Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders
theguardian.com451 points by skilled a day ago
451 points by skilled a day ago
> 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.
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?
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 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.
On the contrary, endless shaking and freaking out about anything "Israel" is ridiculous. The article itself is entirely insinuation.
The ongoing Gaza genocide has done more to expose just how much influence Israel & Zionists have on the West.
If you'd said that the Jews controlled Western media to any significant degree, you'd have been called an antisemite.
Now, where do I even start: 1. Forcing the confiscation of TikTok at giveaway prices. The TikTok sale had faltered after Bytedance put on their lobbying hats, but the Zionist lobby overpowered them. Imagine being willing to attract China's wrath, just so you can censor the internet and not let people see dead Palestinian kids?
2. Openly paying Western influencers for pro-Israel propaganda.
3. Propagandists like Ellison & Bari Weiss capturing media companies and openly planning to, "inculcate a love & respect of Israel in Americans."
4. Telling MAGA that if they don't support Israel that they're not MAGA (LMAO).
5. Exposing Western hypocrisy in failing to enforce an ICC arrest order against Netanyahu.
6. A livestreamed genocide.
7. Systematic acts of rape and torture against the Palestinians.
8. Silencing anyone who dares criticize Israel.
You even have Jews like Jordana Cutler, Meta's Director of Public Policy for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora bragging about censoring anyone who implies Zionists control the media. Like, you're silencing the 'antisemites' by proving them right, haha?
If anyone had even as much as alluded to Israel having outsized, perverse influence across the West, you'd have been shut down. Now, they're doing the hard work, gloating, scrambling, and showing their cards. Very good.
"If you'd said that the Jews controlled Western media to any significant degree, you'd have been called an antisemite."
Yeah, it's weird how anyone could find this antisemtic. I read a book by this Austrian guy from the 1920s who had already figured it out back then. Not sure why it's controversial a hundred years later.
The only thing that makes me question it, just a little bit, is the way Israel has been endlessly criticized in all forms of media for their response to the Oct 7th massacre.
Absolutely wild to conflate criticism of slaughter of tens of thousands of kids, women and children, with "because hitler" - an ongoing israeli genocide that has claimed 20+ kids for every israeli adult on October 7.th, 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, taunted daily by rich settlers that steal their land or shoot directly at them until they retaliate.
No one is buying the lies anymore. Thousands of kids dead, and every day dozens more are killed by israel, 87% civilians according to their own military. It's simply sick.
The genocide they have conducted? The war crimes? The fact they have broken international law?
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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?"
Very much doubt something this hot in an agreement with a foreign government as counterparty gets signed off by some random salesman
> If either Google or Amazon provides information to authorities in the US, where the dialing code is +1, and they are prevented from disclosing their cooperation, they must send the Israeli government 1,000 shekels
This is criminal conspiracy. It's fucking insane that they not only did this, but put the crime in writing.;
I 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...
> 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.
>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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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 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
> 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...
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?
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!"
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.
>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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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?
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
>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
Not to burst your bubble....but you do know that Page and Brin are both jewish, correct? Who's to say they wouldn't chose Israel?
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.
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.
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..
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 genocide libel is tiring and that report is full of nonsense and usual for UN anti-israel bias.
* Redefines the meaning of genocide to fit the shape of the conflict -- a war started by Hamas on Oct 7 when it invaded Israel and slaughtered hundreds of music festival goers and Kibbutzniks.
* it uncritically adopts Hamas ministry of health casualty data without identifying combatants vs civilians.
* largely ignores role of Hamas in the conflict, downplays its use of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals for military uses.
* Frames the country as a "settler-colonial" project ignoring realities of jewish history in the region.
Overall i would prefer if these sorts of discussions that inevitably lead to century-old blood libels would not take place on HN and thats why i commented on thinking about the original article outside the context of Israel.
> 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?
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.
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.
If you or I did this, we'd go to jail for a very long time.
"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.
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 WWW = Western Wall Wink.
That's wild. Sounds like a sketchy legal loophole for big tech.
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
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.
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.
Imagine if someone asked for the data for money laundering investigations. The cloud provider could get prosecuted for "tipping off".
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.
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.
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?
>Why is the US in particular tolerating Israel
We all know why. Imagine the backlash if there were half as many powerful people in America's media, politics, finance, etc who had dual-Senegalese citizenship or ancestry, and spent more time defending the Senegalese government, complaining of anti-Senegalese sentiment, and advocating for material support for the Senegalese people than they ever bothered with Americans.
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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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
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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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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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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.
If mass murder at this scale does not horrify and offend you, then you have failed as a human being. That is what destroys things.
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.
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.
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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.
Israel stole US nuclear secrets to create their own nuclear weapons program, they killed American navy men, they destroyed 90% of the buildings in Gaza and very blatantly committed genocide in the process of doing so, Palestinians prisoners are commonly held without trials or charges i.e. they're hostages. Zionism literally cannot exist without them committing ethnic cleansing because everywhere Israelis live used to be Palestinian properties.
Honestly, what is your point? What are you seeing that the rest of us aren't getting? For the record, my mother's family is mostly Sephardic.
The started off settlement by legally buying property for wealth (mostly absentee) landlords, who were non-Palestinians (they lived in other part of the Ottoman Empire).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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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
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.
I suspect that buyucu's "help[ing]" by spewing into the void about Sudan will have only negligibly less impact than his "help[ing]" with Israel.
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.
You've now mentioned this twice in this thread. We can agree that you've pointed to some specific misdeeds but you've not demonstrated why is this so much worse than many of the other dreadful things happening in the world. There are massacres in Myanmar and Sudan, ethnic cleansing in China. If we're going back in history, the United States was founded on ethnic cleansing and was funded by the slave trade. Most major European countries have similar track records.
I'm not saying that the United States or Europe are evil places. I'm trying to illustrate that the things you've mentioned do not justify the claim that Israel is uniquely evil, either in modern or historical terms.
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.)