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.
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.
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.
In this scheme, the government would be deprived of its legal right to obtain information about a business's customer without the consent or knowledge of said customer.
In many/most? cases, a customer can be notified and can attempt to block such information gathering, but there are also many where it's not permitted.
IE criminal intent vs criminal activity, critically the criminal activity only needs to be intended not actually occur for it to be fraud. Specifying which criminal intent is applicable is reasonable but nothing I said was incorrect.
The victims are the people being deprived of their legal protections.
Not everyone agrees which information should be protected but sending information can be a form of harm. If I break into your bank, find all your financial transactions, and post it on Facebook, I have harmed you.
Courts imposing gag orders over criminal or civil matters is a critical protection, and attempting to violate those gag orders is harm. The specific victims aren’t known, but they intend for there to be victims.
IANAL, but all criminal definitions of fraud that I am aware of require an intention to harm to a victim. It's kind of hard to argue that sending money fulfills this criteria.
The harm is not to the recipient of the funds in this case, but to the investigating authorities, who have had the secrecy of their subpoena compromised.
There is wide latitude in the criminal code to charge financial crimes. This reminds me a bit of Trump's hush money conviction. IIRC, a central issue was how the payment was categorized in his books. In this case, there would be a record of this payment to Israel in the books, but the true nature of the payment would be concealed. IANAL, but I believe that is legally problematic.
The investigating authorities aren't being defrauded though; making someone's job harder isn't fraud. Google or Amazon could be committing other crimes,[1] but not fraud.
[1] If they actually violated a gag order, which realistically they won't. In all likelihood there's language to ensure they're not forced to commit crimes. Even if that wasn't explicit, the illegality doctrine covers them anyway, and they can just ignore any provisions which would require them to commit crimes.
Almost all crime requires some form of lying, at least by omission and often of the explicit sort. Fraud though, is much more narrow than "they deceived but also crimed"... and anyone saying otherwise should be so embarrassed that we never have to hear their halfwittery ever again.
Americans get legal protections for their private health data because the disclosure of such information is considered harmful.
Other countries provide legal protections for other bits of information because disclosure of that information is considered harmful to the individual, it’s that protection they are trying to breach which thus harms the person.
How is this related to the fraud discussion in this thread? Illegal disckosure of confidential information is usually handled by a separate legal framework.
Stuff is generally also fraud rather than only being fraud. We don’t know the details of what else happened so we can’t say what other crimes occurred.
Same deal as most illegal things public companies do also being SEC violations.
The same action can break multiple laws. Unlawful discharge of a firearm is a crime, but it can also kill someone and thus break a different law. https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/03107.htm
Here we don’t know which specific laws were broken because we lack details, but the companies definitely signed a contract agreeing to commit fraud.
Anyway, the comment I responded to had “require an intention to harm to a victim” it’s that aspect I was addressing. My point was the transmission of information itself can be harmful to someone other than the recipient of that information. So the same act fulfills both aspects of fraud (deception + criminal intent), and also breaks some other law.
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.
> 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.
> 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.;
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.
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.
> 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".
>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
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.
I would think to stopping doing something is equally an action as to do something, in regards to warrant canaries and gag orders. You had to take make some change to your process, or if automated take an actual action to disable. In either case, there was a cognizant choice that was made
The legal theory is that in the US the first amendment prevents the government from forcing you to make a false update. I don’t know if it’s ever been tested.
As I understand, this theory wouldn’t even hold up in other countries where you could be compelled to make such a false update.
More specifically, the theory is that cannot compel you to lie, there are all kinds of cases where businesses are compelled to share specific messages.
Right - the whole premise is that the government cannot compel speech (in the US). So if you publish something every week that says, “we’ve never been subpoenaed as of this week” and then receive a subpoena, the government can’t force you to lie and publish the same note afterwards. The lack of it being published is the canary here.
Whether you can be compelled to lie under these circumstances or not is not a resolved question of law. Although it seems fairly likely that compelling speech in this way is unconstitutional, if it has been tested in court, the proceedings are not public.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
Congressmen don't have classified access by default. Even those involved in oversight often rely on briefings which are written by the people potentially breaking the law and include whatever they choose to include, or not. It's akin to regulatory authorities that operate by asking those being regulated 'Are you still operating under all appropriate regulations?'
And laws are also written extremely broadly, which gives the intelligence agencies extreme leeway in interpreting them as they see fit. And even if they go beyond that, it's not like there are any consequences. For one of the most overt - James Clapper indisputably lied under oath and absolutely nothing happened. Furthermore politicians are generally ignorant on most topics, especially on anything remotely technically related. But revealing that ignorance is politically damaging, so they turn into yes men on most of these topics.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
>Openly paying Western influencers for pro-Israel propaganda.
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.
>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.
You're strenuously refuting a point I didn't make. So, I decided anything else you wrote would be quite inappropriate and not worth my time.
> an event that in itself was a crescendo of creating a "jewish ghetto" just for arabs with millions of people crammed together in poverty for decades
You remind me of a person who (years ago) accused Israel of "killing minors". Not mentioning that the minors in question were committing terrorist acts.
Israel literally forced Israeli settlers from Gaza to completely give it to Palestine. Yet HAMAS kept the population in poverty by rejecting any attempts at peace. It was a de-facto capital crime in Gaza to work with Israeli government.
From Israel's point of view, they tried playing fair with HAMAS. While HAMAS kept playing dirty. HAMAS at various times: murdered civilians, indiscriminately bombed cities, attacked hospitals, used ambulances for troop transport, used rape as a weapon of war, etc.
There's nothing that Israel is doing to HAMAS that HAMAS hadn't done to Israel before. Yet we're not seeing any pushback against HAMAS from the usual suspects. I guess their only problem is just that Israel is doing everything _better_ than HAMAS?
Because they overplayed their hand and they know it, so the only thing left to do is go all in and hope the walls they built hold long enough for this to be a fait accompli.
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?
it doesn't matter what it does, why it's there, or how often it's used because: 1) skirts the law, 2) infringes on the laws of other countries, and finally 3) it's just so dodgy you have to be asking yourself wtf is going on.
