💻🚨 Journalists Expose Evil Secret Deal Google & Amazon Struck With Israel - Violating Their Own Rules & Hiding It

A joint investigation by Yuval Abraham (+972 Magazine/Local Call) and Harry Davies (The Guardian) reveals explosive deal between big tech and Israel.

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First, credit where it’s due

This post stands on the reporting of Yuval Abraham at +972 Magazine (in partnership with Local Call and The Guardian) and Harry Davies at The Guardian. Their joint investigation pulls back the curtain on Project Nimbus — Israel’s $1.2 billion cloud-and-AI contract with Google and Amazon — and the extraordinary controls Israel told Big Tech to accept if they wanted the deal.

What those documents show is preposterous, brazen, and dangerous.

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The two clauses that should make every regulator sit up

1) “No restrictions.”
Google and Amazon agreed they cannot restrict, cut off, or even limit how Israeli government ministries, security services, and military units use their cloud platforms — even if that use violates the companies’ own Terms of Serviceor acceptable-use policies. If the companies dare to enforce their rules, Israel can sue for breach and hit them with financial penalties. Translation: no off-switch, even in the face of rights abuses. Like….WTF????

2) The secret “winking mechanism.”
If a foreign court (or law-enforcement agency) compels Google/Amazon to hand over Israel’s data and slaps them with a gag, the companies must covertly tip off Israel by wiring a coded payment within 24 hours — the amount matching the country’s dialing code (e.g., NIS 1,000 for +1 United States, NIS 3,900 for +39 Italy). If the gag is so strict they can’t even signal the country, they owe a NIS 100,000 backstop. Israel literally built a secret alert into a government cloud deal.

Legal experts told The Guardian this is “highly unusual,” a “cute” letters-of-the-law dodge that risks violating gag orders and puts the firms in a bind: violate the contract or violate the law. Israel’s own memo admits the collision. They are calling it “a wink.”

Both companies deny they’d ever evade lawful orders. Israel’s Finance Ministry calls the implication “baseless” — while bragging that Google and Amazon are bound by “stringent contractual obligations” to safeguard Israel’s interests. Read that sentence again.

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Why this exists — and what it buys

Israel anticipated the CLOUD Act (U.S.) and EU due-diligence cases that could force disclosure or curb services, especially if Big Tech’s infrastructure was tied to abuses in the West Bank and Gaza. It also feared employee/shareholder pressure could make the companies hit the brakes. So the state demanded: no brakes — and a back-channel alert if foreign authorities touched its data.

Contrast: after reporting revealed Unit 8200 warehoused millions of intercepted Palestinian phone calls on Microsoft’s cloud in breach of ToS, Microsoft cut access. Israeli sources then planned to move the trove to AWS under Nimbus — where the “no restrictions” clause shields it from exactly that kind of accountability.

This is not innovation. It’s impunity-as-a-service.

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The law and the risk

• Gag orders mean don’t tell — not tell with a code. Secret payments that “wink” at a gag’s content risk obstructing lawful processes.

• Acceptable-use and human-rights guardrails exist for a reason — to prevent platforms from facilitating serious harm. Nimbus subordinates those guardrails to the state’s demands.

• In the context of Gaza — where a UN Commission of Inquiry just said Israel committed four genocidal acts with specific intent — continued provision of infrastructure “without restrictions,” while knowing how it’s used, exposes suppliers to allegations of aiding and abetting or complicity under domestic and international law.

If you can’t hit “stop” when your tools are powering a crime, you are part of the mechanism. Period. Full stop.

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What accountability looks like — the floor, not the ceiling

• Publish the contract. Confidentiality should not cloak government-tech arrangements that override law and corporate guardrails.

• Regulatory probes (U.S./EU): gag-order circumvention, consumer-protection/fair-dealing violations, export-control exposure.

• Cloud ethics with teeth: firm, public policies ensuring providers must suspend services tied to grave abuses — without breaching contracts or paying penalties for obeying their own rules.

• Criminal exposure review: if infrastructure materially enables unlawful surveillance, collective punishment, or genocidal acts, prosecutors should evaluate aiding/abetting theories (including universal jurisdiction).

• Worker power: employees and investors press for independent audits, real off-switches, and human-rights conditions that cannot be contractually waived.

Power shouldn’t be able to write itself an exemption from ethics — and then bill us for the privilege.

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Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun

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