Double Take: Condoleezza Rice As Dropbox's Newest Board Member

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.

Re:Wiretapping?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? National Security Advisor who supports wire tapping sitting on the board for a cloud based storage solution company. Could your post be code for stupid.

Revolving door of business and government. Having her on board increases the probability that if the Republicans gain the Senate this year, or the Presidency in 2016, the government will "encourage" its subcontractors to use Dropbox, or adopt Dropbox itself. Even if they don't, Republican-sympathetic nation states (vs. Democratically-sympathetic nation sates) are more likely to be good targets for Dropbox's enterprise sales force.

Re:Good choice

[khasim]

Anyone that thought the Iraq War was a good idea, should not be described as "pretty sharp".

That depends upon whether you mean "good idea ... for the USofA" or "good idea ... for me and my friends".

A lot of companies made a lot of money off of that war.

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.

I don't agree with that. I think that anyone, regardless of race, creed, religion, etc, will always have a job publicly supporting the existing power structure.

She wasn't elected. She was appointed by the people who were elected. And those were white men.

Which is why I think that she's now at DropBox. She still has those political connections. And DropBox wants to pay her for access to them.

Re:Good choice

[Ceriel Nosforit]

She's a horrible cunt who lied...

That may not be truthful. There's a consensus building that she and her allies genuinely believed in their policy. That doesn't speak well for her competence but at least her integrity isn't under as great a scrutiny.

So, it's an old familiar foe called Ignorance that we keep on fighting, instead of some malevolent conspiracy.

Re:Force her out!

[mi]

Gonzales who said habeus corpus wasn't really a right

So did Abraham Lincoln [about.com]...

Who said that torture was OK?

For the umpteenth time: waterboarding is not torture. At most, it is "torture-lite" — anything, from which the subject walks away without bodily harm, does not qualify.

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.

First of all, Obama's era is only worse in this regard. I understand — and share — your contempt for all government officials, because, regardless of the party they all tend to buy into the "government knows better" concept. But a company with a privacy policy must be able to balance users' privacy with the government's requests (and demands) for cooperation.