How can an independent state "infringe on the laws of other countries"? If you think Israel is somehow bound by foreign states' laws, should it also be enforcing the Great Firewall, for example?
And how is it dodgy to want to know who spies on your data?
It is Israel's method introduced so that when Google and Microsoft who are legally required to pass over stored data based on where their servers are based, to find out who asked for it. I assume in the goal of trying to influence who asked for it.
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.
>>You’re conveniently ignoring that Hamas took 200+ hostages and refused to return them throughout the war.
Are you saying what I think you're saying? Holding 200+ hostages justifies killing 18 thousand children? "inevitable casualties" - what a feckless way to call what anyone else can see clearly as a systematic attempt to kill and eradicate a group of people.
You're going to have to download a hasbara update. Israel is still genociding despite the completed prisoner exchange, so the excuse of "why won't they just release the hostages and this will all end" isn't going to work anymore.
> 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).
The Jewish history in the region became the Palestinian history of the region. The Palestinians are literally the direct descendants of the Israelites said to be in prior history. This is per David Ben Gurion.
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
Timelines disagree with you:
A) after disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and all the way until this war, Israel did not control the border between Gaza and Egypt. Egypt did
B)
2005 - Israel withdraws from Gaza
Jan 2026 - Hamas wins popular elections
Feb 2026 - rocket and mortar attacks launched by new Hamas govt begin. 179 attacks in February alon
Feb 2026 - international sanctions and tightened Israeli border control begins
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.
> 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.
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.
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....
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.
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
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.
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.
You're making the appeal to authority fallacy. Just because these organisations claim it doesn't make it true. The UN is one of the most discredited bodies. None of the others have distinguished themselves over the course of the war. As far as i and many others are concerned they are hopelessly biased captives to hamas concerns, regardless of the good work they do in other areas.
It's not censoring, hn has a very low tolerance for flamebait.
It’s not one organization, literally every humanitarian organization on earth has acknowledged Israel’s barbaric genocide in Gaza and apartheid in West Bank with intent to eradicate the Palestinians. There’s plenty of documented evidence to corroborate this, and the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli leadership.
Every humanitarian organization on earth works for Hamas? Why don’t Zionists demand the same level of scrutiny for facts in favor of Israel?
I can’t tell you the number of times IDF shills have tried to discredit internationally recognized humanitarian orgs only to post obviously fabricated drivel unworthy of being used as toilet paper in response… it’s so cringe worthy.
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".
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.
years of "but we have to because of our enemies" undisciplined realpolitik has ended in states that insist upon their own legitimacy but don't even pay lip service to the rule of law. your enemies are people you can and should fuck over and your allies are people you've hoodwinked, and can and should fuck over.
Why is the US in particular tolerating Israel sabotaging antiterrorism investigations?
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.
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.
theyre complicit and profiting off genocide just as they have been forever. The sad reality is, most of these criminals and white collar gangsters will never be held to account
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.
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???"
"Alright, they did give us irrigation.
But other than gender equality, freedom of religion, gay rights, democracy, education, a thriving economy, and irrigation, what have the Israelis ever done for us?" /s
Did German Jews make public statements prior to Nazism about driving 'Aryans' from Europe? What were the equivalents to the Munich Massacre, suicide bombings, rocket attacks, or October 7th?
The situations seem quite different to me, but maybe there is an outrageous gap in my knowledge of Weimar Germany.
And for the centuries of Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians living with Palestinian Jews, how many times do you think those Palestinians Muslims and Christians wanted to destroy all those Palestinians Jews.
For me Zionists for Palestinians are fair game, the same as Germans Nazis were fair game to German Jews.
The fact that Nazis are backing up Zionists in the West tells all the story.
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.
This is exactly what I was trying to point out. You've made some reasonable points here, but that doesn't offer any evidence for the hyperbolic statement that Israel is pure and undiluted evil. Israel could be a bad place without that statement being true.
This might seem like a silly distinction to some but what I find depressing about modern culture wars is how "we disagree on these points" seems to morph into "you and everything you represent is terrible". Nuance matters.
You seem a bit over-focused on the literal truth value of that "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement.
Vs. 99% of educated and rational people recognize that as a bombastic/emotive statement. Arguing its truth value is like kitchen-testing whether a cookie recipe turns out worse if you replace "2C sugar, 1/2t salt" with "2C salt, 1/2t sugar".
And sadly, such bombastic/emotive mis-statements are far, far older than our modern culture wars.
It’s very possible that things were always this way, you’re right. My own perception is that politics has become more divisive and less respectful in my own lifetime, and I happen to think that social media makes this worse, but that’s admittedly just an opinion.
To the emotional statement: I think I’d get a reaction if rather than saying “I don’t think Go is a good language” I said something like “Go is objectively the worst programming language ever devised”. I get your point but if you feel emotional about something then say so - IMO the parent comment did much more than that.
>You seem a bit over-focused on the literal truth value of that "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement.
>Vs. 99% of educated and rational people recognize that as a bombastic/emotive statement.
That's a cope. Words have meanings, and being able to make and walk back on misleading/false statements with "I was being bombastic/emotive and it wasn't meant to be taken literally" absolutely poisons any sort of attempt rational discourse. "Israel committed war crimes" becomes not a statement about whether Israel broke international laws but whether you support Israel or not, "fake news" becomes not a statement about whether the news story was conjured from thin air but whether you like the story, etc.
Words have meanings, and "%" obviously means division by zero.
If you logically disproved the "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement - say, by finding one saintly-pure Israeli preschool teacher - would anyone outside the Temple of Ultimate Pedantry really care?
Vs. if you took that statement to mean "I am very angrily anti-Israeli", might you find it quicker & easier to communicate your own position? Or at least make it a bit difficult for people (who you obviously don't like) to deny your interpretations of their positions?
>If you logically disproved the "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement - say, by finding one saintly-pure Israeli preschool teacher - would anyone outside the Temple of Ultimate Pedantry really care?
