Everyone is talking about Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’s recent purchase of the Washington Post. Less noticed is the conflict of interest between his ownership of the Post and Amazon’s potentially significant profits from computing and data storage contracts with numerous US government agencies including the CIA. The question is whether the newspaper will be able to even-handedly report on the US government despite Bezos’s financial interest in US government contracts.

Though not as well known as its retail sales business, Amazon is a big player in data storage and cloud computing. GCN reports that Amazon’s cloud services arm Amazon Web Services is the “largest hosting company in the world” and has more than 300 government agencies as customers.

Among Amazon’s more recent government contracts is a 10 year, $600 million contract to build private cloud services inside CIA data centers.

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