The method is buried about 60% through the article, but it's interesting. It seems incredibly risky for the cloud companies to do this. Was it agreed by some salespeople without the knowledge of legal / management?
Leaked documents from Israel’s finance ministry, which include a finalised version of the Nimbus agreement, suggest the secret code would take the form of payments – referred to as “special compensation” – made by the companies to the Israeli government.
According to the documents, the payments must be made “within 24 hours of the information being transferred” and correspond to the telephone dialing code of the foreign country, amounting to sums between 1,000 and 9,999 shekels.
If either Google or Amazon provides information to authorities in the US, where the dialing code is +1, and they are prevented from disclosing their cooperation, they must send the Israeli government 1,000 shekels.
If, for example, the companies receive a request for Israeli data from authorities in Italy, where the dialing code is +39, they must send 3,900 shekels.
If the companies conclude the terms of a gag order prevent them from even signaling which country has received the data, there is a backstop: the companies must pay 100,000 shekels ($30,000) to the Israeli government.
> Was it agreed by some salespeople without the knowledge of legal / management?
Never worked for either company, but there's a zero percent chance. Legal agrees to bespoke terms and conditions on contracts (or negotiates them) for contracts. How flexible they are to agreeing to exotic terms depends on the dollar value of the contract, but there is no chance that these terms (a) weren't outlined in the contract and (b) weren't heavily scrutinized by legal (and ops, doing paybacks in such a manner likely require work-arounds for their ops and finance teams).
Legal can advise, but it's ultimately up to the business to risk-accept. If they think the risk vs reward analysis makes it worthwhile, they can overrule legal and proceed.
Why would it be fraudulent in this case? I assume that these would be paid as refunds accounted for as a discount to a particular customer - aren't these generally discretionary? Also, I would assume that it would be the Israeli government getting services from the Israeli subsidiary of that company, so it's not clear whether even if it were a crime, which jurisdiction would have an issue with it.
You could argue that it's against something like the OECD Anti‑Bribery Convention, but that would be a much more difficult case, given that this isn't a particular foreign official, but essentially a central body of the foreign government.
Just to clarify, not saying that it's ok, but just that accusing it of being a "crime" might be a category error.
"Everything" here meaning "blatant lying" - and knowingly staying silent on something that obviously has a huge impact on a company is lying - which in corporate America is so normalized that some mistake it for being "everything". Securities fraud is incredibly easy to avoid if executives just stop lying. This soon becomes clear when clicking through the links in the article.
> Yesterday New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood filed a securities-fraud lawsuit against Exxon Mobil Corp. “alleging that the company misled investors regarding the risk that climate change regulations posed to its business.”
Blatant lying
> if you are a public company that suffers a massive data breach and exposes sensitive data about millions of customers without their consent, and that data is then used for nefarious purposes, and you find out about the breach, and then you wait for years to disclose it, and when you do disclose it your stock loses tens of billions of dollars of market value, then shareholders are going to sue you for not telling them earlier
Blatant lying
The fact that most of this lying (see Exxon) is done under some kind of "nudge nudge, wink wink, we all know what's really going in" doesn't stop it from knowingly lying.
That knowingly lying is securities fraud seems very logical, and nothing like "everything".
This is all moot anyway now that the US is no longer interested in upholding any laws against large companies whatsoever.
> Yesterday New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood filed a securities-fraud lawsuit against Exxon Mobil Corp. “alleging that the company misled investors regarding the risk that climate change regulations posed to its business.”
>Blatant lying
Can you elaborate? Looking at the case it seems pretty clear that Exxon did not lie, especially not in any "blatant" manner.
In what sense would the payments be fraudulent? It would be real money paid out of Amazon's accounts as part of a contract they willingly signed with Israel.
Wouldn't just having 1000 canaries be a "legal" way to do the alerting?
A government can compel Amazon to avoid notifying a target (Israel in this case) that their information has been subpoenaed, but can't compel Amazon to lie and say it hasn't sent their info.
Or is the concept of a canary pretty much useless now?
I'm personally one of the "activists" who is trying to avoid Amazon and Google to a practical degree, due to project Nimbus, so I'd be more than happy if their data could be accessed, and even happier to see Amazon and Google just cut ties with them altogether.
And I'm personally one of the "activists" who is trying to avoid Amazon and Google to a practical degree, because they might be ordered by a foreign government (or my own government) to turn over my data to that government and be legally forbidden from saying that they have been required to do this. Or because they might succumb to activist pressure to deplatform me.
> (my nation of citizenship, the US, definitely has rules against that)
US rules are, unfortunately, nortoriously and outlandishly broken whenever it comes to Israel: Foreign Agent Registration Act, the Leahy Law, and probably a bunch of others as well.
The payments are an act of fraud as they deprive the company of resources for no tangible business purpose. No contract authorizes the use of payments to bypass communications controls and exfiltrate data.
The act of communicating privileged or sealed information on itself is at minimum contempt of court and perhaps theft of government property, wire fraud or other crimes. Typically accounts payable aren’t aware of evidence gathering or discovery, so the actor is also facing conspiracy or other felonies.
> If either Google or Amazon provides information to authorities in the US, where the dialing code is +1, and they are prevented from disclosing their cooperation, they must send the Israeli government 1,000 shekels.
its a buggy method, considering canada also uses +1, and a bunch of countries look like they use +1 but dont, like barbados +1(246) using what looks like an area code as part of the country code.
> its a buggy method, considering canada also uses +1, and a bunch of countries look like they use +1 but dont, like barbados +1(246) using what looks like an area code as part of the country code.
You are correct that ITU code is not specific enough to identify a country, but I'm sorry, +1 is the ITU country code for the North American Numbering Plan Area. 246 is the NANPA area code for Barbados (which only has one area code) but as a NANPA member, Barbados' country code is +1, same as the rest of the members. There is no '+1246' country code.
There's not a lot of countries that are in a shared numbering plan other than NANPA, but for example, Khazakstan and Russia share +7 (Of course, the USSR needed a single digit country code, or there would have been a country code gap), and many of the former Netherland Antilles share +599, although Aruba has +297, and Sint Maarten is in +1 (with NANPA Area code 721)
It seems weirdly complicated. At this point I would assume it's much easier and secure just to bribe someone to tell them directly. This is like roleplay of secret sleeper agents during the cold war.
> If either Google or Amazon provides information to authorities in the US, where the dialing code is +1, and they are prevented from disclosing their cooperation, they must send the Israeli government 1,000 shekels
This is criminal conspiracy. It's fucking insane that they not only did this, but put the crime in writing.;
I'm always surprised how often crimes get put in writing in big companies, often despite the same companies having various "don't put crimes in writing" trainings.
To be fair it is not necessarily true that they did this. Devil's advocate (emphasis on the devil part) -- google and amazon may have agreed to do this / put it in the contract but never followed through.
It is criminal conspiracy, a federal felony in the US, if you contract to commit a crime. Conspiracy is a standalone crime on its own, independent if the contracted crime is never carried out (in breach of contract).
The mob tried your argument generations ago. It never worked.
They publicly agreed to do genocide, having a slightly criminal communications protocol in a contract on the side amounts to an ethical rounding error.
> If the companies conclude the terms of a gag order prevent them from even signaling which country has received the data, there is a backstop: the companies must pay 100,000 shekels ($30,000) to the Israeli government.
Uhm doesn't that mean that Google and Amazon can easily comply with US law despite this agreement?
There must be more to it though, otherwise why use this super suss signaling method?
How can they comply with a law that forbids disclosing information was shared, by doing just that? THe fact it's a simply kiddie code instead of explicit communication doesn't allow you to side step the law.
Except this is an affirmative action. Warrant canaries are simply removing from the TOS that the company has not/will not interact with law enforcement.
This is directly violating gag orders. Passing a message, even if it's encrypted or obfuscated is absolutely illegal. The article is a little BS as this sort of thing has been tested in court.
The only reason warrant canaries are in the gray zone is because they are specifically crafted that the business has to remove their cooperation clause to keep the ToS contract valid.
There's nothing like that at play here. It's literally "Just break the gag order, here's our secret handshake".
I don't understand these legal mambo jumbo, but lets make it simpler. Israel and the US have a tight intelligence agreements. No one have to keep secrets since they share information readily. That is what it means to be friends. Israel is the best outpost for western influence in the Middle East, and the US have a strategic need to maintain that to oppose forces such as China, Russia and Iran axis. There is no need for bribes or anything like that to get intelligence from both sides... The last time they started lying to each other was disastrous and henceforth I believe the relationship is stable. Not to mention it includes European powers, even though they are happy to defame Israel, they share intelligence, participate in joint operations and buy a huge amount of arms and technology from Israel and sell arms to Israel. So don't let the media fool you...
> The U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.
>Under the terms of the deal, the mechanism works like this:
> If either Google or Amazon provides information to authorities in the US, where the dialing code is +1, and they are prevented from disclosing their cooperation, they must send the Israeli government 1,000 shekels.
This sounds like warrant canaries but worse. At least with warrant canaries you argue that you can't compel speech, but in this case it's pretty clear to any judge that such payments constitute disclosure or violation of gag order, because you're taking a specific action that results in the target knowing the request was made.
A warrant canary works by removing information, not by transmitting it. You put up a sign like "The FBI has not issued a warrant" and then remove it if they do, even if there is a gag order stating you cannot disclose that they issued you a warrant. This only works because you have not told anyone that a warrant has been issued but they must infer that the missing canary implies such a warrant has been dispatched.
> but in this case it's pretty clear to any judge that such payments constitute disclosure
Agreed. This is direct. It is like putting up a posting "The FBI *has* issued a warrant". Which this would be in direct violation of a gag order. Their codes are even differentiating who the issuer is. I'm pretty confident a comprehensive set of warrant canaries detailing every agency would not comply with gag orders either as this leaves little ambiguity. But this isn't even doing that. It is just straight up direct communication.
I think what is funniest is that it could have been much more secret. When I saw the reference in the intro to payments I was thinking "don't tell me they're so dumb they're coding info like Costco". That they'd use the cents to detail access. Like .99 for all clear and .98 for access. But that's not "clever" at all lol
> warrant canary works by removing information, not by transmitting it.
You transmit information by changing the content of the transmission, basically just like any communication works
> This only works
do you know that? Haven't heard of it actually working in any high profile case.
> because you have not told anyone that a warrant has been issued
you have told them explicitly by agreeing to a scheme both parties understand and by enacting the message change under said scheme. You basically just used some encoding to hide the plain message
I think a canary works by having a date it was last updated and expiration date, and you just stop updating it if the condition no longer holds. You don't modify it if the event occurs, because then you are making a barred communication.
> You transmit information by changing the content of the transmission
That's incorrect.
First off, you're using the word in the definition. You can't use "transmit" to define "transmit". A transmission is the noun variation of transmit (verb).
Second off, a transmission is *active*
Think about radio. If I am constantly producing a 440kHz signal then I'm transmitting a signal. If I'm not producing the signal, I'm not transmitting.