Do you think Trump supporters actually cares whether the stories he calls out as "fake news" were actually fake or just displeased the president? Or whether the election was "stolen", or he simply didn't like the way it was conducted?
>Vs. if you took that statement to mean "I am very angrily anti-Israeli", might you find it quicker & easier to communicate your own position? Or at least make it a bit difficult for people (who you obviously don't like) to deny your interpretations of their positions?
But why add all that extra stuff about being the most evil? If you just wanted to express his displeasure at israel, you could have just said "I'm mad at israel", or even "israel is evil". The fact OP went out of his way to say that "israel is the most evil" suggests that he thought he had something to gain from doing so, like adding the fib makes his argument more convincing or something. Same with Trump calling stuff "fake news" instead of just saying "I don't like this story about me".
Most don't. A few (and more of the swing voters) care somewhat. Good reason to not spend (waste) time getting picky on the details, eh?
> But why...?
Some combination of social signalling/performance - "look at my uber-ultimate loyalty to the anti-Israel cause!!!" - and an ancient human tendency to exaggerate for emotional emphasis. Anecdote: Back in the 1900's, one of my nieces routinely referred to her kid sister as the "spawn of the devil" and similar. Why? Until the birth of the younger, the older niece had been the baby of the family, and had her own bedroom. Plus normal sibling rivalry. Fast-forward 2 decades from that - and the two nieces were on perfectly friendly terms. The older one both got the younger one a nice office job, and was happy to have the younger one babysit her own small children.
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 claims that it was deliberate boil down to "they must have known because there were identifying marks", which can be said about almost any friendly fire incident. In reality, not every operation is executed competently. Plenty of militaries have shot down their own airplanes, for example, despite the existence of several safeguards designed to prevent that.
Alternatively, Israel may well have identified the ship and decided to sink it regardless. The USS Liberty was a SigInt ship that was well-known for monitoring wireless transmissions to hold nations accountable from offshore. Israel, at the time, was engaged in an internationally condemned and illegal military operation in the Golan Heights, and may just as well have sank it consciously to prevent the US from taking leverage of the situation.
We may never know the truth, taking Israel's Military Censor into account.
Your speculation seems a bit farfetched - there's no evidence that intelligence collected by USS Liberty was hurting Israel, and if Israel's goal was to avoid scrutiny, attacking an expensive asset of the world's superpower would have been rather counterproductive.
Israel captured the Golan Heights because it had been used to shell Israeli communities for decades, and that continued even after Syria officially accepted the ceasefire. It would be unreasonable to expect Israel to tolerate that sort of aggression; no capable military would do so.
> It would be unreasonable to expect Israel to tolerate that sort of aggression
It would also be unreasonable to allow Israel to colonize the annexed territory in violation of international law, especially if the goal is to reduce the exposure of Israeli citizens to reparation attacks. The Knesset isn't exactly known for reasonable decisions though, and I'm willing to extend that judgement to the upper echelons of Israeli leadership as well. Maybe I'm bigoted.
Again - evidence-based speculation would be of use if the IDF didn't directly censor all domestic reporting and investigations. An honest postmortum was never going to be an option, even if Israel bombed the Liberty with custards and coffee. Cui bono, you decide.
> if the IDF didn't directly censor all domestic reporting and investigations
This just seems like another double standard. What modern military doesn't censor reporting during a war in its own territory?
> An honest postmortum
Israel and the US settled the matter (with the help of substantial reparations) and went on to become allies. Why would they bother trying to convince anyone else?
And what would the convincing postmortum you're expecting look like? Some kind of third-party investigation? Can you name any military that willingly subjects itself to such investigations?
> What modern military doesn't censor reporting during a war in its own territory?
The ones willing to defer to an ICJ investigation? Hell, an IAEA inspection?
Both Dimona and the Liberty were critically reliant on America's infinite tolerance for Israeli transgression. Kennedy's stance towards Israel could have only convinced Johnson that resistance was futile, there's no way he could raise a finger if he did suspect foul play. The two nations were motley and often disagreeing partners united by a desire to mete out territory of neighboring petrostates. If a closed-door meeting ever decided that secrecy was the cost of keeping oil prices low, not a single American president would put their name on the line to speak up about it.
Not a damning accusation, sure. But it's also the same thing many Americans wondered in 1967.
> The ones willing to defer to an ICJ investigation?
What state has ever consented to an ICJ investigation that was focused on interrogating its military command or other sensitive military assets?
> Hell, an IAEA inspection?
If a state is an IAEA member, their nuclear program is (ostensibly) not a military program, so there should be no military secrets at risk.
> America's infinite tolerance for Israeli transgression
Even if we accept the extraordinary claim that the US would have tolerated what it knew was an intentional attack on an expensive ship, at best that means that we can't infer anything from the US reaction. There are plenty of other reasons to doubt that the attack was intentional. I.e. it's extremely difficult to imagine any risk-benefit analysis under which it would make sense for Israel to suddenly attack a neutral superpower in the middle of a war for its survival.
It seems to track with Seymour Hersh's accusations of Israeli intelligence holding the CIA over a barrel. If the Mossad wanted to maintain their access to satellite surveillance over Russia and Syria, letting the US blackmail them could have jeopardized their cooperation.
Taking into account the lengths to which Israel goes currying favor with the US, pretending to show remorse for a sunken ship is nothing compared to the sham Dimona investigation they put together for the Kennedy administration. Lying isn't beneath their means.
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).
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.
What is wrong with "helping" Sudan? Your comment suggested that the only reason you weren't "helping" in Rwanda is that you couldn't because it was 30 years ago.
If you think commenting here is "helping" "Palestine", you need to recalibrate your assessment of the impact of HN comments on the world.
Oh wow I didn’t know that America was funding the atrocities in Sudan.
What’s also neat is that in America you can say “free Sudan” and not worry about losing your livelihood, but good luck with saying “free Palestine” and not getting swarmed.
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."
Is Europe or the US engaged in slave trade right now? Israel is committing mass murder right now. There is a difference between past evils that can't be helped and present evils that we have the power to stop.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle and ignoring our request to stop doing this.
