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Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret ‘wink’ to sidestep legal orders
| screenman | 10/30/25 |
| screenman | 10/30/25 |
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Date: October 30th, 2025 2:27 PM Author: screenman When Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2bn cloud-computing deal in 2021, their customer – the Israeli government – had an unusual demand: agree to use a secret code as part of an arrangement that would become known as the “winking mechanism”.
The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world, was born out of Israel’s concerns that data it moves into the global corporations’ cloud platforms could end up in the hands of foreign law enforcement authorities.
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.
This process is often cloaked in secrecy. The companies are frequently gagged from alerting the affected customer their information has been turned over. This is either because the law enforcement agency has the power to demand this or a court has ordered them to stay silent.
For Israel, losing control of its data to authorities overseas was a significant concern. So to deal with the threat, 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.
To clinch the lucrative contract, Google and Amazon agreed to the so-called winking mechanism, according to leaked documents seen by the Guardian, as part of a joint investigation with Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.
Based on the documents and descriptions of the contract by Israeli officials, the investigation reveals how the companies bowed to a series of stringent and unorthodox “controls” contained within the 2021 deal, known as Project Nimbus. Both Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses have denied evading any legal obligations.
The strict controls include measures that prohibit the US companies from restricting how an array of Israeli government agencies, security services and military units use their cloud services. According to the deal’s terms, the companies cannot suspend or withdraw Israel’s access to its technology, even if it’s found to have violated their terms of service.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/29/google-amazon-israel-contract-secret-code |
Date: October 30th, 2025 2:28 PM Author: screenman How the secret code works
Named after the towering cloud formations, the Nimbus contract – which runs for an initial seven years with the possibility of extension – is a flagship Israeli government initiative to store information from across the public sector and military in commercially owned datacentres.
Even though its data would be stored in Google and Amazon’s newly built Israel-based datacentres, Israeli officials feared developments in US and European laws could create more direct routes for law enforcement agencies to obtain it via direct requests or court-issued subpoenas.
With this threat in mind, Israeli officials inserted into the Nimbus deal a requirement for the companies to a send coded message – a “wink” – to its government, revealing the identity of the country they had been compelled to hand over Israeli data to, but were gagged from saying so.
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.
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. 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. Legal experts, including several former US prosecutors, said the arrangement was highly unusual and carried risks for the companies as the coded messages could violate legal obligations in the US, where the companies are headquartered, to keep a subpoena secret.
“It seems awfully cute and something that if the US government or, more to the point, a court were to understand, I don’t think they would be particularly sympathetic,” a former US government lawyer said.
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
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