You are not considered to be transmitting unless you are holding down the button to send the signal.
That's how a canary works. You're constantly transmitting a signal (the canary is constantly singing) and then all of a sudden it goes quiet. You have stopped transmission.
Does this communicate? Yes. But what it communicates is ambiguous. Maybe the canary just went to sleep. Maybe it starved to death instead of getting carbon dioxide poisoning. It does not provide an unambiguous truth.
That reasonable deniability is the reason a canary works. You can claim it was taken down for other reasons, such as an accident. Those reasons have to be believable and justifiable. Mind you, a warrant canary can work like going down in one commit and up in the next, happening over a small period of time. A canary does not need to work by continuous existence or continuous absence.
Canaries also frequently work by having expirations (which is closer to how you're thinking, but still follow the same abstraction discussed above). It has to be manually updated or modified. For example I could add the canary "godelski hasn't been raided by the FBI: signed 31 oct 2025 expires 7 Nov 2025". Were that message to still exist exactly on Nov 7th (and it will because I can't edit comments outside a time window) then you can conclude that my canary expired. You can't conclude I was raided by the FBI. You should be suspicious, but you can't be positive. Maybe I just can't update comments...
This isn't to be conflated with the way we transmit information is through variation, such as high and low in binary. Technically while you're talking you make pauses and "stop talking" several times while saying a single word. But we say you're talking until you stop "transmitting" or complete. If this pause wasn't included then the dead would still speak and your annoying uncle would never shut up
Yeah there's lots of ways to implement them but expiration is very common.
I guess you can technically be compelled to update your canary. But the main idea is to make it hard to compel the action that results in the canary existing. But don't ask me, like most HN users IANAL
This reads like something a non-lawyer who watched too many bad detective movies would dream up. Theres absolutely no way this would pass legal muster —- even warrant canaries are mostly untested, but this is clearly like 5x ‘worse’ for the reasons you point out.
> Several experts described the mechanism as a “clever” workaround that could comply with the letter of the law but not its spirit.
It's not clear to me how it could comply with the letter of the law, but evidently at least some legal experts think it can? That uncertainty is probably how it made it past the legal teams in the first place.
Warrant canaries depend on action, the removal or altering of the canary document. It’s too clever but no more clever than what Israel is requiring here.
Ah, I think I get it. Violating the spirit of a law can be, often is, enough to get you convicted of a crime. Arguably more often than violating the letter of the law but not it's spirit.
However, if a judge dodesn't want to find someone guilty, "not violating the letter of the law" can provide a fig leaf for the friendly judge.
When those experts are not named one could wonder if they even exist. Why would a journalist not reveal the name of an expert who is consulting on a matter of law?
Not to get super conspiratorial, but I think this is almost certainly a weasel statement simply to avoid directly accusing Israel/google/amazon of breaking the law.
I can't imagine any "legal expert" dumb enough to say you can violate a gag order if you use numbers instead of words.
In all likelihood there's just language like "to the extent permitted by law", which The Guardian isn't telling us about. Even if they didn't write that explicitly, it's implied anyway - Israel knows any US court would void any provision requiring Google/Amazon to commit criminal acts (illegality doctrine). It's also not really possible for Israel to be break laws of foreign states, since it's not bound by them in the first place.
This only works for Israel because members of the Israeli government expect to be above the law. They need to offer only the flimsiest pretext to get away with anything. Look what happened with Tom Alexandrovich.
From reading the Wiki, it seems like the state cops (who were somehow in charge of the case) forgot to take his passport when they arrested him, and then he just fled after he paid bail?
Is there any evidence he was helped in his escape by anyone? Genuinely asking (and genuinely seeking hard facts and data).
He was interviewed by the feds after his arrest and mentioned his upcoming flight in the interview transcript but still was allowed to leave the country.
Agree that there's something fishy/missing in this story.
Never say never, but I find it extremely unlikely that Google/Amazon lawyers, based in the US, would agree to such a blatantly mafia-like scheme.
Wouldn't the lawyers be based in Israel - under some Israel-based shell/subsidiary of Google/Amazon, that owns the data centers, and complies with local law?
There is no way a US company would enter this sort of deal with Israel where they promise to circumvent a gag order. The money isn't worth going to jail for and the execs signing the deal would go to jail and they have little to benefit from. Story has no sources and makes no sense. Either the Guardian is reporting some rumor or they're just making stuff up.
Is it really that difficult to believe it could be accurate? If we take at face value what has been written about other big tech companies (mainly thinking of Facebook) as they grew their relationship in countries such as the People’s Republic of China, we also see they had to sweeten the deal by giving the government more power over how they could use the services.
I do think it’s kind of a different situation though because apparently the employees of Facebook could have gotten into legal trouble in those other countries they were trying to expand into.
I don't know about Google but Amazon works with lawyers and other roles to routinely operate illegal union-busting strategies. It is blatantly illegal behavior that they use all their might to get away with. I don't know why you would find it so unbelievably surprising that they would do illegal mafia-like things.
It's a "cute" mechanism. The lawyers and the companies they work for found this to be an acceptable thing to put in a contract, when doing so could be interpreted as conspiring to evade the law. Did they get any assurances that they wouldn't get in trouble for doing this?
I don't think evade the law is the right term, at least if we stick with tax analogs. Clearly the goal was to 'avoid' the law. Doing something that avoids legal obligations is legal, doing something that evades them is illegal.
It's evasion. And it is arguably a conspiracy, since the other party in the contract is complicit in crafting language that gets around an anti-terrorism law. It's serious and wrong.
It's evasion based on what? To say that with any degree of certainty you'd need to have immense knowledge in the esoteric of the balance of US laws, international treaties, and more. Even that is probably not enough as the exact bounds and constraints of laws can be somewhat ambiguous especially when they start interacting with other laws. And then on top of all of this need to start factoring in sovereign immunity, the interplay with Israel Laws and Google, and countless other things.
And while 'anti-terrorism' is the pretext for these secret courts, secret orders, and other nonsense - in reality I expect they've done extremely little to actually stop terrorists. Yet it's certainly created a system where even a defacto Western/allied bloc government is worried that their data is going to be secretly seized. It's quite dystopic, all done in the name of errorism.
If you're working with the people Amazon works with, the risk assessment isn't "Will we get in trouble for this?" it's "When we get in trouble for this, can we defend it on legal grounds?" Given that even the American spooks cited in this article are defending this blatantly immoral and obscene trespass, obviously Amazon's lawyers have reason to believe they can.
The key with a canary is that the thing you're trying to signal ensures the positive or negative signal itself, like "I will check in every 24 hours as long as everything is good, because if I'm not good I won't be able to check in.". THis is just a very thin, very simple code translation. It's like saying "if you get a request for our info, blink 3 times!"
I mean, why pay the money? Why not just skip the payment and email a contact "1,000"? Or perhaps "Interesting article about in the Times about the USA, wink wink"?
This method is deliberately communicating information in a way that (I assume) is prohibited. It doesn't seem like it would take a judge much time to come to the conclusion that the gag order prohibits communication.
Creating a secret code is still communication, whether that's converting letters A=1, B=2, sending a video of someone communicating it in sign language, a painting of the country, writing an ethereum contract, everyday sending a voicemail with a list of all the countries in the world from A to Z, but omitting the one(s) that have the gag / warrant...
If you ever dealt with the laws around exporting technology to specific jurisidictions, this would be like saying "We can convert the algorithm code to Python and THEN export it to North Korea!"
I think the point here is to ensure they are legally compelled to make the payment. They can't admit to the gag order, but the existence of the gag order compels them to pay the 1,000 shekels, does the gag order compel them to not pay what they owe??
So if a government agency or court (presumably the US government) makes a data request with a non disclosure order (FBI NSL, FISA, SCA) - Google and Amazon would break that non disclosure order and tell Israel.
Wouldn't those involved be liable to years in prison?
I imagine it depends on which country makes that request, its legal basis, and how their gag order is written.
I find it hard to imagine a federal US order wouldn’t proscribe this cute “wink” payment. (Although who knows? If a state or locality takes it upon themselves to raid a bit barn, can their local courts bind transnational payments or is that federal jurisdiction?)
But from the way it’s structured—around a specific amount of currency corresponding to a dialing code of the requesting nation—it sure sounds like they’re thinking more broadly.
I could more easily imagine an opportunistic order—say, from a small neighboring state compelling a local contractor to tap an international cable as it crosses their territory—to accommodate the “winking” disclosure: by being either so loosely drafted or so far removed from the parent company’s jurisdiction as to make the $billions contract worth preserving this way.
I wonder if Google's plan here is to just not actually make the "special payments" if a gag order applies. Possibly they think that the contract doesn't actually require those payments (most contracts have a provision about not contradicting the law), or just ignore the contract provision when a gag order comes (how would Israel know, and what would they do about it anyway).
However they have a gentleman’s agreement to not do that.
Trying to remember back to Snowden, I think I recall that not only DON'T they have such an agreement, but the intelligence folks consider this a feature. The US government is Constitutionally forbidden from reading "US persons" communications, but our Constitution has no such restriction on third parties. So if those third parties do the spying for us, and then tell our intelligence folks about it, everybody wins. Well, except for the people.
To circumvent US law prohibiting spying on Americans.
It's cute, really. Country A turns a blind eye and even helps country B vacuum all of it's citizen's data. Then country B gifts back to A. And vice versa.
Since country A didn't do the surveillance, it didn't break any laws. Furthermore, it's legal to accept data from third parties.
As to why country A would allow even its senators and congressmen to be spied on by B? That's obvious - country A's intel agencies are most interested in their budget!
And why would country A’s lawmakers allow that legal loophole to be used against themselves? They wrote the laws no? Or are they being blackmailed, or is their power a facade?
2. The power of the constitution ends at the border.
It's pretty sick, but that's what it amounts to. The CIA can't operate within US borders but it can operate at and outside borders. That means sending messages internationally are fair game for warrant-less searches.
That doesn’t explain why lawmakers would allow their own government to (indirectly) spy on them. Or are they so full of integrity that they would say “I must be spied on as well as my constituents, you know, for fairness”? /s
> how would Israel know, and what would they do about it anyway
Spy on, insert or recruit an asset from the pool of employees who are involved in any "Should we tell Israel?" discussion. That way, even if an answer is "No, don't alert them", the mere existence of the mechanism provides an actionable intelligence signal.
If they're able to gather the intelligence without a public signal, they wouldn't be wanting a public signal. Any discussion of "should we tell Israel" would be limited to people who knew of the secret subpoena's existence. If Israel already had an asset within that group, they'd just have that person signal them in a much more clandestine manner than a public payment mandated in a signed contract.
Either Israel already knows about the subpoena, in which case the discussion doesn't matter, or they don't, in which case their asset wouldn't be in on the discussion.
