Has Amazon Partnered with the CIA?

Online retail and cloud storage giant Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has just landed a contract that almost every company dreams of: developing a special product for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Unnamed sources are stating that Amazon has signed on to create a custom cloud system for the CIA, a contract which could be worth as much as $600 million over the next 10 years. FCW is reporting that Amazon Web Services will help the intelligence agency build a private cloud infrastructure, that will help the agency keep up with emerging technologies in a cost-effective manner that was not possible under the CIA’s previous cloud efforts.

Amazon declined to comment on the contract, and probably not surprisingly, so did the CIA. ”As a general rule, the CIA does not publicly disclose details of our contracts, the identities of our contractors, the contract values, or the scope of work,” a CIA spokesperson said.

The CIA has recently been dropping leads on ways it can obtain software, uses big-data analytics, and the ways in which it incorporates commercial-sector innovation, according to FCW…