Condi Rice Joins Dropbox Board of Directors. Who Should Worry?

Condoleezza Rice, former
secretary of state under George W. Bush and defender of his
administration’s sins, has joined the board of file-sharing service
Dropbox. Here’s how Businessweek
reported it:

The former secretary of state’s consulting firm,
RiceHadleyGates, has been advising the startup on management issues
for the last year. Now she’ll help the company think about such
matters as international expansion and privacy, an issue that dogs
every cloud company in the age of Edward Snowden and the NSA.

“As a country, we are having a great national conversation and
debate about exactly how to manage privacy concerns,” Rice says
about her new position. “I look forward to helping Dropbox navigate
it.”

There has been some outrage in response to the idea of Rice
“thinking” about privacy. In 2005, Rice defended
President Bush skipping the Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA)
Court and not bothering with getting warrants to place National
Security Agency (NSA) wiretaps on foreigners in the U.S. with
suspected terrorist ties (despite concerns at the time from both
Democrats and Republicans in Congress).

Those who remember Edward Snowden’s very first NSA document dump
about PRISM, the program to give NSA access to files and
communications on servers at several major Internet companies, may
recall that Dropbox was not yet listed as a participant program but
would be joining soon. Dropbox
denied any involvement at the time—but then, so did everybody
else.

Rice’s addition to the board has quickly prompted the creation
of the “Drop Dropbox”
campaign to encourage Dropbox to dump Rice or for consumers to dump
Dropbox. Though ostensibly her support for the surveillance state
should be the excluding factor for leadership of the company, Drop
Dropbox also wants to use Rice’s involvement in starting the Iraq
War, defense of torture, and role on the board of directors for
Chevron as reasons why she shouldn’t serve. While the first two
items are bad things that she’s done, they’re completely irrelevant
to anything Dropbox might be doing, unless they’ve got some really,
really unusual expansion plans.

Also, Dropbox announced that Pearl Jam was becoming an investor
in the company. This also prompted a little bit of outrage by
Fortune Senior Editor Dan Primack in the “Ya sold out,
Eddie!” vein. Read his argument
here.