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?
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...
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.
Who exactly here is the victim that gets it legal rights deprived or what is the gain at the expense of the victim?
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.
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)
This is criminal conspiracy. It's fucking insane that they not only did this, but put the crime in writing.;
> 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.
> 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.
No, they can simply not publish a warrant canary in the future, which will tip people off if they've been publishing it regularly in the past.
you update your canary to say that nothing has changed, at a known cadence.
if you ever dont make the update, readers know that the canary has expired, and so you have been served a gag order warrant.
changing or removing the canary in response to a warrant is illegal. not changing it is legal.
for an equivalent cloudwatch setup, its checking the flag for "alarm when there's no points"
As I understand, this theory wouldn’t even hold up in other countries where you could be compelled to make such a false update.
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
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...
Why is the US in particular tolerating Israel sabotaging antiterrorism investigations?
We all know why. Imagine the backlash if there were half as many powerful people in America's media, politics, finance, etc who had dual-Senegalese citizenship or ancestry, and spent more time defending the Senegalese government, complaining of anti-Senegalese sentiment, and advocating for material support for the Senegalese people than they ever bothered with Americans.
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.
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.
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...
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.
That does not help
Signing the contract was a criminal conspiracy
I am not holding my breath for prosecution, though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is certainty they broke the law. Both federally and, in all likelihood, in most states.
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.
Insane. Obeying the law or ToS, apparently, is discriminatory when it comes to Israel.
If you'd said that the Jews controlled Western media to any significant degree, you'd have been called an antisemite.
Now, where do I even start: 1. Forcing the confiscation of TikTok at giveaway prices. The TikTok sale had faltered after Bytedance put on their lobbying hats, but the Zionist lobby overpowered them. Imagine being willing to attract China's wrath, just so you can censor the internet and not let people see dead Palestinian kids?
2. Openly paying Western influencers for pro-Israel propaganda.
3. Propagandists like Ellison & Bari Weiss capturing media companies and openly planning to, "inculcate a love & respect of Israel in Americans."
4. Telling MAGA that if they don't support Israel that they're not MAGA (LMAO).
5. Exposing Western hypocrisy in failing to enforce an ICC arrest order against Netanyahu.
6. A livestreamed genocide.
7. Systematic acts of rape and torture against the Palestinians.
8. Silencing anyone who dares criticize Israel.
You even have Jews like Jordana Cutler, Meta's Director of Public Policy for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora bragging about censoring anyone who implies Zionists control the media. Like, you're silencing the 'antisemites' by proving them right, haha?
If anyone had even as much as alluded to Israel having outsized, perverse influence across the West, you'd have been shut down. Now, they're doing the hard work, gloating, scrambling, and showing their cards. Very good.
Yeah, it's weird how anyone could find this antisemtic. I read a book by this Austrian guy from the 1920s who had already figured it out back then. Not sure why it's controversial a hundred years later.
The only thing that makes me question it, just a little bit, is the way Israel has been endlessly criticized in all forms of media for their response to the Oct 7th massacre.
No one is buying the lies anymore. Right now every day, even with their "supposed" ceasefire, dozens of civilians are killed by Israel. 87% civilians according to their own military, that's called "ethnic cleansing" as many legal experts have concluded over a year ago already.
I hate to break it to you, but the largest oil "companies in the world" are not Exxon or Royal Dutch Shell -- they are non-democratic, state-controlled Arab entities which are orders of magnitude larger. If you think for a moment that said countries are not quietly pouring millions if not billions of dollars to cover up their own injustices and to foster hatred for Israel, you would be among the great majority, but also tragically uninformed.
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.
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.
* Redefines the meaning of genocide to fit the shape of the conflict -- a war started by Hamas on Oct 7 when it invaded Israel and slaughtered hundreds of music festival goers and Kibbutzniks.
* it uncritically adopts Hamas ministry of health casualty data without identifying combatants vs civilians.
* largely ignores role of Hamas in the conflict, downplays its use of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals for military uses.
* Frames the country as a "settler-colonial" project ignoring realities of jewish history in the region.
Overall i would prefer if these sorts of discussions that inevitably lead to century-old blood libels would not take place on HN and thats why i commented on thinking about the original article outside the context of Israel.
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?
But I do not think we knew that Google and Amazon would engage in criminal conspiracy for profit
I can imagine that this Alphabet General Counsel-approved language could be challenged in court.
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.
helsinkiandrew•1d ago
Wouldn't those involved be liable to years in prison?
alwa•1d ago
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.
IAmBroom•1d ago
votepaunchy•1d ago
breppp•4h ago
In my opinion that's extremely unlikely. This was probably set up for other kinds of countries
NickC25•17m ago
Not to burst your bubble....but you do know that Page and Brin are both jewish, correct? Who's to say they wouldn't chose Israel?