Amazon does have devices listening in every home.
Is the concern here that hiring Keith Alexander would make it easier for government to get people's conversation data?
Or perhaps affect Amazon's procurement with non-transparent motives. Suppose these is a certain microarchitectural vulnerability in one vendor's hardware but not another's. If Amazon could be induced to buy the vulnerable hardware over the non-vulnerable hardware, that could help people who knew about the vulnerability spy on AWS customers. Or if there were a company to be rewarded or punished for its decision to cooperate or not to cooperate with some covert activity, the reward or punishment could be done through procurement decisions.
Or perhaps affect Amazon's lobbying at home or abroad about privacy legislation or something.
(It's not obvious to me whether the danger is particularly greater from a former DIRNSA than from someone with undisclosed connections to a spy agency. Maybe Alexander's recommendations would get extra scrutiny!)
No, they don’t. It’s a choice people make, and most aren’t buying Kindle, Echo or other near useless spying device like that.
Not that it matters though - phones are [already a vector](https://www.wired.com/2014/06/nsa-bug-iphone/) for the government to listen to you. I'm not sure this news really changes anything - the government already works with large US companies to spy on people, and then makes sure they're not allowed to disclose it to the public.
Also, I think Kindle is a great product, and wouldn't consider it a useless spying device. Each to their own though.
Are we assuming that all the individuals who purchased the devices live completely alone? There are only 128 million households in the US. [0]
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183635/number-of-househo...
sarcasm.