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?
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 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.
> 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.
> 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.;
They publicly agreed to do genocide, having a slightly criminal communications protocol in a contract on the side amounts to an ethical rounding error.
I don't understand these legal mambo jumbo, but lets make it simpler. Israel and the US have a tight intelligence agreements. No one have to keep secrets since they share information readily. That is what it means to be friends. Israel is the best outpost for western influence in the Middle East, and the US have a strategic need to maintain that to oppose forces such as China, Russia and Iran axis. There is no need for bribes or anything like that to get intelligence from both sides... The last time they started lying to each other was disastrous and henceforth I believe the relationship is stable. Not to mention it includes European powers, even though they are happy to defame Israel, they share intelligence, participate in joint operations and buy a huge amount of arms and technology from Israel and sell arms to Israel. So don't let the media fool you...
> The U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.
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.
>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.
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...
I think the point here is to ensure they are legally compelled to make the payment. They can't admit to the gag order, but the existence of the gag order compels them to pay the 1,000 shekels, does the gag order compel them to not pay what they owe??
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!"
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?
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
I'm not sure which ones you're referring to, but it's very obvious they have outsized control in US politics and especially the Trump admin. That it is taboo to say this is evidence of that control, and I think that taboo serves to enable things like the genocide in Gaza via controlling US opinion.
Articles like the above should raise major alarms among US citizens. And this is not the first time Israel has betrayed the US. They even welcomed Jonathan Pollard (a US citizen!) with open arms and he's now pursuing a political career in Israel. They're clearly not an ally, and it is mind boggling we continue to support them. And like any good RCA, we need to not only fix the current mess but analyze how it occurred so it does not happen again.
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.
Because Israel managed to pull of a wildly successful operation to capture the American politics by very aggressively promoting the notion that being in any way, shape, or form against anything Israel does is rabid anti-Semitism, and then using that as a cudgel (backed by a lot of money) to beat any candidate who might want to say something about it.
I’ve seen government datacenters. We should be thankful they’re using the cloud.
That’s not “cloud > onprem always”, that’s “even given cloud providers’ many faults governments are so terrible at managing and securing infrastructure today that the cloud is preferable for them”. Whether you anre pro- or anti-particular-government, you should still support gov-moves-to-cloud. The alternative is proven unbelievably worse on every possible axis.
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).
Yes many contracts contain unenforceable or unactionable clauses that are superseded by common law. This is an example of that.
For example a tennant can sign a lease that says they have no notice period before eviction. If they’re in a state with a 30 day minimum notice period then the notice period is 30 days. It doesn’t matter what the contract says.
Google would comply with the US court order and ignore the contract it signed with Israel.
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?
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....
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
> 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.
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.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 93.4 ms ] threadWouldn't those involved be liable to years in prison?
In my opinion that's extremely unlikely. This was probably set up for other kinds of countries
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.
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?
No laws require prosecution and enforcement. Western countries shield Israel from all of that.
its a buggy method, considering canada also uses +1, and a bunch of countries look like they use +1 but dont, like barbados +1(246) using what looks like an area code as part of the country code.
This is criminal conspiracy. It's fucking insane that they not only did this, but put the crime in writing.;
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/israel-white-house...
> The U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.
> If either Google or Amazon provides information to authorities in the US, where the dialing code is +1, and they are prevented from disclosing their cooperation, they must send the Israeli government 1,000 shekels.
This sounds like warrant canaries but worse. At least with warrant canaries you argue that you can't compel speech, but in this case it's pretty clear to any judge that such payments constitute disclosure or violation of gag order, because you're taking a specific action that results in the target knowing the request was made.
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...
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
Articles like the above should raise major alarms among US citizens. And this is not the first time Israel has betrayed the US. They even welcomed Jonathan Pollard (a US citizen!) with open arms and he's now pursuing a political career in Israel. They're clearly not an ally, and it is mind boggling we continue to support them. And like any good RCA, we need to not only fix the current mess but analyze how it occurred so it does not happen again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIPAC, which is an obvious foreign agent that's blatantly operating in violation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac... for >70 years now.
Edit: you Zionists can flag, downvote, whatever. Doesn’t make a difference. The world sees your grotesque actions and Israel will fall
That’s not “cloud > onprem always”, that’s “even given cloud providers’ many faults governments are so terrible at managing and securing infrastructure today that the cloud is preferable for them”. Whether you anre pro- or anti-particular-government, you should still support gov-moves-to-cloud. The alternative is proven unbelievably worse on every possible axis.
For example a tennant can sign a lease that says they have no notice period before eviction. If they’re in a state with a 30 day minimum notice period then the notice period is 30 days. It doesn’t matter what the contract says.
Google would comply with the US court order and ignore the contract it signed with Israel.
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?
Insane. Obeying the law or ToS, apparently, is discriminatory when it comes to Israel.
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.
But I do not think we knew that Google and Amazon would engage in criminal conspiracy for profit
I can imagine that this Alphabet General Counsel-approved language could be challenged in court.