>most contracts have a provision about not contradicting the law
But is there an Israeli law that states contracts must be in concordance with foreign law... When the damages of an Israeli contract get evaluated in an Israeli court and they include the loss of Israeli intelligence assets will the costs not be significant? Yes google can pull out of Israel but they literally built datacentres there for these contracts so there are sizeable seizable assets.
And yes google may also get fined for breaking foreign law by foreign courts. The question is if the architecture of the system is set up so the only way data can be "secretly" exfiltrated by other governments is to go through local Israeli employees and they're the one's breaking the foreign law (and they were told explicitly by foreign bosses that they can't share this information wink) is there any punishment for google other than fines dwarfed by the contract and having to fire an employee who is strangely ok with that, who is replaced by a equally helpful local employee.
I think it'd be unlikely for the Israeli government to try and push this issue. Yes, Google has assets within Israel that could be seized, but it'd be a bit of a disaster. Israel would be creating a scenario where it told companies: go to prison in your home country or we'll seize everything you've invested here.
Also, I can't believe that Google or Amazon would sign a contract that doesn't specify the judicial jurisdiction. If the contract says "this contract will be governed by the courts of Santa Clara County California" and the Israelis agreed to that, then they won't have a claim in Israeli courts. If an Israeli court concluded that they have jurisdiction when both parties agreed they don't have jurisdiction, it'd create a very problematic precedent for doing business with Israeli companies.
Even if an Israeli court would ignore all that, what would Israel get? Maybe it could seize a billion in assets within Israel, but would that be worth it? For Google or Amazon, they face steeper penalties in the US and Europe for various things. For Israel, maybe they'd be able to seize an amount of assets equivalent to 10% of their annual military budget. So while it's not a small sum, it is a small sum relative to the parties' sizes. Neither would really win or lose from the amount of money in play.
But Israel would lose big time if it went that route. It would guarantee that no one would sign another cloud deal with them once the existing contracts expired. Investment in Israel would fall off a cliff as companies worried that Israeli courts would simply ignore anything they didn't like.
The point of these agreements is that Israel needs access to cloud resources. The primary objective is probably to avoid getting cut off like Microsoft did to them. That part of the contract is likely enforceable (IANAL): Israel does something against the ToS, but they can't be cut off. I'd guess that's the thing that Israel really wanted out of these deals.
The "wink" was probably a hopeful long shot that they never expected to work. But they got what they needed: Amazon and Google can't cut them off regardless of shareholder pressure or what they're doing with the cloud no matter what anyone thinks of it. Suing Amazon or Google over a part of the contract that they knew was never going to happen would jeopardize their actual objective: stable, continued access to cloud resources.
Sorry I didn't mean to imply I expected it would degrade to such a point that Israel is actually seizing the assets, it's more I'm pointing out that there's a credible threat of sizeable costs. Compounded with that the real teeth of the espionage laws outside of Israel will be in imprisonment which won't likely apply in these cases if the principal actors are Israeli citizens and the people subject to the foreign law are "doing all they can" to go along espionage orders once they receive one. The point is to get the contract in place in such a way that those who can get punished in a jurisdiction have plausible deniability and profitability to absorb any likely financial penalty by foreign actors. So that everyone just goes along with it as they're not breaking any laws at the time and then later they know their best efforts will be futile.
The Cloud doesn't just mean foreign data centers it means 3rd party infrastructure and expertise, which in this case at least, some of is local to the country. The point is that any 'secret' surveillance is reported. I.e. person in US gets ordered to access data, they connect to data center with appropriate credentials, which is monitored and either questioned and billed, or get flagged locally as not reportable and so not logged (making it show up on the shadow logs installed by local Israeli intelligence assets). Foreign employees best efforts to comply with espionage orders still reveal their actions and local employees happily obey local reporting laws knowing they are outside of those jurisdictions and helping their country.
Yes it can be forced to fall apart, but it has to be done in the open (because it will require changing local data center operations) and will be time consuming unless an actual open order by the US to immediately stop working with Israel on this which is extremely unlikely to happen.
Yes many contracts contain unenforceable or unactionable clauses that are superseded by common law. This is an example of that.
For example a tennant can sign a lease that says they have no notice period before eviction. If they’re in a state with a 30 day minimum notice period then the notice period is 30 days. It doesn’t matter what the contract says.
Google would comply with the US court order and ignore the contract it signed with Israel.
> Several experts described the mechanism as a “clever” workaround that could comply with the letter of the law but not its spirit. “It’s kind of brilliant, but it’s risky,” said a former senior US security official.
If it wasn't Amazon, Google and Israel government, there wouldn't be people pretending it comply with the 'letter of the law'. It is simple treason, selling your own country secret to another.
And the way it's done isn't that 'brilliant'. Oh yes they aren't writing on paper that x country asked for Israel data, they are instead using the country phone index and making payment based on that...
> officials created a secret warning system: the companies must send signals hidden in payments to the Israeli government, tipping it off when it has disclosed Israeli data to foreign courts or investigators.
> The terms of the Nimbus deal would appear to prohibit Google and Amazon from the kind of unilateral action taken by Microsoft last month, when it disabled the Israeli military’s access to technology used to operate an indiscriminate surveillance system monitoring Palestinian phone calls.
I don’t understand the connection between these two things. The article seems all over the place.
It is like if it is illegal to import more then $1000 into the country without declaring, and you (clever) give $900 each to 4 of your friends who are conveniently traveling with you, so you only walk across the border with remaining $400, not breaking any laws. Then when inside the country, your friends give you back the $900 each, meaning you just de-facto imported $4000 while technically crossing the border with less then $1000, as legally required.
If normal people tried to do this they would obviously be charged with the crime of illegally importing money, but also with something like a conspiracy to evade the law.
I don't know of a general term, but in financial crime it's generally referred to as 'structuring'. IIRC this is from US legislation but it's definitely used in several other countries. I've also heard it referred to as 'smurfing', particularly when splitting a task like purchasing items in a small enough quantity to not be suspicious.
There are no two countries which have completely transparent data sharing agreements with each other. There are always secrets, whether the opposite party is a friend or an enemy.
Doesn't matter though, the US Constitution defines treason:
> Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
This bar is virtually impossible to clear. You'll never get a US court to convict anybody of treason for anything concerning Israel. Espionage sure, but not treason. The last time anybody got convicted of treason for anything in America was for acts committed during WW2, which is the last time America was in a properly declared war.
It seems crazy to me that any country would outsource storage of military intelligence data to a foreign corporation. But my reading of the article is that the data is physically stored in Amazon and Google datacenters on Israeli soil.
If for some reason the US were storing sensitive data in US-based datacenters operated by a foreign corporation, don't you think they would try to take measures to prevent that data from being exfiltrated? It would be idiotic for Israel not to take what measures it could.
As for the idea that Amazon is acting treasonously - is warning someone that your country is spying on them treasonous? I think they should warn anyone and everyone whose data is being shared with any government, as long as they stay within the letter of the law in the places they operate.
> As for the idea that Amazon is acting treasonously - is warning someone that your country is spying on them treasonous?
Yes it is if you are American. Snowden revealed that the American government was spying on every single American, now he is forced to live hidden in Russia.
It's not "another" "country", though. That's a misconception about Israel, which is not a country, it's a colony. It doesn't have borders, it's dependent on financial handouts from its imperium, does not respect any of the rules that apply to 'countries' (i.e. international law), &c.
Expecting there to be law abidance and so on when dealing with Israel or israelis is a mistake that'll make you the 'freier' in that relationship. This is why Israel and israeli corporations commonly use usian and european fronts when they do business with more discerning customers than the most obvious tyrants of the world.
Initially, I suspected the cloud contracts were for general government operations, to have geo-distributed backups and continuity, in event of regional disaster (natural or human-made).
But could it instead/also be for international spy operations, like surveillance, propaganda, and cyber attacks? A major cloud provider has fast access at scale in multiple regions, is less likely to be blocked than certain countries, and can hide which customer the traffic is for.
If it were for international operations, two questions:
1. How complicit would the cloud providers be?
2. For US-based providers, how likely that US spy agencies would be consulted before signing the contracts, and consciously allow it to proceed (i.e., let US cloud providers facilitate the foreign spy activity), so that US can monitor the activity?
fwiw towards your theory, I believe that the US Govt actually considers cloud providers - by way of specific services offered "dual use" systems for mil or civil use.
E.g. you will find references in AWS docs to Bureau of Industry/Security rulings.
In Microsoft case they provide services for storing and possibly processing (transcribing) calls of millions of people that are under belligerent occupation:
I don't imagine Google and Amazon are any better. I.e. take boatloads of money, while sticking the head into sand and pretend it's not likely used to help the illegal occupation of Palestinians, to persecute and harm them.
Can't buy stock contracts on Amazon/Microsoft/Google right before you announce the $1B investment towards cloud infrastructure if you roll it all yourself, though
I’ve seen government datacenters. We should be thankful they’re using the cloud.
That’s not “cloud > onprem always”, that’s “even given cloud providers’ many faults governments are so terrible at managing and securing infrastructure today that the cloud is preferable for them”. Whether you anre pro- or anti-particular-government, you should still support gov-moves-to-cloud. The alternative is proven unbelievably worse on every possible axis.
> Microsoft said that using Azure in this way violated its terms of service and it was “not in the business of facilitating the mass surveillance of civilians”. Under the terms of the Nimbus deal, Google and Amazon are prohibited from taking such action as it would “discriminate” against the Israeli government. Doing so would incur financial penalties for the companies, as well as legal action for breach of contract.
Insane. Obeying the law or ToS, apparently, is discriminatory when it comes to Israel.
U.S. law. It's pretty obvious that neither Amazon nor Google are good options for serious actors that are not the U.S. government. So if they want to make business outside the U.S., they need to dance around the fact that in the end they bow to the will of Washington.
It's not insane, at least based on the information in the article, which is entirely insinuation. Do we actually have access to the leaked documents and what specifically was being asked besides a "secret code" being used?
It would be suicide to sign the contract. It basically allows them to hack their platforms without any repercussions or ability to stop it. They would quickly claim expanded access is part of the contract.
This endless bowing down to Israel is and always will be ridiculous. When a country can do whatever they like unchallenged, no matter how wrong, or how illegal, we have failed as a society.
while the comment you reply to is borderline insane,
you're taking from a very privileged position in terms of media consumption. the media that criticizes the genocide and the blackflag on oct 7th is very niche and you seem to consume it exclusively. the message is very different within mass media.
I doubt the Guardian has any reason to lie about the documents they have seen. Based on the interactions regarding their war crimes, are you arguing Israel have not basically declared themselves above the law in many ways?
I don’t think this contract would be enforceable. Google/Amazon had no incentive to say no, other than self-respect. Also, how would Israel even know if Google/Amazon failed to “wink”? If they have a way of knowing that, then they don’t need the “wink.”
Google/Amazon could just say yes until the contract is signed, and then just not comply. Israeli government would have no recourse since they can’t go to a US court, and file charges for a US company NOT breaking the law or for complying with a court order. Israel also would not want this to come to light.
