A Clever Alleged Legal Sidestep in Big Techs Israeli Cloud Deal Chalk this one up under the most clever alleged legal sidesteps. A new report details a so-called winking mechanism within Israels Project Nimbus cloud computing contracts with Amazon and Google. The alleged system, dating back to 2021, would require the US tech giants to send coded messages to Israel using money transfers. According to the report, whenever Google or Amazon secretly comply with an overseas legal request for data stored in Israel, they are required to send a specific amount of money to the Israeli government. The dollar amount itself is the code, indicating which country issued the data request. The coding system is said to be based on international dialing prefixes. For instance, if data is handed over to the United States, which has the dialing code 1, the companies would send 1,000 shekels. For a request from Italy, with the dialing code 39, the payment would be 3,900 shekels. The report even mentions a failsafe for situations where a gag order is particularly strict. If the standard signal cannot be used, the companies could allegedly notify Israel by sending a much larger sum, 100,000 shekels. The report also claims that Microsoft, which originally bid for the Nimbus contract, lost out partly because it refused to accept some of Israels proposed terms. In response, an Amazon spokesperson denied any underhanded processes. They stated that the company has a rigorous global process for responding to lawful orders for customer data. The spokesperson emphasized that AWS carefully reviews each request and maintains confidentiality in accordance with the law. They flatly denied having any processes in place to circumvent confidentiality obligations on lawfully binding orders. Google also issued a strong denial, calling the accusations false and absurd. A company spokesperson stated that the idea they would evade legal obligations as a US company is categorically wrong. They reiterated that their terms of service for the Nimbus contract are clear and have not changed, suggesting this is another false attempt to imply otherwise. The Israeli government has been contacted for a statement. The full report contains significantly more detail on the alleged leaked information.
