[lawnchair_larry]

He didn’t hire them for plausible deniability.

He’s not an idiot, but he isn’t a security expert. It’s actually really difficult to evaluate the competency of security experts. He got some government guy with a flashy resume who then contracted it out to some generic business consulting firm. Which is a reasonable thing for a layperson like Bezos to do, but a bad way to get actual technical experts. He would have been far better off emailing some of the security teams at Amazon for recommendations.

[m0zg]

One of the main skills a good executive needs is evaluating the competence of people they hire without knowing those people's jobs. Bezos is one of the best people in the world, and I'm sure he can smell bullshit better, and from farther away than any of us here. An inebriated baboon can see that these people don't know what they're talking about. Bezos likely has hundreds, if not thousands of industry-leading security experts working for him at Amazon. A five minute due diligence check by them would result in advice to hire someone else, and likely in a recommendation on who to hire.

[lawnchair_larry]

> Bezos likely has hundreds, if not thousands of industry-leading security experts working for him at Amazon.

Not even close. A few dozen or so, most of which aren’t iOS or forensics experts. Also, nobody had this report until after it was written.

If you think executives can evaluate the competency of experts in niche fields, you are absolutely kidding yourself. This is also why nearly every CISO in the industry has absolutely no idea what they are doing.

[m0zg]

Really? In a company with 300K+ employees you estimate that there are only a few dozen people who can vet a security consultancy by checking if it previously did any successful iOS forensic work?

[lawnchair_larry]

I have worked there, in security, so yes.