It’s like a criminal’s promise. The only recourse is taking your business elsewhere, which Israel would do when they’re tipped off anyways. But at least if Google/Amazon fail to wink, contract lasts a little longer.
Now that the trick is out the gag order will say explicitly not to make the payment. Or specifically to make a “false flag” payment, tell them it’s the Italians.
There's no need to alter a gag order. If you attempt an end-run around a gag order by speaking in French or Latin or Swahili, the gag order is still violated. This is exactly the same: changing the language in which the gag order is violated.
Are payments "speech" though? Just like the Israeli govt thinks they are being "cute" with the "winks" so can other governments be "cute" with their interpretation of "speech".
>Microsoft, which provides a range of cloud services to Israel’s military and public sector, bid for the Nimbus contract but was beaten by its rivals. According to sources familiar with negotiations, Microsoft’s bid suffered as it refused to accept some of Israel’s demands.
So Microsoft is now more ethical than Google and Amazon? What times we live in!
If the US government asked Google and amazon for data using specific legal authorities and the companies tipped off the Israeli government, there's a chance they may have broken the law....
Setting aside the legalities of the "wink" payments, I'm fascinated to know what is the purpose of the country-specific granularity? At most Israel would learn that some order was being sought in country X, but they wouldn't receive knowledge of the particular class of data being targeted.
I wonder if there's a national security aspect here, in that knowing the country would prompt some form of country-specific espionage (signals intelligence, local agents on the inside at these service providers, etc.) to discover what the targeted data might be.
Obviously, they must think it's a feature of some value.
Knowing the country allows an immediate diplomatic protest, threats to withdraw business, and investigation.
The payment is to be within 24 hours, which means that they can act quickly to stop the processing of the data, prevent conclusions from being drawn, etc.
If the signaled country were the US, I would expect a bunch of senators to be immediately called and pressured to look into and perhaps stop the investigation.
Interesting take. It's also possible that it functions as a checksum of sorts for their intelligence operations to identify gaps. e.g., If intelligence has knowledge of X requests from country Y, but they're getting X+5 "winks" about country Y, then it's an indicator of where they need to step up their intelligence efforts.
This is a good opportunity to make money from helping corporations migrate off these services and onto alternatives with better data protection regulations and weaker ties to the zionist atrocity factory.
They coordinate, but coordination doesn't mean totally aligned behavior and interests which never diverge, nor that they don't try to spy on each other. Multiple people in the United States have been been caught and convicted of spying for Israel and are serving lengthy prison sentences because of it; Israeli lobbying efforts have tried to get their sentences commuted, so far without success. That's not what you would see if "coordination" went as far as your post implied.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is all a part of the "game" of spycraft. Israel probably expects the US spy agencies would get wind of this agreement. "I see you watching me."
If you don't want your data in the hands of someone with access to the state's monopoly on violence, you're best off getting rid of all internet access in your life.
One thing I don't understand.
Israel probably have huge amount of data in Google and Amazon.
What is the gain from telling Israel that there is a country that issue an order about some of their data. What data? What's the order about? Etc, many crucial details are missing for Israel be able to do something....
This is almost certainly just for show (as in, they would have no reliance on it and not expect it to ever be triggered).
They will have agents both known and unknown operating at those companies. A company cannot as a policy set out to violate the law (if it's smart). It would be trivial for individuals to have covert channels set up.
Surprised that Israel didn't just decide to go it alone and build their own infra given the multiple reservations they clearly had. They have a vibrant tech ecosystem so could presumably pull it off
Something worth noting is that when they call a significant number of reserves to IDF, their industries suffer.
Most SWEs are still 20-40-something men, which would be the same demographic being called to service (I realize women also serve in the IDF, but combat positions are generally reserved for men).
So it's possible that Israel can't rely on their own private tech industry being unaffected during high-engagement periods.
I think the government does have plenty of its own infra (and military tech sectors would be unaffected by calling in reserves), but given the size of the country (and also considering its Palestinian second-class citizens who make up 20% of the Israeli population may not be trusted to work on more sensitive portions of its infrastructure) they're probably not able to manage every part of the stack. Probably only China and the U.S. can do this.
I work with people that have been called up for service there and don't think it's as disruptive to a country's data-center building ability as you suggest.
I imagine the concern becomes survivability. Israeli's really like their multiple levels of backups, and having a data copy out of the reach of enemy arms seems high priority.
Iran attacking US-East-1 would certainly be unusual.
They could likely work around that, multiple locations in-country and an off site encrypted backup out of country.
More likely is it was "aid" from the US which usually comes with stipulations about what/where they can spend it - common with weapons/military kit, wouldn't be surprised if they did something similar with cloud services.
> The idea that we would evade our legal obligations to the US government as a US company, or in any other country, is categorically wrong
Not a lawyer. Can this statement hold in a US court of law? To me it sounds sleazy and ambiguous. To say if an “idea is wrong” could mean it’s a bad idea, an immoral one or a false “idea”. But in any case, an idea is not a statement or a fact. I have a hundred ideas everyday. Some are right, some are wrong and others in between.
> suggest the secret code would take the form of payments – referred to as “special compensation” – made by the companies to the Israeli government.
This seems like a very dumb way to communicate in a criminal conspiracy: it's more traceable than a simple message, with permanent record, and more people are involved to enact the communication.
If we take "Israel" out of the equation to remove much of controversy, i dont understand why wouldnt any actor, especially government actor, take every possible step that their data remains under their sole control.
In other words, im curious why would Israel not invest in making sure that the their were storing in third-party vendor clouds was not encrypted at rest and in transit by keys not stored in that cloud.
This seems like a matter of national security for any government, not to have their data accessible by other parties at the whims of different jurisdiction where that cloud vendor operates.
Conversely, if you don't, it's not hard to understand at all when you consider that there are oodles of American politicians, at all levels, actually publicly declaring that they put Israeli interests over US interests. What's hard to understand about _that_ is that, for some reason, it's not considered pure and simple treason.
It would still be very alarming if a democratic country like Australia or European Union taking a step like this where they tell the vendor that it will use its data and service in whatever way it sees fit, and sidestep existing policies those vendors have on the uses of their services and data.
Now maybe we can say that Israel is not a democratic system or environment, but then Microsoft would not be wholly desiring to do business serving such an entity, lest they break with US oversight.
Israel here told the vendor that whenever there is a gag on them by their government against making Israel aware of their request, the vendor is to secretly transmit a message alerting them..
"The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world"
"Like other big tech companies, Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses routinely comply with requests from police, prosecutors and security services to hand over customer data to assist investigations."
The way I interpret this is Google, Amazon operates in multiple countries under multiple jurisdictions. The security services for any of these countries(including for example Egypt where Google has offices according to....Google), can produce a legal(in Egypt) order requesting Google to produce data of another customer( for example Israeli govt) and Google has to comply or leave Egypt.
It seems to me that being under constant threat of your government sensitive data being exposed at the whims of another, potentially adversarial government is not a sustainable way of operating and Im surprised that Israel havent either found ways of storing its infrastructure locally or encrypting it five way to Sunday.
This is not a comment on the specific accusation of actions by Israel but for strange reality of being a small-country government and a customer of a multi-national cloud vendor.
It's not irrelevant that it's Israel in question. There's not many countries that have been found to be committing genocide (by UN), are actively involved in a war or where the leaders are sought by ICC.
For every killed Israeli in the attacks on the 7th of October, Israel went and killed 18 children in retaliation. If that is not genocide then I don't know what is.
That is an elementary understanding international law.
If after Oct 7th Israel went and killed a single child in retaliation, that would be unjust. Justification and proportionality are not measured like that.
Justification is established by a valid objective to go to war. Proportionality is measured in comparison to the military objectives. The Oct 7th attack clearly justifies the removal of Hamas. The proportionality of doing so is dependent on the size of Hamas's army (20k-30k), the size of their infrastructure (500 kms of tunnels), and their ability to separate their operations and operators from civilians.
You’re conveniently ignoring that Hamas took 200+ hostages and refused to return them throughout the war.
Just because Hamas, build the biggest underground bomb shelter network and refused to let any civilians in it and that that it operated militarily out of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, causing inevitable casualties by civilians does not make it a genocide. It makes it a terrible war. A war that Hamas started on October 7.
> Redefines the meaning of genocide to fit the shape of the conflict -- a war started by Hamas on Oct 7
My man, Israel had a blockade surrounding Palestine on all sides for years prior. October 7th was a retaliation for a lot of the pain Israel had inflicted on Palestine (sorry- Greater Israel). And Bibi was well in the know and all too happy to let it happen.
> largely ignores role of Hamas in the conflict
Bibi loved and loves Hamas. Also, Israel has nuclear weapons. A lot of them.
It's like David and Goliath, except in this case David is malnourished to the extreme, has no future, no present, no past except seeing his family and friends bombed to oblivion....and only can attack Goliath with a few pebbles. Meanwhile, Goliath has plot armor and nukes.
>Frames the country as a "settler-colonial" project ignoring realities of jewish history in the region.
And not ignoring Palestine, which had existed for 12 centuries before the birth of Christ?
> My man, Israel had a blockade surrounding Palestine on all sides for years prior.
A blockade that was specifically accounted for the the preceding ceasefire agreement that was in place on Oct 6th.
> David and Goliath
Yet, it is David who keeps starting this fight, losing, then calling Goliath unjust because his ability to punch back is greater.
> And not ignoring Palestine, which had existed for 12 centuries before the birth of Christ?
Nope not ignoring. Both groups have a long history in the region. Arabs through colonization centuries ago. Heck, "Palestine" even comes from the Jewish word for invader (the naming is not connected to the arabization of Palestine).
A) you know that Gaza has border with another country that is not Israel
B) you’re missing out on cause and effect here — could it be that Israeli started blocking import of goods that can be used for military purposes shortly after Hamas gain control of Gaza in 2007 and started shooting missiles at Israel
I am baffled by the manufactured outrage this story is generating. "oh no. <country> is sidestepping the NSA which we loudly proclaim to be evil at every opportunity, and (gasp) imposing their own conditions and bullying gigantic tech companies which are even more evil."
This from the same group of people who insist that europe should host their own data.
> American companies sidestepping law related to international relationships between the US and other countries in order to benefit a foreign state??
Assuming it's even true, there is no side-stepping international relations between the US and other countries.
If Egypt were to issue a legal order with a gag clause ordering Amazon to release Israeli data, and Amazon were to signal that fact to Israel, how does this involve the US at all?
So many unanswered questions. Why would Israel move sensitive data into Amazon and Google servers off this was a concern? How would this scheme protect Israel's data or help them at all? Why would these very wealthy companies agree to this? Why would Israel assume or verify they would comply? Why and how would an obscure Palestinian magazine acquire these documents?
Why is this characterized as a "demand"? Amazon and Google have the freedom that Microsoft does to decline.
