Double Take: Condoleezza Rice As Dropbox's Newest Board Member 313
Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State under George W. Bush, and defender of Bush-era (and onward) policies about surveillance by wiretapping and other means, has landed at an interesting place: she's just become a part of the small board at Dropbox. TechDirt calls the appointment "tone deaf," and writes "At a time when people around the globe are increasingly worried about American tech firms having too close a connection to the intelligence community, a move like this seems like a huge public relations disaster. While Rice may be perfectly qualified to hold the role and to help Dropbox with the issues it needs help with, it's hard not to believe that there would be others with less baggage who could handle the job just as well."
Some people are doing more than looking for an alternative for themselves, too, as a result.
Good choice (Score:5, Insightful)
She's pretty sharp, well connected, and understands how the government sees these types of date & service providers.
At a she's an awesome catch for any cloud company. Throw in her political awareness and it's even better.
Force her out! (Score:5, Insightful)
Quick, let's boycott Dropbox so we can force her out of the company. Then after we've succeeded we can have a another Slashdot story lamenting how intolerant we've all become and we can point fingers at everyone else.
Baggage? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know you all think Bush and Obama are the same, but there's no way Secretary Rice has "close connections to the intelligence community" under the Obama administration.
Surely (Score:4, Insightful)
meh (Score:5, Insightful)
I really don't care, this is a private company and they can hire who they want to. That being said, I assumed dropbox already was infiltrated by the NSA.
Re:Wiretapping? (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh why not? (Score:4, Insightful)
She was the provost of Stanford University, she's got a huge rolodex in government and SillyCon Valley. She's also obviously got a big background in IR and particularly working with Russia and Africa, which are both huge growth markets for Internet companies.
Her biggest crime was not asking all the right questions, and didn't have to swag necessary to challenge Cheney or Rumsfeld, not that she was particularly motivated. She's proven to be a pretty bad administrator and manager, but she's going on the Board, not into management.
Re:Wiretapping? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, I assumed dropbox already was infiltrated by the NSA.
And now it's confirmed. Freaking astute move by the board members with gag orders and National Security Letters if you ask me.
Congratulations Dropbox ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been meaning to disable this for a while.
If she's on your board, I'll get that done now.
There is now zero room to trust DropBox as an entity.
Low even for Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
If she were a Democrat, the article would talk about the racist/sexist Republicans that were trying to force her out.
The Democrats have only enhanced the spying and wiretapping, but you don't get outcry's about the likes of Facebook the Zuckerberg's of the world who are huge Democrat donors.
I love to see that "tolerance" the left is famous for.
Re:Oh why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
She was intimately involved in the decision to go to war with Iraq and spoke publicly in support of it.
She was an integral part of the Bush administration's campaign of lies surrounding the war, working to further public support of the war by lying about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
Rice played a central role in affirming the "legality" of the Bush administration's torture program.
Rice not only spoke in favor of the Bush administration's warrantless wiretap program and expansive domestic surveillance program, she authorized the warrantless wiretap of UN Security Council members.
But you keep thinking that a extremely brilliant and accomplished individual, having obtained her Masters degree at age 20, isn't smart enough to ask the right questions or able to go toe to toe with Cheney or Rumsfeld....
Re:Oh why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
That is not quite true. To simplify, she was a neocon who was overconfident of what US military force could do. That would put her on the side of Dick Cheney, but on the opposite side of Rumsfeld and Powell who were urging caution.
I will second you point on that she is very sharp but that her management of the state department was subpar.
Re:The important stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, she supported propping up eight dudes and having female soldiers point at their junk.
Re:Good choice (Score:5, Insightful)
She's pretty sharp
Anyone that thought the Iraq War was a good idea, should not be described as "pretty sharp". There is a saying that 'Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.' Condoleezza Rice is proof that we have moved past that. She is female (and black), and promoted to the highest levels, despite the failure of nearly all her policies. She is proof that you no longer have to be male to be both successful and incompetent.
Uh oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently they never checked her stance on Gay marriage:
“I don’t ever want anybody to be denied rights within our country. I happen to think marriage is between a man and a woman. That’s tradition, and I believe that that’s the right answer. But perhaps we will decide that there needs to be some way for people to express their desire to live together through civil union.”
Condoleezza Rice — Dec. 20, 2010
I guess websites will have to protest and such and then she'll resign after 2 weeks right?
Re:Wiretapping? (Score:2, Insightful)
A conservative is incapable of understanding what racism means. Seriously. Ask them to define it and they get a convoluted bundle of CRAP.
Only a conservative would fail to understand concerns about someone who pushed the Patriot Act to the hilt as NSA adviser is 'racist.'
It's most liberals that don't know what racism is. They sceam "racism" if someone mentions islamic terrorists. They think it's great to hire someone just because they're a minority even if they're under qualified and ignore white males when they are qualified. They don't see Affirmative Action as inherently racist, even though it's based totally on race. And they certainly love to say and do racist things about black and latino/hispanic conservatives, but throw a complete fit if a conservative says anything remotely derogatory about a democrat minority. Just note all the, "You didn't vote for Obama? Then you're a racist!" hyperbole from the likes of Chris Matthews and crew.
Racism is believing that your race is far superior in all or most respects to other races and, more to the point, that you and they should be treated accordingly. Or, in some cases, simply judging and hating one specific race. Racism is not merely having pride in your race, even if you're white.
