriefs and decrypting moments of human intimacy; whole communities reduced to metadata-hyperlinked dossiers; transcripts of interrogations that decent people would call torture; dark truths and useless junk all hanging shapeless in a steady breeze of electrons behind Langley's firewall. (It will certainly be an advantage in Amazon's Cloud War against Google.)

To imagine Amazon's dark black breathing machine communicating regularly with the NSA's yottabyte data center outside Bluffdale, extracting and calcifying this vast containment facility of our past lives, is to cry out in anguish over a grim new understanding of what it truly means to be governed.

But there's more. Look at what we learn from the first comment (written by someone who seems to know what he is talking about)...

The $600M covers way way more than storage - it's a full build-out of the complete Amazon Web Services stack in a facility that can be used by the intelligence community. Any press-release excreting "cloud company" can do virtual servers and block storage. Most of them are just rebranding VMWare or doing other lame things. The CIA/AWS contract states that all current and future AWS services will all get deployed into the special CIA cloud as well.

There is some evidence that Amazon was part of the NSA's PRISM Program.

Amazon expects you to pay $180 dollars for the privilege of installing a super-acute eavesdropping device in your home, one which will be able to make out what you are saying even if you are listening to music or watching TV. Your words -- all of your words, uttered in the privacy of your own home -- will be translated "on the fly" into digital-ese, sent to the NSA, and stored forever in the Bluffdale facility, available for keyword searches.

Of course, Amazon hopes to set your mind at ease...

Put a microphone in your product, and someone is going to assume you're listening to them. That's one of the challenges Amazon Echo - the online retailer's "Siri in a totem pole" - faces, with suspicion about just how much Jeff Bezos & Co. (or his algorithms, at least) are actually eavesdropping on. Given the power of Amazon's recommendation engines and the amount of data it gathers just from casual browsing, you can certainly see where some of the paranoia might come from, too. A microphone-mute button takes pride of place on top of Echo, but will it be enough to persuade potential users that the virtual assistant is working for them and not for Amazon itself?

Of course the mics will still operate when the "mute" button is pushed. That button is a placebo.

What kind of mental defective would buy this thing?

The same mental defectives who made Facebook an inescapable part of American life -- even though everyone knows that Facebook is the CIA. You can't get onto Facebook without giving them your cell phone number, which means that they can -- and do -- track you everywhere you go.

By the way, we could change all of that. We could insist on a law which would mandate that every cell phone sold in this country come equipped with a genuine "off" switch.

Why isn't such a law on the books right now? Because most Americans are cattle.