What kind of company is Amazon? It’s a question with a lot of reasonable answers: It’s a peerless e-commerce giant; it’s a massive shipping and logistics operation; it’s a devices and digital-services company that sells millions of gadgets; it’s a cloud provider so widely used that a regional outage can take out a good chunk of the entire internet. With the help of Whole Foods, it’s become a credible competitor in groceries, and with Prime Video, a major streamer and producer of TV and movies. In the course of becoming America’s quintessential neo-conglomerate, though, Amazon has also become something else: a serious — and diverse — surveillance firm.

Two pieces of news from this month help map the depth and scope of Amazon’s investment in surveillance technology. This week, following sma

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