I don't trust any of these cloud providers with my data specifically because of their ties to Israel and the Trump administration. They will always acquiesce to the bully in the room. I've received too many notices from both Amazon and Google about how my data was leaked already. Their motto, "Don't be evil", should have included a winkwink in it.
> Was it agreed by some salespeople without the knowledge of legal / management?
LOL. No. That is not how it works. Legal combs through every contract, negotiates, and gates the process, while revenue officers act very self-entitled to having the contract signed ASAP. Legal has to do their job, or they're a liability.
Based on reported decisions (mostly SCA-related; FISA stuff is not public), Microsoft is the cloud provider who's litigated the most on behalf of client privacy. e.g., It was the Microsoft Ireland case, challenging the extraterritoriality of the Stored Communications Act, that ultimately led to the CLOUD Act.
Microsoft understands at a corporate level that it's in their business interest (as a global vendor) for local lawful access regimes to be as narrow as possible. Their pushback here is understandable; if they're not seen as trustworthy by the US government, it potentially undermines a lot of the latitude they're trying to fight for.
My comment and others point to the israeli atrocities here all just all just got flagged and removed in a very suspicious way with tons of "disinformation" comments below them, basic stuff that's literally been said by the UN, Amnesty, Red Cross, Doctors without borders etc. for years is flaggable now?
I thought censoring and straight up brigading was not allowed here? But i guess if they do what the article is about they can easily sway a thread like this in a few minutes, and i'm sure they do when stuff becomes frontpage on various sites. Can't talk about the genocide.
Funny, I thought he was adjusting his Bayesian priors based on available evidence.
From a classical logic perspective, it's correct that authority does not imply truth.
But from a pragmatic Bayesian perspective, when verifying the truth of a matter is difficult-to-impossible for a layperson, we all try to figure out the truth based on what authorities say and our assessment of their trustworthiness.
----
HNers really need to grok that high-school debate club doesn't help you with reality.
By wanting to know when foreign states are snooping on their data? The Guardian is trying their best to paint this as something nefarious on Israel's part, but it just isn't.
Maybe Amazon and Google created a compliance issue for themselves, but that's not Israel's problem; Israel isn't obligated to comply with foreign states' gag orders.
Intentionally. An easy way to accuse people who oppose you of bias is to bait them into producing quotes and soundbites that can later be used (out-of-context or not) as evidence of antisemitism.
I'm not sure which ones you're referring to, but it's very obvious they have outsized control in US politics and especially the Trump admin. That it is taboo to say this is evidence of that control, and I think that taboo serves to enable things like the genocide in Gaza via controlling US opinion.
Articles like the above should raise major alarms among US citizens. And this is not the first time Israel has betrayed the US. They even welcomed Jonathan Pollard (a US citizen!) with open arms and he's now pursuing a political career in Israel. They're clearly not an ally, and it is mind boggling we continue to support them. And like any good RCA, we need to not only fix the current mess but analyze how it occurred so it does not happen again.
Because Israel managed to pull of a wildly successful operation to capture the American politics by very aggressively promoting the notion that being in any way, shape, or form against anything Israel does is rabid anti-Semitism, and then using that as a cudgel (backed by a lot of money) to beat any candidate who might want to say something about it.
There has been a concerted effort to tie Jewish identity to the modern state of israel. It certainly doesn't help that the birth of said state came in the wake of the Jewish people nearly being wiped out by an industrialized genocide. Add to that the previous 1000 years or so of systematized antisemitism and it's easy to see why the proposition can be very appealing to a Jewish person who had (and sometimes still has) very material reason to fear for their safety.
This was leveraged (some might say exploited) by unsavory actors in the creation of a reactionary, settler-colonial ethno-state. This should not be too surprising, given that zionism arose in the same sociopolitical milieu that gave us modern nationalism and pan-nationalist ideologies.
People seem more accepting of the concept than you might expect. Compare the song "My Uncle Dan McCann", which you can hear here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_puzpI03Xcs
I found me uncle Dan McCann
A very prosperous Yankee man
He holds a seat in Congress
And he's leader of his clan
He's helped to write America's laws
His heart and soul in Ireland's cause
And God help the man who opened his jaws to me uncle Dan McCann
As far as the song is concerned, this is admirable behavior. Of course, the song is written from the perspective of an Irishman visiting from Ireland to look for his uncle. But it's marketed to Americans. The question "is it a good thing to have American legislators whose purpose in life is to work for the benefit of Ireland?" never seems to come up.
Though I recognise the similarity, a Irish song about a relative who emigrated to America in the 19th century, fought in the Civil War, becomes a politician and advocates for Irish Independence isn't really on the same scale as what the Israel lobby is being accused of.
And a double reminder that it's an Irish song that tells an Irish perspective,not an American one.
It was apparently written by Irish musician Shaun O'Nolan and popularised by another Irish musician Mick Moloney. I don't see a source for the year and location of it's authoring. Maybe you could provide one?
And audiences in America isn't the same thing as American audiences. There was and still is a very large Irish diaspora in the United States. I'd also appreciate a source for the claim that it was intentionally written for American audiences.
Imagine if we sent Senagal $10M per day in tax payer money and questioning it led to your own politicians labeling you as "anti-senagalese" and being ousted from every political party.
Downvoted because people don't like to admit that pro-Israel factions of the US have a lot of sway in Washington.
OK, they're probably OK with the way I worded it, but as soon as you admit that many of those pro-Israel factions are of one religious background in particular, it's a no-no.
Which is stupid. It's not stereotyping to admit powerful people care about their own subgroups. It's stereotyping to insist it's only one group that's like this, or that everyone in that group is like this.
it's not stereotyping but its only relevant if you're trying to make a point about that religious background, and if you are then you have to consider that the vast majority of people of that background aren't members of pro-Israel factions that dominate the government so what's the actual point of bringing up the religious background? To muddy the waters, of course, and to try to paint more people with the same broad brush. After all, we don't hold Christendom responsible for everything bad any Christian has ever done.
As if the terms of Amazon's contract with the Chinese government being leaked wouldn't be massive news. This kind of cynicism is precisely why these things aren't challenged; "of course bad stuff is happening, why should I be concerned???"
It is extremely hard to imagine such an article being written, and such a response generated, about any other country. "Denmark asks cloud providers to privately notify it if its data is leaked to other states" sounds way too boring to be published, let alone generate outrage.
Change it to Israel, sprinkle in some vaguely insidious language (a contract becomes a "secret agreement", etc), and suddenly it's a scandal.
In all fairness, if you put data on the internet (aka "the Cloud"), here is no reasonable expectation of privacy, unless you yourself control both the server and the client AND have everything encrypted.
Saying things like “first genocide since WWII” makes me not take you serious at all. Just as a single example, Rwanda genocide in 1994 saw between 500,000 and 800,000 people killed. And it’s by far not the only one in the last 80 years.
This kind of absurd blunder is what happens when American public schools have twelve years of history education that consist of nothing but "Holocaust Class". Bro has probably had to read every popular holocaust book but has never even heard of Cambodia.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to Hacker News, regardless of what view you hold or how strongly you feel about it. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
We're talking about two different things. You're talking about something big and I'm talking about something small. Nevertheless, we need you to follow HN's rules when posting here, same as for any other user.
Is he really trying to move those goalposts? Or is he just voicing the most-common way for humans to process such events?
I'm thinking that 99% of people would feel horrible and/or morally responsible if they lent an axe to their neighbor Mr. Seemed-Nice, which he then used to kill his wife. Vs. far less so, if their neighbor bought his fatal ax from Amazon or Walmart.
If the mass murder committed by Israel against the Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian people does not horrify you, then you don't have shred of humanity left in you.
Arguing about pedantic details does not change that.
Because when a nation starts believing its own myths of moral purity, it stops seeing the line between justice and domination. This is a dangerous line to cross.
Israel stole US nuclear secrets to create their own nuclear weapons program, they killed American navy men, they destroyed 90% of the buildings in Gaza and very blatantly committed genocide in the process of doing so, Palestinians prisoners are commonly held without trials or charges i.e. they're hostages. Zionism literally cannot exist without them committing ethnic cleansing because everywhere Israelis live used to be Palestinian properties.
Honestly, what is your point? What are you seeing that the rest of us aren't getting? For the record, my mother's family is mostly Sephardic.
The started off settlement by legally buying property for wealth (mostly absentee) landlords, who were non-Palestinians (they lived in other part of the Ottoman Empire).
America bought the Louisiana Purchase from France. France never had any meaningful presence in that territory; being incapable of defending the territory should America decide to take it anyway is probably a big part of the reason they decided to accept money for it.
Now my question: having purchased that land from France, did America have a right to eject the native people who lived there? Or did France in fact have no right to sell that land which, in all practical ways, actually belonged to the people who lived there?
Israel "bought" that land from people who had no legitimate ownership of the land in the first place.
If I setup a $10b trust fund to buy up Texan land, I can't unilaterally invade Texas and build my ethnostate on it after I've purchased, say, 6-7% of it. That's the percentage of Palestine the Zionists bought before expelling the indigenous people in the Nakba genocide.
Likewise, if you legally purchase double-digit percentages of Indian, Chinese, Brit, Australian land, it doesn't give you the moral or legal precedent to expel the natives from the rest of their land and declare it your state.
It's not just a numbers game. Many of those you've listed also only lasted a few years, while Israel's evil still continues after almost a century.
"Operation Cast Thy Bread was a top-secret biological warfare operation conducted by the Haganah and later the Israel Defense Forces which began in April 1948, during the 1948 Palestine war. The Haganah used typhoid bacteria to contaminate drinking water wells in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol."
This is basically just the warrant canaries from the FISA prism days. Which at the time hacker news was in favor of. Both companies deny doing this though
Amazon already publishes transparency reports indicating which country requested data[1]. It's not clear in the article what kinds of data requests are communicated by the alleged payments (subpoena, warrant, court order?), but the whole thing seems so unbelievable as to be.... made up
Leaked documents from Israel’s finance ministry, which include a finalised version of the Nimbus agreement, suggest the secret code would take the form of payments – referred to as “special compensation” – made by the companies to the Israeli government.
According to the documents, the payments must be made “within 24 hours of the information being transferred” and correspond to the telephone dialing code of the foreign country, amounting to sums between 1,000 and 9,999 shekels.
If either Google or Amazon provides information to authorities in the US, where the dialing code is +1, and they are prevented from disclosing their cooperation, they must send the Israeli government 1,000 shekels.
If, for example, the companies receive a request for Israeli data from authorities in Italy, where the dialing code is +39, they must send 3,900 shekels.
If the companies conclude the terms of a gag order prevent them from even signaling which country has received the data, there is a backstop: the companies must pay 100,000 shekels ($30,000) to the Israeli government.
Never worked for either company, but there's a zero percent chance. Legal agrees to bespoke terms and conditions on contracts (or negotiates them) for contracts. How flexible they are to agreeing to exotic terms depends on the dollar value of the contract, but there is no chance that these terms (a) weren't outlined in the contract and (b) weren't heavily scrutinized by legal (and ops, doing paybacks in such a manner likely require work-arounds for their ops and finance teams).