Re:So everyone protesting her is a racist (Score:1, Insightful)
My thoughts exactly. How can the same people, who answer every criticism of a Black President with deep and loud suspic..., nay, accusations of racism, boycott a Black Secretary of State?
Not only are they racist themselves then, they are sexist too.
Re:Good choice (Score:5, Insightful)
The Iraq war was good for all the companies involved, just like the other wars. Plus, it took down the criminal who dared to trade oil in euros, not dollars, so it was good for the State as well.
Re:Force her out! (Score:4, Insightful)
As opposed to Gonzales who said habeus corpus wasn't really a right? Who said that torture was OK?
You can keep him.
I'm not defending Holder, but Gonzales didn't seem to have the barest clue about what the Constitution said and what it meant.
Sorry, but pretty much anybody from the Bush era (and quite honestly a bunch who are still in Washington) has no business working at a place which has a privacy policy.
Sum up... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh why not? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've said this before, the US Military does obliterating an opposing force quite well. Which serves well when the objective is the liberation of a territory from hostile occupation, where the US can go in, win, and then the local populace can quickly get things back the way it was. It does not do occupation very well nor really has outside of the Wester Hemisphere.
The exception being post World War II with the Marshal Plan. Which planning for that began in 1943 and by 1945 the government had managed to twist the arms of a lot of academics, economists, finance, and high ranking industry officials to spend two years post war to help rebuild western Europe.
Re:Oh why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that, while she is smart, she is also ideological.
If her ideology conflicts with the facts, the ideology wins.
Not only was she NOT willing to ask question, she WAS willing to give press interviews with WRONG information. Because that WRONG information suited her ideology. Even though it would cost lives.
NOT the kind of person YOU want on the Board of Directors of a company tasked with providing access to YOUR data.
She didn't care enough about the lives that would be lost to ask any questions. And she cared so little for those lives that she provided wrong information to support the drive to war. Do you think that your DATA will mean more to her than that?
Re:Good choice (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that anyone, regardless of race, creed, religion, etc, will always have a job publicly supporting the existing power structure.
Isn't that an amazing step forward in egalitarianism? Such a short time ago, someone like her would never have been accepted, no matter what her political views. Pretty cool, eh? Nah, just kidding. Let's keep blaming everything on "white men" LOLZ
Re:Wiretapping? (Score:4, Insightful)
A conservative is incapable of understanding what racism means. Seriously. Ask them to define it and they get a convoluted bundle of CRAP.
Conservative: racism is discriminating based on race. For example, college admissions are racist if they use different requirements for different races.
Liberal: racism is the absence of penalizing whites. For example, college admissions aren't racist as long as they penalizes whites; if they penalize Asians more than whites, that's still not racism, since whites are still penalized in some way.
Both are simple: one seeks equality at the start of the process, the other equality at the end of the process, and both think the other hates equality, like almost everything else in the conservative/liberal divide.
Re:Good choice (Score:5, Insightful)
The Iraq war achieved all of it's objectives:
The objective of the war was to destroy Iraq's WMDs. The things you listed were made-up-after-the-fact justifications.
Prior to the war, we had three goals:
1. A united Iraq
2. A secular Iraq
3. An Iraq opposed to Iranian influence.
These were also the goals of Saddam Hussein. They are NOT the goals of the current government of Iraq, which has pretty much the opposite goals (for instance, they are supporting the Assad regime in Syria).
Re:Good choice (Score:5, Insightful)
The objective of the war was to destroy Iraq's WMDs. The things you listed were made-up-after-the-fact justifications.
That was never the goal. That was the BS propaganda. Don't believe everything^W anything you see on the news. We didn't even hear the term "WMD" until Blair said that the UK wouldn't join us without a UN mandate.
The UN resolution that served as the peace treaty that ended the first Gulf War included a requirement that Saddam destroy all his WMDs and provide proof that he had done so. That proof hadn't been provided, so, bingo, pretext for war. Whether Iraq actually had any WMDs was only relevant to ginning up emotional support: the propaganda mill. It was never actually important.
BTW, it's no more important that Iraq have pro-American policies than that France does. Democracies are more open to trade and less open to war, so we benefit regardless. It's far easier for a dictator to find purely personal gain in expanding his territory regardless of sanctions, as we see in Ukraine now, for example.
Re:Good choice (Score:4, Insightful)
"* Got our troops out of Kuwait, and anywhere else too close to Mecca"
um no, US troops have been and will continue to be in Kuwait. not to mention Qutar.
"*... and showing other tin-pot dictators that the US should be feared."
the only thing Bush did that Obama has undone.
Re:Good choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Saying she's a bad choice is like saying a successful defense lawyer is a bad choice because he got his client off, and you were the prosecuting attorney.
FTFY. Because really, it has nothing to do with competence. I'm sure she's very competent. Just in a way that is bad news for dropbox users (ie, the "prosecuting attorney" in the fixed analogy).
Re:Force her out! (Score:4, Insightful)
It was torture when the North Koreans were doing it to US prisoners of war. Please tell me what has changed.
Re:Force her out! (Score:4, Insightful)
Waterboarding is regarded as torture by any other civilized country of the world.
Doesn't matter if you type you fingers bloody or stomp your feet to pretend otherwise. Just shows what America is made of these days ... not the right stuff.