> I don't know about arrogant
Does Google or Amazon have enough compute power to compete with the NSA? My guess would be yes. They certainly have a good cover story if they were interested in using it for exploits. :-)
Does Google or Amazon have enough compute power to compete with the NSA? My guess would be yes. They certainly have a good cover story if they were interested in using it for exploits. :-)
On the other hand, this is exactly the reason that entities that do operate through handshake deals with no visible economic activity—organized crime and the zaibatsu/chaebol type of conglomerate—tend to be considered imminent threats to states. They're opaque to logistical analysis! (Not that your average mob boss would have any inherent reason to commit treason against the United States, but other nations might be rather motivated to give them extrinsic reasons.)
For this reason, even "benign" domestic crime syndicates or conglomerates will have their intelligence opacity hacked through with the application of good old-fashioned HUMINT.
Thus, such entities can do an entire skunkworks project without needing to touch the economy. Just like a state can.
Zaibatsu are complementary to (corporatist) governments, not adversarial. They feed off each other.
EDIT: to be clear when I say “no ability” I mean practically. Obviously they COULD put all employees on a single problem but they simply won’t.
It wasn't all employees, but all servers, that I was thinking about.
[0] For a very simple example compare the hashrate on any CPU vs a bitcoin miner ASIC with a comparable size.
On the other hand those idle resources could be rented to an agency at a discount price