(No, this is not because of your views; yes it works the same way for accounts with opposite views. It's because this is a failure mode for HN, and therefore an important line to draw.)
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.
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
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.
It does seem a bit baffling. This method just adds a second potential crime, in the form of fraudulent payments.
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.
Not speaking to the fraudulence of this specific case, but wire fraud is an umbrella term that covers pretty much every non tangible crime.
It's kind of like how everything can be securities fraud[0]
bloomberg article: https://archive.is/ixwRi
"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.
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.
It is two crimes:
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.
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.
I'm not disputing that the company would be breaking the law by doing this. That's not what fraud is though.
Fraud is intentional deception + criminal intent. The deception comes from using payments as a code instead of say an encrypted channel.
No, fraud is intentional deception to deprive a victim of a legal right or to gain from a victim unlawfully or unfairly.
Who exactly here is the victim that gets it legal rights deprived or what is the gain at the expense of the victim?
In this scheme, the government would be deprived of its legal right to obtain information about a business's customer without the consent or knowledge of said customer.
In many/most? cases, a customer can be notified and can attempt to block such information gathering, but there are also many where it's not permitted.
The shareholders of Microsoft or Amazon are deprived of their value.
"everything is securities fraud"
IE criminal intent vs criminal activity, critically the criminal activity only needs to be intended not actually occur for it to be fraud. Specifying which criminal intent is applicable is reasonable but nothing I said was incorrect.
The victims are the people being deprived of their legal protections.
Not everyone agrees which information should be protected but sending information can be a form of harm. If I break into your bank, find all your financial transactions, and post it on Facebook, I have harmed you.
Courts imposing gag orders over criminal or civil matters is a critical protection, and attempting to violate those gag orders is harm. The specific victims aren’t known, but they intend for there to be victims.
IANAL, but all criminal definitions of fraud that I am aware of require an intention to harm to a victim. It's kind of hard to argue that sending money fulfills this criteria.
The harm is not to the recipient of the funds in this case, but to the investigating authorities, who have had the secrecy of their subpoena compromised.
There is wide latitude in the criminal code to charge financial crimes. This reminds me a bit of Trump's hush money conviction. IIRC, a central issue was how the payment was categorized in his books. In this case, there would be a record of this payment to Israel in the books, but the true nature of the payment would be concealed. IANAL, but I believe that is legally problematic.
The investigating authorities aren't being defrauded though; making someone's job harder isn't fraud. Google or Amazon could be committing other crimes,[1] but not fraud.
[1] If they actually violated a gag order, which realistically they won't. In all likelihood there's language to ensure they're not forced to commit crimes. Even if that wasn't explicit, the illegality doctrine covers them anyway, and they can just ignore any provisions which would require them to commit crimes.
This is a bizarre reddit-brained legal theory.
Almost all crime requires some form of lying, at least by omission and often of the explicit sort. Fraud though, is much more narrow than "they deceived but also crimed"... and anyone saying otherwise should be so embarrassed that we never have to hear their halfwittery ever again.
Americans get legal protections for their private health data because the disclosure of such information is considered harmful.
Other countries provide legal protections for other bits of information because disclosure of that information is considered harmful to the individual, it’s that protection they are trying to breach which thus harms the person.
How is this related to the fraud discussion in this thread? Illegal disckosure of confidential information is usually handled by a separate legal framework.
Stuff is generally also fraud rather than only being fraud. We don’t know the details of what else happened so we can’t say what other crimes occurred.
Same deal as most illegal things public companies do also being SEC violations.
The other person is saying that disclosure of health data in violation of HIPAA wouldn't be fraud. It would be a HIPAA violation, not fraud.
The same action can break multiple laws. Unlawful discharge of a firearm is a crime, but it can also kill someone and thus break a different law. https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/03107.htm
Here we don’t know which specific laws were broken because we lack details, but the companies definitely signed a contract agreeing to commit fraud.
Anyway, the comment I responded to had “require an intention to harm to a victim” it’s that aspect I was addressing. My point was the transmission of information itself can be harmful to someone other than the recipient of that information. So the same act fulfills both aspects of fraud (deception + criminal intent), and also breaks some other law.
It depends on the context. I’ve gathered evidence to support prosecution of an individual disclosing PHI who was doing so to facilitate criminal acts.
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.
> 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).
That's my experience too, but it seems impossible that a competent legal team would have agreed to this.
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.
When advice from legal conflicts with the upcoming sound of ka-ching! the only question that matters is: "how loud is that cashier going to be?"
[flagged]
> 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's a criminal scheme to spy on law enforcement. Both the company and the scheming country are committing crimes.
Can a country commit a crime?
No, it's the government that commits it.
People use the country = government metaphor as a shortcut for communication, but this one takes it further than usual.
> country = government metaphor
This will probably never be particularly useful, but this figure of speech is a "synecdoche" (a "metonymy" instead of a "metaphor")
As long as we’re being pedantic, synecdoche means referring to part as the whole (nice wheels = car, nice threads = clothes).
Saying the US did something when referring to the government is metonymy, but not synecdoche.
Extradition by tectonic subduction
Obviously illegal lowbrow schemes asixe, it's hilarious that the company has to SEND money to Israel to notify them of a breach.
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.
Very much doubt something this hot in an agreement with a foreign government as counterparty gets signed off by some random salesman
I’d assume they have agents inside the companies smoothing the way or even running interference against any inconvenient questions.
> 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.;
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.
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.
> 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.
[dead]
I don't quite understand this. How much money would Israel be able to milk from this? It can't be that much, can it?
It's not about money, it's about sending information while arguably staying within the letter of US law
Kinda similar to a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary, with the same untested potential for "yeah that's not allowed and now you're in even more trouble".
Are there any instances anyone knows of in which a warrant canary has been found to violate antidisclosure law?
(Australia apparently outlaws the practice, see: <https://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/australia-outlaws-warrant-...>.)
Any such case seems likely to wind up in something like the secret FISA court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
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".
>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.