You mean like in financing a ball room?
You could argue that it's against something like the OECD Anti‑Bribery Convention, but that would be a much more difficult case, given that this isn't a particular foreign official, but essentially a central body of the foreign government.
Just to clarify, not saying that it's ok, but just that accusing it of being a "crime" might be a category error.
It's kind of like how everything can be securities fraud[0]
bloomberg article: https://archive.is/ixwRi
> Yesterday New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood filed a securities-fraud lawsuit against Exxon Mobil Corp. “alleging that the company misled investors regarding the risk that climate change regulations posed to its business.”
Blatant lying
> if you are a public company that suffers a massive data breach and exposes sensitive data about millions of customers without their consent, and that data is then used for nefarious purposes, and you find out about the breach, and then you wait for years to disclose it, and when you do disclose it your stock loses tens of billions of dollars of market value, then shareholders are going to sue you for not telling them earlier
Blatant lying
The fact that most of this lying (see Exxon) is done under some kind of "nudge nudge, wink wink, we all know what's really going in" doesn't stop it from knowingly lying.
That knowingly lying is securities fraud seems very logical, and nothing like "everything".
This is all moot anyway now that the US is no longer interested in upholding any laws against large companies whatsoever.
Blatant lying also?
> Yesterday New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood filed a securities-fraud lawsuit against Exxon Mobil Corp. “alleging that the company misled investors regarding the risk that climate change regulations posed to its business.”
>Blatant lying
Can you elaborate? Looking at the case it seems pretty clear that Exxon did not lie, especially not in any "blatant" manner.
1. Alerting a country to secret actions taken by a third party government (my nation of citizenship, the US, definitely has rules against that)
2. Passing money to commit a crime. See money laundering.
Honestly, the second crime seems aggravated and stupid. Just pass random digits in an API call if you want to tell Israel you did something.
A government can compel Amazon to avoid notifying a target (Israel in this case) that their information has been subpoenaed, but can't compel Amazon to lie and say it hasn't sent their info.
Or is the concept of a canary pretty much useless now?
I'm personally one of the "activists" who is trying to avoid Amazon and Google to a practical degree, due to project Nimbus, so I'd be more than happy if their data could be accessed, and even happier to see Amazon and Google just cut ties with them altogether.
US rules are, unfortunately, nortoriously and outlandishly broken whenever it comes to Israel: Foreign Agent Registration Act, the Leahy Law, and probably a bunch of others as well.
The act of communicating privileged or sealed information on itself is at minimum contempt of court and perhaps theft of government property, wire fraud or other crimes. Typically accounts payable aren’t aware of evidence gathering or discovery, so the actor is also facing conspiracy or other felonies.
No laws require prosecution and enforcement. Western countries shield Israel from all of that.
its a buggy method, considering canada also uses +1, and a bunch of countries look like they use +1 but dont, like barbados +1(246) using what looks like an area code as part of the country code.
You are correct that ITU code is not specific enough to identify a country, but I'm sorry, +1 is the ITU country code for the North American Numbering Plan Area. 246 is the NANPA area code for Barbados (which only has one area code) but as a NANPA member, Barbados' country code is +1, same as the rest of the members. There is no '+1246' country code.
There's not a lot of countries that are in a shared numbering plan other than NANPA, but for example, Khazakstan and Russia share +7 (Of course, the USSR needed a single digit country code, or there would have been a country code gap), and many of the former Netherland Antilles share +599, although Aruba has +297, and Sint Maarten is in +1 (with NANPA Area code 721)
People use the country = government metaphor as a shortcut for communication, but this one takes it further than usual.
This will probably never be particularly useful, but this figure of speech is a "synecdoche" (a "metonymy" instead of a "metaphor")
To spy on law enforcement that is trying to fight crime is not a good thing. Israel is not the world police.
This is criminal conspiracy. It's fucking insane that they not only did this, but put the crime in writing.;
The mob tried your argument generations ago. It never worked.
Uhm doesn't that mean that Google and Amazon can easily comply with US law despite this agreement?
There must be more to it though, otherwise why use this super suss signaling method?
(Australia apparently outlaws the practice, see: <https://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/australia-outlaws-warrant-...>.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
This is directly violating gag orders. Passing a message, even if it's encrypted or obfuscated is absolutely illegal. The article is a little BS as this sort of thing has been tested in court.
The only reason warrant canaries are in the gray zone is because they are specifically crafted that the business has to remove their cooperation clause to keep the ToS contract valid.
There's nothing like that at play here. It's literally "Just break the gag order, here's our secret handshake".
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/israel-white-house...
> The U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.
> If either Google or Amazon provides information to authorities in the US, where the dialing code is +1, and they are prevented from disclosing their cooperation, they must send the Israeli government 1,000 shekels.
This sounds like warrant canaries but worse. At least with warrant canaries you argue that you can't compel speech, but in this case it's pretty clear to any judge that such payments constitute disclosure or violation of gag order, because you're taking a specific action that results in the target knowing the request was made.
A warrant canary works by removing information, not by transmitting it. You put up a sign like "The FBI has not issued a warrant" and then remove it if they do, even if there is a gag order stating you cannot disclose that they issued you a warrant. This only works because you have not told anyone that a warrant has been issued but they must infer that the missing canary implies such a warrant has been dispatched.
Agreed. This is direct. It is like putting up a posting "The FBI *has* issued a warrant". Which this would be in direct violation of a gag order. Their codes are even differentiating who the issuer is. I'm pretty confident a comprehensive set of warrant canaries detailing every agency would not comply with gag orders either as this leaves little ambiguity. But this isn't even doing that. It is just straight up direct communication.I think what is funniest is that it could have been much more secret. When I saw the reference in the intro to payments I was thinking "don't tell me they're so dumb they're coding info like Costco". That they'd use the cents to detail access. Like .99 for all clear and .98 for access. But that's not "clever" at all lol
You transmit information by changing the content of the transmission, basically just like any communication works
> This only works
do you know that? Haven't heard of it actually working in any high profile case.
> because you have not told anyone that a warrant has been issued
you have told them explicitly by agreeing to a scheme both parties understand and by enacting the message change under said scheme. You basically just used some encoding to hide the plain message
First off, you're using the word in the definition. You can't use "transmit" to define "transmit". A transmission is the noun variation of transmit (verb).
Second off, a transmission is *active*
Think about radio. If I am constantly producing a 440kHz signal then I'm transmitting a signal. If I'm not producing the signal, I'm not transmitting.
You are not considered to be transmitting unless you are holding down the button to send the signal.
That's how a canary works. You're constantly transmitting a signal (the canary is constantly singing) and then all of a sudden it goes quiet. You have stopped transmission.
Does this communicate? Yes. But what it communicates is ambiguous. Maybe the canary just went to sleep. Maybe it starved to death instead of getting carbon dioxide poisoning. It does not provide an unambiguous truth.
That reasonable deniability is the reason a canary works. You can claim it was taken down for other reasons, such as an accident. Those reasons have to be believable and justifiable. Mind you, a warrant canary can work like going down in one commit and up in the next, happening over a small period of time. A canary does not need to work by continuous existence or continuous absence.
Canaries also frequently work by having expirations (which is closer to how you're thinking, but still follow the same abstraction discussed above). It has to be manually updated or modified. For example I could add the canary "godelski hasn't been raided by the FBI: signed 31 oct 2025 expires 7 Nov 2025". Were that message to still exist exactly on Nov 7th (and it will because I can't edit comments outside a time window) then you can conclude that my canary expired. You can't conclude I was raided by the FBI. You should be suspicious, but you can't be positive. Maybe I just can't update comments...
This isn't to be conflated with the way we transmit information is through variation, such as high and low in binary. Technically while you're talking you make pauses and "stop talking" several times while saying a single word. But we say you're talking until you stop "transmitting" or complete. If this pause wasn't included then the dead would still speak and your annoying uncle would never shut up
I’ve always wondered. It seems just as easy for authorities to forbid removing canaries as it is to forbid telling someone something.
EDIT: ah, this is explained downthread: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=45763032
I guess you can technically be compelled to update your canary. But the main idea is to make it hard to compel the action that results in the canary existing. But don't ask me, like most HN users IANAL
> Several experts described the mechanism as a “clever” workaround that could comply with the letter of the law but not its spirit.
It's not clear to me how it could comply with the letter of the law, but evidently at least some legal experts think it can? That uncertainty is probably how it made it past the legal teams in the first place.
This, being an active process, if found out, is violating a gag order by direct action.
However, if a judge dodesn't want to find someone guilty, "not violating the letter of the law" can provide a fig leaf for the friendly judge.
I can't imagine any "legal expert" dumb enough to say you can violate a gag order if you use numbers instead of words.
Is there any evidence he was helped in his escape by anyone? Genuinely asking (and genuinely seeking hard facts and data).
I do think it’s kind of a different situation though because apparently the employees of Facebook could have gotten into legal trouble in those other countries they were trying to expand into.
Yeap...they would never do it ....
"Tech, crypto, tobacco, other companies fund Trump’s White House ballroom" - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/23/trump-ballroom-dono...
I trust The Guardian. So I agree It was unlikely. I find it very sad
Very sad
And while 'anti-terrorism' is the pretext for these secret courts, secret orders, and other nonsense - in reality I expect they've done extremely little to actually stop terrorists. Yet it's certainly created a system where even a defacto Western/allied bloc government is worried that their data is going to be secretly seized. It's quite dystopic, all done in the name of errorism.
I mean, why pay the money? Why not just skip the payment and email a contact "1,000"? Or perhaps "Interesting article about in the Times about the USA, wink wink"?
This method is deliberately communicating information in a way that (I assume) is prohibited. It doesn't seem like it would take a judge much time to come to the conclusion that the gag order prohibits communication.
Creating a secret code is still communication, whether that's converting letters A=1, B=2, sending a video of someone communicating it in sign language, a painting of the country, writing an ethereum contract, everyday sending a voicemail with a list of all the countries in the world from A to Z, but omitting the one(s) that have the gag / warrant...
Wouldn't those involved be liable to years in prison?
I find it hard to imagine a federal US order wouldn’t proscribe this cute “wink” payment. (Although who knows? If a state or locality takes it upon themselves to raid a bit barn, can their local courts bind transnational payments or is that federal jurisdiction?)
But from the way it’s structured—around a specific amount of currency corresponding to a dialing code of the requesting nation—it sure sounds like they’re thinking more broadly.
I could more easily imagine an opportunistic order—say, from a small neighboring state compelling a local contractor to tap an international cable as it crosses their territory—to accommodate the “winking” disclosure: by being either so loosely drafted or so far removed from the parent company’s jurisdiction as to make the $billions contract worth preserving this way.
In my opinion that's extremely unlikely. This was probably set up for other kinds of countries
This means that they can read even the personal email of Supreme Court justices, congressmen and senators.
However they have a gentleman’s agreement to not do that.
