Another day, another protest against a Seattle tech titan.
Tuesday’s protest included a blockade of the South Lake Union Streetcar, with activists holding a banner that read: CIAmazon. That was in reference to Amazon Web Services’ partnership with the CIA, and it comes a day after protesters blocked a Microsoft Connector bus on Capitol Hill on Monday.
Brendan Kiley at The Stranger offers a first-hand account of the action near Amazon’s campus, writing that the “street theater was not well received.”
Writes Kiley:
The demonstrators seem to be playing town crier (a role that is important or exasperating, depending on who’s talking), popping up here and there to briefly disrupt the rhythm of everyday life and point toward this or that issue.
What’s the main beef with Amazon and its CIA contract?
According to a flyer distributed at the protest:
“The simple truth is that Amazon, the leviathan that calls Seattle home, is currently building a private data cloud for the CIA. With this cloud, the CIA will be better able to incinerate entire Yemeni families with Predator drones, stalk domestic and foreign dissidents, and keep track of its operatives across the planet. Amazon is now directly complicit in every new death caused by the CIA.”
More on the protestors’ mission on the Tides of Flame blog, which notes that Amazon’s cloud service will help the CIA “coordinate their massacres, assassinations, and terrorism across the planet.”