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
What happens if in the gag order they explicitly forbid the target from removing warrant canaries, and give examples of existing ones?
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763032
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.
From the article:
> 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 canary depends on agreed upon inaction, which shields it somewhat. You cannot exactly compel speech by a gag order.
This, being an active process, if found out, is violating a gag order by direct action.
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.
the canary notification method is a lack of updates, not a specific update.
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"
I would think to stopping doing something is equally an action as to do something, in regards to warrant canaries and gag orders. You had to take make some change to your process, or if automated take an actual action to disable. In either case, there was a cognizant choice that was made
The legal theory is that in the US the first amendment prevents the government from forcing you to make a false update. I don’t know if it’s ever been tested.
As I understand, this theory wouldn’t even hold up in other countries where you could be compelled to make such a false update.
Yes but the theory, at least in the US, is that the government cannot compel you to say something. That is, they can't make you put up a notice.
yea, I get that, but my gut tells me this doesn't pass the sniff test
It's a choice you make and action you take either way, be it not updating a canary or sending a covert financial transaction
That it has not been tested in court is why it's still a "theory" (hypothesis?)
My hope is that a jury of our peers would stay closer to the spirit than the letter of the law
More specifically, the theory is that cannot compel you to lie, there are all kinds of cases where businesses are compelled to share specific messages.
Ah, that was confusing to me. Thank you.
And this would be why warrant canaries aren't seen as a proven legal shield yet.
>Warrant canaries depend on action, the removal or altering of the canary document.
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.
Right - the whole premise is that the government cannot compel speech (in the US). So if you publish something every week that says, “we’ve never been subpoenaed as of this week” and then receive a subpoena, the government can’t force you to lie and publish the same note afterwards. The lack of it being published is the canary here.
Whether you can be compelled to lie under these circumstances or not is not a resolved question of law. Although it seems fairly likely that compelling speech in this way is unconstitutional, if it has been tested in court, the proceedings are not public.
Good thing no one is doing anything unconstitutional right now?
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.
Just jumping in to point out that thus had 6 points before the hasbada bots swooped in and now it's at 1.
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.
Right, because his passport wasn't confiscated. I still err on this being stupidity by the Clark County cops in the lack of further information.
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.
First day on this planet?
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?
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 certainly very interesting and difficult to explain...
> a blatantly mafia-like scheme.
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 find it extremely unlikely that Google/Amazon lawyers, based in the US, would agree to such a blatantly mafia-like scheme.
I trust The Guardian. So I agree It was unlikely. I find it very sad
Very sad
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.
Larry Ellison, biggest private donor to the IDF, enters the chat.
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.
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!"
Yeah.
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!"
One of the earliest example would be "we can print PGP as a book and then..."
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).
Israel reportedly has unredacted data feeds from the USA(this was part of the Snowden leaks, Guardian link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-...).
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”
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.
Why would the US send unredacted personal email of justices and senators to a foreign country?
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!
But this is a special case. It's Israel.
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?
Congressmen don't have classified access by default. Even those involved in oversight often rely on briefings which are written by the people potentially breaking the law and include whatever they choose to include, or not. It's akin to regulatory authorities that operate by asking those being regulated 'Are you still operating under all appropriate regulations?'
And laws are also written extremely broadly, which gives the intelligence agencies extreme leeway in interpreting them as they see fit. And even if they go beyond that, it's not like there are any consequences. For one of the most overt - James Clapper indisputably lied under oath and absolutely nothing happened. Furthermore politicians are generally ignorant on most topics, especially on anything remotely technically related. But revealing that ignorance is politically damaging, so they turn into yes men on most of these topics.
1. We don't have a right to privacy.
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
Because it places a higher priority on the desires of that foreign country than on the privacy of its justices and senators?
Imagine asking about they why in 2025.
link to any credible report?
Updated my post with a link, thanks.
> 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.
My thoughts as well. Also, "only" violating a contract sounds less illegal.
> Google's plan here is to just not actually make the "special payments"
That does not help
Signing the contract was a criminal conspiracy
I am not holding my breath for prosecution, though.
> 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.
There were many terms
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.
It's only treason if Israel is an enemy. YMMV
Isn’t there a legal term for this?
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.
Obstruction of justice.
At least for us. For the more fortunate, maybe it’s just a “creative interpretation of law.”
When this is done with deposits to avoid IRS scrutiny it's called "structuring."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring
Perhaps conspiracy and accounting fraud.
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?
In a nation that strictly follows its own laws, sure.
Your terms are acceptable.
and your assumption is that if Google has conflicting legal obligations to the USA and Israel it will choose Israel...
In my opinion that's extremely unlikely. This was probably set up for other kinds of countries
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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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology
https://www.bis.gov/
https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/global-export-compliance/
In Microsoft case they provide services for storing and possibly processing (transcribing) calls of millions of people that are under belligerent occupation:
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.
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.
Is managing servers really such a lost art that even governments with sensitive data must cede to AWS/Azure/GCP?
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
Apparently, yes: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/858tb-of-governme...
It is more of people who can manage servers have no standing in front of people who buy or sell cloud services.
> ...a lost art that even governments with sensitive data must cede to AWS/Azure/GCP?
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...
If you or I did this, we'd go to jail for a very long time.
> 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.
That now makes two of U.S.
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>Openly paying Western influencers for pro-Israel propaganda.
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.
>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.
You're strenuously refuting a point I didn't make. So, I decided anything else you wrote would be quite inappropriate and not worth my time.
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You're still strenuously opposing points I didn't make so I'll continue ignoring you, LMAO.
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It's always this same lame rhetoric every single goddamn time.
The genocide they have conducted? The war crimes? The fact they have broken international law?
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> an event that in itself was a crescendo of creating a "jewish ghetto" just for arabs with millions of people crammed together in poverty for decades
You remind me of a person who (years ago) accused Israel of "killing minors". Not mentioning that the minors in question were committing terrorist acts.
Israel literally forced Israeli settlers from Gaza to completely give it to Palestine. Yet HAMAS kept the population in poverty by rejecting any attempts at peace. It was a de-facto capital crime in Gaza to work with Israeli government.
