Google, Amazon agreed to evade legal obligations in lucrative Israel deal: Report
A new analysis has found that leading technology companies Google and Amazon agreed to disregard their own terms of service and sidestep legally binding orders in different countries under a lucrative contract with Israel, despite the regime being implicated in cyber espionage against Palestinians.
The investigation by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, together with the British daily The Guardian, analyzed leaked Israeli documents regarding the 2021 cloud-computing deal, known as Project Nimbus.
It revealed that the tech giants submitted to highly unorthodox demands that Israel imposed on them as part of the accord in anticipation of legal challenges over its use of new technologies to spy on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.
The first demand prohibited Google and Amazon from revoking or restricting Israel’s access to their cloud platforms, either due to changes in company policy or because they find Israel’s use of their technology violates their terms of service, according to the study.
The second obliged the companies to send a coded message – a “wink” – to Tel Aviv if a foreign court orders them to hand over the regime’s data stored on their cloud platforms.
The so-called winking mechanism would take the form of payments made by the companies to Israel.
The payments must be made “within 24 hours of the information being transferred” and correspond to the telephone dialing code of the foreign country.
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 regime 1,000 shekels (over $300).
If the companies conclude the terms of a gag order prevent them from even signaling which country has received the data, the companies must pay 100,000 shekels (more than $30,000) to the usurping entity.
Legal experts described the mechanism as highly unusual, saying it could violate legal obligations in the US.
During its two-year-long genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military exploited new technologies to store and analyze large volumes of data and intelligence information about Palestinians.
Last month, Microsoft terminated the Israeli military’s access to the technology it used to operate a mass surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls made each day in the besieged Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.
Earlier this year, Francesca Albanese, the UN's special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, called on dozens of multinational companies to stop doing business with Israel, warning them they risked being complicit in the regime’s war crimes.
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