“Wink”
Trying to remember back to Snowden, I think I recall that not only DON'T they have such an agreement, but the intelligence folks consider this a feature. The US government is Constitutionally forbidden from reading "US persons" communications, but our Constitution has no such restriction on third parties. So if those third parties do the spying for us, and then tell our intelligence folks about it, everybody wins. Well, except for the people.
I think it's just more likely that we send them whatever they ask for when they ask for it.
It's cute, really. Country A turns a blind eye and even helps country B vacuum all of it's citizen's data. Then country B gifts back to A. And vice versa.
Since country A didn't do the surveillance, it didn't break any laws. Furthermore, it's legal to accept data from third parties.
As to why country A would allow even its senators and congressmen to be spied on by B? That's obvious - country A's intel agencies are most interested in their budget!
But this is a special case. It's Israel.
> Since country A didn't do the surveillance, it didn't break any laws.
Of course it did, that's where the data came from!
2. The power of the constitution ends at the border.
It's pretty sick, but that's what it amounts to. The CIA can't operate within US borders but it can operate at and outside borders. That means sending messages internationally are fair game for warrant-less searches.
Spy on, insert or recruit an asset from the pool of employees who are involved in any "Should we tell Israel?" discussion. That way, even if an answer is "No, don't alert them", the mere existence of the mechanism provides an actionable intelligence signal.
Either Israel already knows about the subpoena, in which case the discussion doesn't matter, or they don't, in which case their asset wouldn't be in on the discussion.
But is there an Israeli law that states contracts must be in concordance with foreign law... When the damages of an Israeli contract get evaluated in an Israeli court and they include the loss of Israeli intelligence assets will the costs not be significant? Yes google can pull out of Israel but they literally built datacentres there for these contracts so there are sizeable seizable assets.
And yes google may also get fined for breaking foreign law by foreign courts. The question is if the architecture of the system is set up so the only way data can be "secretly" exfiltrated by other governments is to go through local Israeli employees and they're the one's breaking the foreign law (and they were told explicitly by foreign bosses that they can't share this information wink) is there any punishment for google other than fines dwarfed by the contract and having to fire an employee who is strangely ok with that, who is replaced by a equally helpful local employee.
Also, I can't believe that Google or Amazon would sign a contract that doesn't specify the judicial jurisdiction. If the contract says "this contract will be governed by the courts of Santa Clara County California" and the Israelis agreed to that, then they won't have a claim in Israeli courts. If an Israeli court concluded that they have jurisdiction when both parties agreed they don't have jurisdiction, it'd create a very problematic precedent for doing business with Israeli companies.
Even if an Israeli court would ignore all that, what would Israel get? Maybe it could seize a billion in assets within Israel, but would that be worth it? For Google or Amazon, they face steeper penalties in the US and Europe for various things. For Israel, maybe they'd be able to seize an amount of assets equivalent to 10% of their annual military budget. So while it's not a small sum, it is a small sum relative to the parties' sizes. Neither would really win or lose from the amount of money in play.
But Israel would lose big time if it went that route. It would guarantee that no one would sign another cloud deal with them once the existing contracts expired. Investment in Israel would fall off a cliff as companies worried that Israeli courts would simply ignore anything they didn't like.
The point of these agreements is that Israel needs access to cloud resources. The primary objective is probably to avoid getting cut off like Microsoft did to them. That part of the contract is likely enforceable (IANAL): Israel does something against the ToS, but they can't be cut off. I'd guess that's the thing that Israel really wanted out of these deals.
The "wink" was probably a hopeful long shot that they never expected to work. But they got what they needed: Amazon and Google can't cut them off regardless of shareholder pressure or what they're doing with the cloud no matter what anyone thinks of it. Suing Amazon or Google over a part of the contract that they knew was never going to happen would jeopardize their actual objective: stable, continued access to cloud resources.
The Cloud doesn't just mean foreign data centers it means 3rd party infrastructure and expertise, which in this case at least, some of is local to the country. The point is that any 'secret' surveillance is reported. I.e. person in US gets ordered to access data, they connect to data center with appropriate credentials, which is monitored and either questioned and billed, or get flagged locally as not reportable and so not logged (making it show up on the shadow logs installed by local Israeli intelligence assets). Foreign employees best efforts to comply with espionage orders still reveal their actions and local employees happily obey local reporting laws knowing they are outside of those jurisdictions and helping their country.
Yes it can be forced to fall apart, but it has to be done in the open (because it will require changing local data center operations) and will be time consuming unless an actual open order by the US to immediately stop working with Israel on this which is extremely unlikely to happen.
For example a tennant can sign a lease that says they have no notice period before eviction. If they’re in a state with a 30 day minimum notice period then the notice period is 30 days. It doesn’t matter what the contract says.
Google would comply with the US court order and ignore the contract it signed with Israel.
That does not help
Signing the contract was a criminal conspiracy
I am not holding my breath for prosecution, though.
If it wasn't Amazon, Google and Israel government, there wouldn't be people pretending it comply with the 'letter of the law'. It is simple treason, selling your own country secret to another.
And the way it's done isn't that 'brilliant'. Oh yes they aren't writing on paper that x country asked for Israel data, they are instead using the country phone index and making payment based on that...
> The terms of the Nimbus deal would appear to prohibit Google and Amazon from the kind of unilateral action taken by Microsoft last month, when it disabled the Israeli military’s access to technology used to operate an indiscriminate surveillance system monitoring Palestinian phone calls.
I don’t understand the connection between these two things. The article seems all over the place.
It is like if it is illegal to import more then $1000 into the country without declaring, and you (clever) give $900 each to 4 of your friends who are conveniently traveling with you, so you only walk across the border with remaining $400, not breaking any laws. Then when inside the country, your friends give you back the $900 each, meaning you just de-facto imported $4000 while technically crossing the border with less then $1000, as legally required.
If normal people tried to do this they would obviously be charged with the crime of illegally importing money, but also with something like a conspiracy to evade the law.
At least for us. For the more fortunate, maybe it’s just a “creative interpretation of law.”
> Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
This bar is virtually impossible to clear. You'll never get a US court to convict anybody of treason for anything concerning Israel. Espionage sure, but not treason. The last time anybody got convicted of treason for anything in America was for acts committed during WW2, which is the last time America was in a properly declared war.
If for some reason the US were storing sensitive data in US-based datacenters operated by a foreign corporation, don't you think they would try to take measures to prevent that data from being exfiltrated? It would be idiotic for Israel not to take what measures it could.
As for the idea that Amazon is acting treasonously - is warning someone that your country is spying on them treasonous? I think they should warn anyone and everyone whose data is being shared with any government, as long as they stay within the letter of the law in the places they operate.
Yes it is if you are American. Snowden revealed that the American government was spying on every single American, now he is forced to live hidden in Russia.
Expecting there to be law abidance and so on when dealing with Israel or israelis is a mistake that'll make you the 'freier' in that relationship. This is why Israel and israeli corporations commonly use usian and european fronts when they do business with more discerning customers than the most obvious tyrants of the world.
But could it instead/also be for international spy operations, like surveillance, propaganda, and cyber attacks? A major cloud provider has fast access at scale in multiple regions, is less likely to be blocked than certain countries, and can hide which customer the traffic is for.
If it were for international operations, two questions:
1. How complicit would the cloud providers be?
2. For US-based providers, how likely that US spy agencies would be consulted before signing the contracts, and consciously allow it to proceed (i.e., let US cloud providers facilitate the foreign spy activity), so that US can monitor the activity?
E.g. you will find references in AWS docs to Bureau of Industry/Security rulings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology
https://www.bis.gov/
https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/global-export-compliance/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
I don't imagine Google and Amazon are any better. I.e. take boatloads of money, while sticking the head into sand and pretend it's not likely used to help the illegal occupation of Palestinians, to persecute and harm them.
Apparently, US aid to a country is usually spent on US companies; Israel is no exception: https://theintercept.com/2024/05/01/google-amazon-nimbus-isr...
That’s not “cloud > onprem always”, that’s “even given cloud providers’ many faults governments are so terrible at managing and securing infrastructure today that the cloud is preferable for them”. Whether you anre pro- or anti-particular-government, you should still support gov-moves-to-cloud. The alternative is proven unbelievably worse on every possible axis.
Insane. Obeying the law or ToS, apparently, is discriminatory when it comes to Israel.
you're taking from a very privileged position in terms of media consumption. the media that criticizes the genocide and the blackflag on oct 7th is very niche and you seem to consume it exclusively. the message is very different within mass media.
Google/Amazon could just say yes until the contract is signed, and then just not comply. Israeli government would have no recourse since they can’t go to a US court, and file charges for a US company NOT breaking the law or for complying with a court order. Israel also would not want this to come to light.
It’s like a criminal’s promise. The only recourse is taking your business elsewhere, which Israel would do when they’re tipped off anyways. But at least if Google/Amazon fail to wink, contract lasts a little longer.
So Microsoft is now more ethical than Google and Amazon? What times we live in!
There is certainty they broke the law. Both federally and, in all likelihood, in most states.
I wonder if there's a national security aspect here, in that knowing the country would prompt some form of country-specific espionage (signals intelligence, local agents on the inside at these service providers, etc.) to discover what the targeted data might be.
Knowing the country allows an immediate diplomatic protest, threats to withdraw business, and investigation.
The payment is to be within 24 hours, which means that they can act quickly to stop the processing of the data, prevent conclusions from being drawn, etc.
If the signaled country were the US, I would expect a bunch of senators to be immediately called and pressured to look into and perhaps stop the investigation.
https://www.972mag.com/project-nimbus-contract-google-amazon...
This is a good opportunity to make money from helping corporations migrate off these services and onto alternatives with better data protection regulations and weaker ties to the zionist atrocity factory.
If you don't want your data in the hands of someone with access to the state's monopoly on violence, you're best off getting rid of all internet access in your life.
They will have agents both known and unknown operating at those companies. A company cannot as a policy set out to violate the law (if it's smart). It would be trivial for individuals to have covert channels set up.
I can imagine that this Alphabet General Counsel-approved language could be challenged in court.
Most SWEs are still 20-40-something men, which would be the same demographic being called to service (I realize women also serve in the IDF, but combat positions are generally reserved for men).
So it's possible that Israel can't rely on their own private tech industry being unaffected during high-engagement periods.
I think the government does have plenty of its own infra (and military tech sectors would be unaffected by calling in reserves), but given the size of the country (and also considering its Palestinian second-class citizens who make up 20% of the Israeli population may not be trusted to work on more sensitive portions of its infrastructure) they're probably not able to manage every part of the stack. Probably only China and the U.S. can do this.
Iran attacking US-East-1 would certainly be unusual.
More likely is it was "aid" from the US which usually comes with stipulations about what/where they can spend it - common with weapons/military kit, wouldn't be surprised if they did something similar with cloud services.
And any offsite that is "Israel's gov offsite" is an easy target even if in Cyprus or NYC.