From Israel's point of view, they tried playing fair with HAMAS. While HAMAS kept playing dirty. HAMAS at various times: murdered civilians, indiscriminately bombed cities, attacked hospitals, used ambulances for troop transport, used rape as a weapon of war, etc.
There's nothing that Israel is doing to HAMAS that HAMAS hadn't done to Israel before. Yet we're not seeing any pushback against HAMAS from the usual suspects. I guess their only problem is just that Israel is doing everything _better_ than HAMAS?
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Because they overplayed their hand and they know it, so the only thing left to do is go all in and hope the walls they built hold long enough for this to be a fait accompli.
Because Israel have gone too far at this point and war crimes aren't justifiable.
You're trying to logically reason people out of a position they didn't reach logically. You'll fail because your target isn't truth-seeking.
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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.
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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?
Let's stay to the topic at hand lest you continue to make my point, kimosabe. There is a "secret code" that does.. what exactly?
it doesn't matter what it does, why it's there, or how often it's used because: 1) skirts the law, 2) infringes on the laws of other countries, and finally 3) it's just so dodgy you have to be asking yourself wtf is going on.
How can an independent state "infringe on the laws of other countries"? If you think Israel is somehow bound by foreign states' laws, should it also be enforcing the Great Firewall, for example?
And how is it dodgy to want to know who spies on your data?
> How can an independent state "infringe on the laws of other countries"?
you don't live on earth, do you?
It is Israel's method introduced so that when Google and Microsoft who are legally required to pass over stored data based on where their servers are based, to find out who asked for it. I assume in the goal of trying to influence who asked for it.
Did you not read the article?
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.
> If we take "Israel" out of the equation
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..
Because it is obviously illegal, violates both the letter and spirit of American law.
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).
From the article:
"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.
The UN has made no such ruling. Committees don't speak for the UN.
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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.
Their nature was to murder everyone. Valid objective or not, nothing permits their nature.
Given your other comments on this story by "Their nature" you mean "Jewish nature".
Just to clarify, are you saying all Jews are murderous by nature?
THE talk is about IDF here.
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.
>>You’re conveniently ignoring that Hamas took 200+ hostages and refused to return them throughout the war.
Are you saying what I think you're saying? Holding 200+ hostages justifies killing 18 thousand children? "inevitable casualties" - what a feckless way to call what anyone else can see clearly as a systematic attempt to kill and eradicate a group of people.
You're going to have to download a hasbara update. Israel is still genociding despite the completed prisoner exchange, so the excuse of "why won't they just release the hostages and this will all end" isn't going to work anymore.
what is your definition of genocide?
Shooting back at militants who shot at you during cease fire?
> 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).
The Jewish history in the region became the Palestinian history of the region. The Palestinians are literally the direct descendants of the Israelites said to be in prior history. This is per David Ben Gurion.
Any legitimate sources for this claim?
David Ben Gurion is my source for you. He wrote a book in Yiddish. https://www.ameinu.net/frontier/jf_11-99_rosenthal.html
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
Israel controls the Egypt border as well. They permit goods to go and stop when they wish with Egypt providing the control.
B) they implemented immediately after Hamas won the election, including the West Bank. Until they were forced out.
Timelines disagree with you: A) after disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and all the way until this war, Israel did not control the border between Gaza and Egypt. Egypt did
B) 2005 - Israel withdraws from Gaza
Jan 2026 - Hamas wins popular elections
Feb 2026 - rocket and mortar attacks launched by new Hamas govt begin. 179 attacks in February alon
Feb 2026 - international sanctions and tightened Israeli border control begins
You meant to say 2006.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/08/israel1
I see a different picture in 2006 Feb. not rocket attacks.
> If we take "Israel" out of the equation
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.
>Then this whole story would disintegrate.
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?
> 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.
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.
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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....
> there's a chance they may have broken the law
There is certainty they broke the law. Both federally and, in all likelihood, in most states.
The agreement breaks the law
Israel and the USA already coordinate, so I doubt this story. Other countries should stop selling data of their citizens to these two countries.
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."
That's basically how all governments work.
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.
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
[1] https://d1.awsstatic.com/Security/pdfs/Amazon_AWS_Informatio...
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.
Hundreds of missiles get colaunched making up multi-thousand missile waves. A 200 drone wave is "small".
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).
That's wild. Sounds like a sketchy legal loophole for big tech.
"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,"
I can imagine that this Alphabet General Counsel-approved language could be challenged in court.
Nothing to say any money has actually been sent.
Israel just can't get any more shittier.
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.
You're making the appeal to authority fallacy. Just because these organisations claim it doesn't make it true. The UN is one of the most discredited bodies. None of the others have distinguished themselves over the course of the war. As far as i and many others are concerned they are hopelessly biased captives to hamas concerns, regardless of the good work they do in other areas.
It's not censoring, hn has a very low tolerance for flamebait.
It’s not one organization, literally every humanitarian organization on earth has acknowledged Israel’s barbaric genocide in Gaza and apartheid in West Bank with intent to eradicate the Palestinians. There’s plenty of documented evidence to corroborate this, and the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli leadership.
Every humanitarian organization on earth works for Hamas? Why don’t Zionists demand the same level of scrutiny for facts in favor of Israel?
I can’t tell you the number of times IDF shills have tried to discredit internationally recognized humanitarian orgs only to post obviously fabricated drivel unworthy of being used as toilet paper in response… it’s so cringe worthy.
Imagine if someone asked for the data for money laundering investigations. The cloud provider could get prosecuted for "tipping off".
> According to sources familiar with negotiations, Microsoft’s bid suffered as it refused to accept some of Israel’s demands.
MS/Azure being the good guys for once? Colour me surprised.
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.
I don’t think speech can be compelled like that latter idea
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".
The Supreme court has labeled political spending as free speech. No reason it can't extend everywhere.
Money talks.
History repeating itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
I stopped reading once it said this all sourced from 972mag. Why is this garbage on here
The WWW = Western Wall Wink.
