[arealaccount]

Why wouldn’t they just give them DB access for the 10m? Id assume NSA would prefer the database to remain encrypted and have an admin account?

[radicaldreamer]

Deniability

[bb88]

If you're the NSA, you can tell Amazon, "Hey here's $1B. You're going to get some fiber outages, and we're also going to buy a bunch of compute from you at an exorbitantly high price you'll charge us. It's fine, we're the NSA. So when the outages happen, don't announce it. Also terrorism."

[dylan604]

Plausible. You can always deny anything. It just might not be so plausible under scrutiny.