TL;DR they backed up their servers
This is purely an ad for Amazon Web Services.
Russian Mission Impossible heist to steel the Ukraini Box and thus Ukraine’s entire government and all of its immense power.
After the data downloads, much of the information is sent to the cloud over secure networks, and the Snowballs, loaded with up to 80 terabytes of encrypted data each, are shipped back to Amazon. For good reason, Maxwell doesn’t want to say where, but says “it’s a tense moment around the baggage carousel. Here’s government in a box, literally.”
At the time, Ukrainian law required the majority of government data and certain private data to be housed on servers in Ukraine. In February, parliament changed that law to allow the information transfer.
They sketched out with pen and paper a list of the most essential data: the population register; land and property ownership records; tax payment records; bank records; education registries; anti-corruption databases, and more. The project involved 27 Ukrainian ministries, 18 Ukrainian universities, the country’s largest remote learning K–12 school serving hundreds of thousands of displaced children, and dozens of other private sector companies including Ukraine’s largest private financial institution, PrivatBank.
How much you want to bet the US government now has a permanent record of loads of information about every Ukrainian. I wonder how possible it would be for them to also edit some master copy of this data to privatize a bunch of stuff further. Especially “anti-corruption databases” considering how much of a euphemism that was to Joe Biden where he talked on video about how he got that lawyer or whoever replaced (because he was going after Hunter Biden and actual corruption). Just a bunch of corrupt scumbags on US payroll going poof from that database. And the puppet Ukrainian government won’t even double check. They probably won’t even have a SHA256 hash of the data to go by.
Amazon didn’t have to worry about its relationship with Russia on the Snowball project. It doesn’t have one. “We didn’t have anything to turn off there,” Maxwell said. “We had never invested there. It’s a point of principle.”
Since the project began, other countries have told Amazon they’re interested in out-of-the-country cloud backups of government data. Maxwell wouldn’t say which countries but noted keen interest from East Asia.
Just incredibly creepy stuff. The thought of having the US entirely control entire countries’ government data is horrifying. This is basically just US puppet states saying how excited they are to hand over people’s identities to their US masters. Nobody who cares about any nation’s sovereignty would think of doing this for even a second.
dying of a heart attack on the floor of a fulfillment center because someone ordered Ukraine with free overnight shipping
Nice, government from the cloud!!!