Microsoft of all companies were the ones who had backbone here? What the heck
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 wink wink in it.
We know already that Google and Amazon are morally bankrupt. (My brain is spinning that Microsoft are the "good guys" here).
But I do not think we knew that Google and Amazon would engage in criminal conspiracy for profit
years of "but we have to because of our enemies" undisciplined realpolitik has ended in states that insist upon their own legitimacy but don't even pay lip service to the rule of law. your enemies are people you can and should fuck over and your allies are people you've hoodwinked, and can and should fuck over.
Why is the US in particular tolerating Israel sabotaging antiterrorism investigations?
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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.
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.
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+1 for differentiating between country and the ethnicity
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.
Is the religious background you're thinking of evangelical Christianity, because if it's not I suspect you're mistaken.
theyre complicit and profiting off genocide just as they have been forever. The sad reality is, most of these criminals and white collar gangsters will never be held to account
The empire is EOL tho
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I'm not gonna say anything because if I say something I'm gonna be in trouble.
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Another day, another reason to love Israel. /s
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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.
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Confidential documents yes. Genocide, also yes.
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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???"
Could you elaborate on what specifically details regarding cn-northwest-1/similar are remotely similar to what's being described in the article?
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"Alright, they did give us irrigation. But other than gender equality, freedom of religion, gay rights, democracy, education, a thriving economy, and irrigation, what have the Israelis ever done for us?" /s
Genocide and colonization, you forgot those two.
To the extent that I would use those terms, I'd withhold some of my judgement.
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.
>If the Israelis are committing genocide, it's of a people obsessed with destroying them.
That's the same justification used by a certain failed Austrian painter.
Genocide is never right.
Did German Jews make public statements prior to Nazism about driving 'Aryans' from Europe? What were the equivalents to the Munich Massacre, suicide bombings, rocket attacks, or October 7th?
The situations seem quite different to me, but maybe there is an outrageous gap in my knowledge of Weimar Germany.
And for the centuries of Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians living with Palestinian Jews, how many times do you think those Palestinians Muslims and Christians wanted to destroy all those Palestinians Jews.
For me Zionists for Palestinians are fair game, the same as Germans Nazis were fair game to German Jews.
The fact that Nazis are backing up Zionists in the West tells all the story.
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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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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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.
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I don't know these places all seem pretty bad but I'm not directly enabling their behavior as an American citizen and taxpayer.
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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.
This is exactly what I was trying to point out. You've made some reasonable points here, but that doesn't offer any evidence for the hyperbolic statement that Israel is pure and undiluted evil. Israel could be a bad place without that statement being true.
This might seem like a silly distinction to some but what I find depressing about modern culture wars is how "we disagree on these points" seems to morph into "you and everything you represent is terrible". Nuance matters.
You seem a bit over-focused on the literal truth value of that "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement.
Vs. 99% of educated and rational people recognize that as a bombastic/emotive statement. Arguing its truth value is like kitchen-testing whether a cookie recipe turns out worse if you replace "2C sugar, 1/2t salt" with "2C salt, 1/2t sugar".
And sadly, such bombastic/emotive mis-statements are far, far older than our modern culture wars.
It’s very possible that things were always this way, you’re right. My own perception is that politics has become more divisive and less respectful in my own lifetime, and I happen to think that social media makes this worse, but that’s admittedly just an opinion.
To the emotional statement: I think I’d get a reaction if rather than saying “I don’t think Go is a good language” I said something like “Go is objectively the worst programming language ever devised”. I get your point but if you feel emotional about something then say so - IMO the parent comment did much more than that.
>You seem a bit over-focused on the literal truth value of that "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement.
>Vs. 99% of educated and rational people recognize that as a bombastic/emotive statement.
That's a cope. Words have meanings, and being able to make and walk back on misleading/false statements with "I was being bombastic/emotive and it wasn't meant to be taken literally" absolutely poisons any sort of attempt rational discourse. "Israel committed war crimes" becomes not a statement about whether Israel broke international laws but whether you support Israel or not, "fake news" becomes not a statement about whether the news story was conjured from thin air but whether you like the story, etc.
Words have meanings, and "%" obviously means division by zero.
If you logically disproved the "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement - say, by finding one saintly-pure Israeli preschool teacher - would anyone outside the Temple of Ultimate Pedantry really care?
Vs. if you took that statement to mean "I am very angrily anti-Israeli", might you find it quicker & easier to communicate your own position? Or at least make it a bit difficult for people (who you obviously don't like) to deny your interpretations of their positions?
>If you logically disproved the "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement - say, by finding one saintly-pure Israeli preschool teacher - would anyone outside the Temple of Ultimate Pedantry really care?
Do you think Trump supporters actually cares whether the stories he calls out as "fake news" were actually fake or just displeased the president? Or whether the election was "stolen", or he simply didn't like the way it was conducted?
>Vs. if you took that statement to mean "I am very angrily anti-Israeli", might you find it quicker & easier to communicate your own position? Or at least make it a bit difficult for people (who you obviously don't like) to deny your interpretations of their positions?
But why add all that extra stuff about being the most evil? If you just wanted to express his displeasure at israel, you could have just said "I'm mad at israel", or even "israel is evil". The fact OP went out of his way to say that "israel is the most evil" suggests that he thought he had something to gain from doing so, like adding the fib makes his argument more convincing or something. Same with Trump calling stuff "fake news" instead of just saying "I don't like this story about me".
> Do you think...?
Most don't. A few (and more of the swing voters) care somewhat. Good reason to not spend (waste) time getting picky on the details, eh?
> But why...?
Some combination of social signalling/performance - "look at my uber-ultimate loyalty to the anti-Israel cause!!!" - and an ancient human tendency to exaggerate for emotional emphasis. Anecdote: Back in the 1900's, one of my nieces routinely referred to her kid sister as the "spawn of the devil" and similar. Why? Until the birth of the younger, the older niece had been the baby of the family, and had her own bedroom. Plus normal sibling rivalry. Fast-forward 2 decades from that - and the two nieces were on perfectly friendly terms. The older one both got the younger one a nice office job, and was happy to have the younger one babysit her own small children.