Comingling with a bunch of bulk commercial hosts is very safe from a threat modeling perspective (in this case).
Not a lawyer. Can this statement hold in a US court of law? To me it sounds sleazy and ambiguous. To say if an “idea is wrong” could mean it’s a bad idea, an immoral one or a false “idea”. But in any case, an idea is not a statement or a fact. I have a hundred ideas everyday. Some are right, some are wrong and others in between.
This seems like a very dumb way to communicate in a criminal conspiracy: it's more traceable than a simple message, with permanent record, and more people are involved to enact the communication.
Is there any benefit?
In other words, im curious why would Israel not invest in making sure that the their were storing in third-party vendor clouds was not encrypted at rest and in transit by keys not stored in that cloud.
This seems like a matter of national security for any government, not to have their data accessible by other parties at the whims of different jurisdiction where that cloud vendor operates.
Conversely, if you don't, it's not hard to understand at all when you consider that there are oodles of American politicians, at all levels, actually publicly declaring that they put Israeli interests over US interests. What's hard to understand about _that_ is that, for some reason, it's not considered pure and simple treason.
Now maybe we can say that Israel is not a democratic system or environment, but then Microsoft would not be wholly desiring to do business serving such an entity, lest they break with US oversight.
Israel here told the vendor that whenever there is a gag on them by their government against making Israel aware of their request, the vendor is to secretly transmit a message alerting them..
Also because no other country has the power to get cloud vendors to do this and this one special country will face no consequences (as usual).
"The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world"
"Like other big tech companies, Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses routinely comply with requests from police, prosecutors and security services to hand over customer data to assist investigations."
The way I interpret this is Google, Amazon operates in multiple countries under multiple jurisdictions. The security services for any of these countries(including for example Egypt where Google has offices according to....Google), can produce a legal(in Egypt) order requesting Google to produce data of another customer( for example Israeli govt) and Google has to comply or leave Egypt.
It seems to me that being under constant threat of your government sensitive data being exposed at the whims of another, potentially adversarial government is not a sustainable way of operating and Im surprised that Israel havent either found ways of storing its infrastructure locally or encrypting it five way to Sunday.
This is not a comment on the specific accusation of actions by Israel but for strange reality of being a small-country government and a customer of a multi-national cloud vendor.
No, I don't think I will.
Since when is talking about Israel controversial?
If it's encrypted in the cloud, it also cannot be processed in the cloud. For AI in particular that kinda defeats the point.
If after Oct 7th Israel went and killed a single child in retaliation, that would be unjust. Justification and proportionality are not measured like that.
Justification is established by a valid objective to go to war. Proportionality is measured in comparison to the military objectives. The Oct 7th attack clearly justifies the removal of Hamas. The proportionality of doing so is dependent on the size of Hamas's army (20k-30k), the size of their infrastructure (500 kms of tunnels), and their ability to separate their operations and operators from civilians.
Just because Hamas, build the biggest underground bomb shelter network and refused to let any civilians in it and that that it operated militarily out of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, causing inevitable casualties by civilians does not make it a genocide. It makes it a terrible war. A war that Hamas started on October 7.
My man, Israel had a blockade surrounding Palestine on all sides for years prior. October 7th was a retaliation for a lot of the pain Israel had inflicted on Palestine (sorry- Greater Israel). And Bibi was well in the know and all too happy to let it happen.
> largely ignores role of Hamas in the conflict
Bibi loved and loves Hamas. Also, Israel has nuclear weapons. A lot of them.
It's like David and Goliath, except in this case David is malnourished to the extreme, has no future, no present, no past except seeing his family and friends bombed to oblivion....and only can attack Goliath with a few pebbles. Meanwhile, Goliath has plot armor and nukes.
>Frames the country as a "settler-colonial" project ignoring realities of jewish history in the region.
And not ignoring Palestine, which had existed for 12 centuries before the birth of Christ?
A blockade that was specifically accounted for the the preceding ceasefire agreement that was in place on Oct 6th.
> David and Goliath
Yet, it is David who keeps starting this fight, losing, then calling Goliath unjust because his ability to punch back is greater.
> And not ignoring Palestine, which had existed for 12 centuries before the birth of Christ?
Nope not ignoring. Both groups have a long history in the region. Arabs through colonization centuries ago. Heck, "Palestine" even comes from the Jewish word for invader (the naming is not connected to the arabization of Palestine).
B) you’re missing out on cause and effect here — could it be that Israeli started blocking import of goods that can be used for military purposes shortly after Hamas gain control of Gaza in 2007 and started shooting missiles at Israel
Then this whole story would disintegrate.
I am baffled by the manufactured outrage this story is generating. "oh no. <country> is sidestepping the NSA which we loudly proclaim to be evil at every opportunity, and (gasp) imposing their own conditions and bullying gigantic tech companies which are even more evil."
This from the same group of people who insist that europe should host their own data.
American companies sidestepping law related to international relationships between the US and other countries in order to benefit a foreign state??
That story would disintegrate? In what universe?
Assuming it's even true, there is no side-stepping international relations between the US and other countries.
If Egypt were to issue a legal order with a gag clause ordering Amazon to release Israeli data, and Amazon were to signal that fact to Israel, how does this involve the US at all?
Seems like you did not understand the story.
Why is this characterized as a "demand"? Amazon and Google have the freedom that Microsoft does to decline.
This story stinks.
MS/Azure being the good guys for once? Colour me surprised.
LOL. No. That is not how it works. Legal combs through every contract, negotiates, and gates the process, while revenue officers act very self-entitled to having the contract signed ASAP. Legal has to do their job, or they're a liability.
Microsoft understands at a corporate level that it's in their business interest (as a global vendor) for local lawful access regimes to be as narrow as possible. Their pushback here is understandable; if they're not seen as trustworthy by the US government, it potentially undermines a lot of the latitude they're trying to fight for.
But I do not think we knew that Google and Amazon would engage in criminal conspiracy for profit
I thought censoring and straight up brigading was not allowed here? But i guess if they do what the article is about they can easily sway a thread like this in a few minutes, and i'm sure they do when stuff becomes frontpage on various sites. Can't talk about the genocide.
Funny, I thought he was adjusting his Bayesian priors based on available evidence.
From a classical logic perspective, it's correct that authority does not imply truth.
But from a pragmatic Bayesian perspective, when verifying the truth of a matter is difficult-to-impossible for a layperson, we all try to figure out the truth based on what authorities say and our assessment of their trustworthiness.
----
HNers really need to grok that high-school debate club doesn't help you with reality.
Maybe Amazon and Google created a compliance issue for themselves, but that's not Israel's problem; Israel isn't obligated to comply with foreign states' gag orders.
Articles like the above should raise major alarms among US citizens. And this is not the first time Israel has betrayed the US. They even welcomed Jonathan Pollard (a US citizen!) with open arms and he's now pursuing a political career in Israel. They're clearly not an ally, and it is mind boggling we continue to support them. And like any good RCA, we need to not only fix the current mess but analyze how it occurred so it does not happen again.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIPAC, which is an obvious foreign agent that's blatantly operating in violation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac... for >70 years now.
This was leveraged (some might say exploited) by unsavory actors in the creation of a reactionary, settler-colonial ethno-state. This should not be too surprising, given that zionism arose in the same sociopolitical milieu that gave us modern nationalism and pan-nationalist ideologies.
I found me uncle Dan McCann
A very prosperous Yankee man
He holds a seat in Congress
And he's leader of his clan
He's helped to write America's laws
His heart and soul in Ireland's cause
And God help the man who opened his jaws to me uncle Dan McCann
As far as the song is concerned, this is admirable behavior. Of course, the song is written from the perspective of an Irishman visiting from Ireland to look for his uncle. But it's marketed to Americans. The question "is it a good thing to have American legislators whose purpose in life is to work for the benefit of Ireland?" never seems to come up.
And a double reminder that it's an Irish song that tells an Irish perspective,not an American one.
No, it's an American song that tells an Irish perspective. It was written in America to be performed for American audiences.
Why do American audiences appreciate it?
And audiences in America isn't the same thing as American audiences. There was and still is a very large Irish diaspora in the United States. I'd also appreciate a source for the claim that it was intentionally written for American audiences.
OK, they're probably OK with the way I worded it, but as soon as you admit that many of those pro-Israel factions are of one religious background in particular, it's a no-no.
Which is stupid. It's not stereotyping to admit powerful people care about their own subgroups. It's stereotyping to insist it's only one group that's like this, or that everyone in that group is like this.
If the Israelis are committing genocide, it's of a people obsessed with destroying them.
If it's colonisation, it's colonisation with about a dozen caveats.
That doesn't make things any better for Gazans, for whom I also have sympathy.
The aspect of the original comment that I was poking fun of is that it is reductive.
That's the same justification used by a certain failed Austrian painter.
Genocide is never right.
Change it to Israel, sprinkle in some vaguely insidious language (a contract becomes a "secret agreement", etc), and suddenly it's a scandal.
https://grokipedia.com/page/Bosnian_genocide
https://grokipedia.com/page/Rwandan_genocide
Why not state your argument aloud? And link reliable sources.
This kind of absurd blunder is what happens when American public schools have twelve years of history education that consist of nothing but "Holocaust Class". Bro has probably had to read every popular holocaust book but has never even heard of Cambodia.
Edit: you Zionists can flag, downvote, whatever. Doesn’t make a difference. The world sees your grotesque actions and Israel will fall
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm thinking that 99% of people would feel horrible and/or morally responsible if they lent an axe to their neighbor Mr. Seemed-Nice, which he then used to kill his wife. Vs. far less so, if their neighbor bought his fatal ax from Amazon or Walmart.
Arguing about pedantic details does not change that.
Honestly, what is your point? What are you seeing that the rest of us aren't getting? For the record, my mother's family is mostly Sephardic.
This was about 50 years ago, was accidental, and Israel apologized and paid reparations soon after.
This is a pretty clear example of double standards for Israel - no other country gets demonized for friendly fire incidents.
Now my question: having purchased that land from France, did America have a right to eject the native people who lived there? Or did France in fact have no right to sell that land which, in all practical ways, actually belonged to the people who lived there?
Israel "bought" that land from people who had no legitimate ownership of the land in the first place.
Likewise, if you legally purchase double-digit percentages of Indian, Chinese, Brit, Australian land, it doesn't give you the moral or legal precedent to expel the natives from the rest of their land and declare it your state.
If they then take to violence against you, you have the right to defend yourself.
Israel is comitting a genocide and attacking/murdering everyone right now.
That is the crucial difference.
"Operation Cast Thy Bread was a top-secret biological warfare operation conducted by the Haganah and later the Israel Defense Forces which began in April 1948, during the 1948 Palestine war. The Haganah used typhoid bacteria to contaminate drinking water wells in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread
Not to mention that Israel has dropped the equivalent of several nuclear bombs on a tiny open-air concentration camp with no possibility to flee.
[1] https://d1.awsstatic.com/Security/pdfs/Amazon_AWS_Informatio...