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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.
Yes.
Yes.
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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.
That might be true but, even if it is, it's a far cry from the statement that the Israeli government is singularly evil.
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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.
> they killed American navy men
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.
None of the sailors that survived believe it was accidental. They claim it was a deliberate false-flag attack.
The claims that it was deliberate boil down to "they must have known because there were identifying marks", which can be said about almost any friendly fire incident. In reality, not every operation is executed competently. Plenty of militaries have shot down their own airplanes, for example, despite the existence of several safeguards designed to prevent that.
Alternatively, Israel may well have identified the ship and decided to sink it regardless. The USS Liberty was a SigInt ship that was well-known for monitoring wireless transmissions to hold nations accountable from offshore. Israel, at the time, was engaged in an internationally condemned and illegal military operation in the Golan Heights, and may just as well have sank it consciously to prevent the US from taking leverage of the situation.
We may never know the truth, taking Israel's Military Censor into account.
Your speculation seems a bit farfetched - there's no evidence that intelligence collected by USS Liberty was hurting Israel, and if Israel's goal was to avoid scrutiny, attacking an expensive asset of the world's superpower would have been rather counterproductive.
Israel captured the Golan Heights because it had been used to shell Israeli communities for decades, and that continued even after Syria officially accepted the ceasefire. It would be unreasonable to expect Israel to tolerate that sort of aggression; no capable military would do so.
> It would be unreasonable to expect Israel to tolerate that sort of aggression
It would also be unreasonable to allow Israel to colonize the annexed territory in violation of international law, especially if the goal is to reduce the exposure of Israeli citizens to reparation attacks. The Knesset isn't exactly known for reasonable decisions though, and I'm willing to extend that judgement to the upper echelons of Israeli leadership as well. Maybe I'm bigoted.
Again - evidence-based speculation would be of use if the IDF didn't directly censor all domestic reporting and investigations. An honest postmortum was never going to be an option, even if Israel bombed the Liberty with custards and coffee. Cui bono, you decide.
> if the IDF didn't directly censor all domestic reporting and investigations
This just seems like another double standard. What modern military doesn't censor reporting during a war in its own territory?
> An honest postmortum
Israel and the US settled the matter (with the help of substantial reparations) and went on to become allies. Why would they bother trying to convince anyone else?
And what would the convincing postmortum you're expecting look like? Some kind of third-party investigation? Can you name any military that willingly subjects itself to such investigations?
> What modern military doesn't censor reporting during a war in its own territory?
The ones willing to defer to an ICJ investigation? Hell, an IAEA inspection?
Both Dimona and the Liberty were critically reliant on America's infinite tolerance for Israeli transgression. Kennedy's stance towards Israel could have only convinced Johnson that resistance was futile, there's no way he could raise a finger if he did suspect foul play. The two nations were motley and often disagreeing partners united by a desire to mete out territory of neighboring petrostates. If a closed-door meeting ever decided that secrecy was the cost of keeping oil prices low, not a single American president would put their name on the line to speak up about it.
Not a damning accusation, sure. But it's also the same thing many Americans wondered in 1967.
You're putting it gently. They killed him for insisting on inspections of Dimona.
> The ones willing to defer to an ICJ investigation?
What state has ever consented to an ICJ investigation that was focused on interrogating its military command or other sensitive military assets?
> Hell, an IAEA inspection?
If a state is an IAEA member, their nuclear program is (ostensibly) not a military program, so there should be no military secrets at risk.
> America's infinite tolerance for Israeli transgression
Even if we accept the extraordinary claim that the US would have tolerated what it knew was an intentional attack on an expensive ship, at best that means that we can't infer anything from the US reaction. There are plenty of other reasons to doubt that the attack was intentional. I.e. it's extremely difficult to imagine any risk-benefit analysis under which it would make sense for Israel to suddenly attack a neutral superpower in the middle of a war for its survival.
> There are plenty of other reasons to doubt that the attack was intentional
I don't buy them, especially given Israel's 1967 political situation. Fun discussion though, thanks for entertaining it!
That's ridiculous to anyone who has read the slightest bit about the lengths to which Israel goes to avoid actions against the US.
It seems to track with Seymour Hersh's accusations of Israeli intelligence holding the CIA over a barrel. If the Mossad wanted to maintain their access to satellite surveillance over Russia and Syria, letting the US blackmail them could have jeopardized their cooperation.
Taking into account the lengths to which Israel goes currying favor with the US, pretending to show remorse for a sunken ship is nothing compared to the sham Dimona investigation they put together for the Kennedy administration. Lying isn't beneath their means.
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).
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.
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Rwandan genocide was almost 30 years ago. There is nothing I can do to help there.
Israel is comitting a genocide and attacking/murdering everyone right now.
That is the crucial difference.
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What is wrong with helping Palestine? Are we to look the other way as the genocidal religious zealots in Tel Aviv commit mass murder?
> There is nothing I can do to help there.
What is wrong with "helping" Sudan? Your comment suggested that the only reason you weren't "helping" in Rwanda is that you couldn't because it was 30 years ago.
If you think commenting here is "helping" "Palestine", you need to recalibrate your assessment of the impact of HN comments on the world.
The genocide in Sudan is horrific.
It in no way diminishes the genocide in Gaza
Both countries should be sanctioned
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Oh wow I didn’t know that America was funding the atrocities in Sudan.
What’s also neat is that in America you can say “free Sudan” and not worry about losing your livelihood, but good luck with saying “free Palestine” and not getting swarmed.
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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."
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.
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Is Europe or the US engaged in slave trade right now? Israel is committing mass murder right now. There is a difference between past evils that can't be helped and present evils that we have the power to stop.
There is indeed a difference and I don’t think we’re disagreeing on that.
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We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle and ignoring our request to stop doing this.
(No, this is not because of your views; yes it works the same way for accounts with opposite views. It's because this is a failure mode for HN, and therefore an important line to draw.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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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.
Why are you advocating for treasonous spying on law enforcement?
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.
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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