6 ms·

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

by rwmj 1y ago

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.

levi-turner 1y ago
> 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).
- rwmj 1y ago
  That's my experience too, but it seems impossible that a competent legal team would have agreed to this.
  - gadders 1y ago
    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.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - bostik 1y ago
      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?"
- belter 1y ago
  (b) weren't heavily scrutinized by legal ... You mean like in financing a ball room?
IshKebab 1y ago
> 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?
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  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.
shevy-java 1y ago
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?
- sebzim4500 1y ago
  It's not about money, it's about sending information while arguably staying within the letter of US law
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    Kinda similar to a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary 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".
    - dredmorbius 1y ago
      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-cana.html https://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/australia-outlaws-warrant-...>.)
      - ceejayoz 1y ago
        Any such case seems likely to wind up in something like the secret FISA court. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
    - cogman10 1y ago
      Except this is an affirmative action. Warrant canaries are simply removing from the TOS that the company has not/will not interact with law enforcement. This is directly violating gag orders. Passing a message, even if it's encrypted or obfuscated is absolutely illegal. The article is a little BS as this sort of thing has been tested in court. The only reason warrant canaries are in the gray zone is because they are specifically crafted that the business has to remove their cooperation clause to keep the ToS contract valid. There's nothing like that at play here. It's literally "Just break the gag order, here's our secret handshake".
nitwit005 1y ago
It does seem a bit baffling. This method just adds a second potential crime, in the form of fraudulent payments.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- sebzim4500 1y ago
  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.
  - master_crab 1y ago
    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.
    - sebzim4500 1y ago
      I'm not disputing that the company would be breaking the law by doing this. That's not what fraud is though.
      - Retric 1y ago
        Fraud is intentional deception + criminal intent. The deception comes from using payments as a code instead of say an encrypted channel.
        gmueckl 1y ago
        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.
Havoc 1y ago
Very much doubt something this hot in an agreement with a foreign government as counterparty gets signed off by some random salesman
8note 1y ago
> 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.
- toast0 1y ago
  > 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)
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> 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.;
- tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
  I'm always surprised how often crimes get put in writing in big companies, often despite the same companies having various "don't put crimes in writing" trainings.
- NewJazz 1y ago
  To be fair it is not necessarily true that they did this. Devil's advocate (emphasis on the devil part) -- google and amazon may have agreed to do this / put it in the contract but never followed through.
  - Cheer2171 1y ago
    It is criminal conspiracy, a federal felony in the US, if you contract to commit a crime. Conspiracy is a standalone crime on its own, independent if the contracted crime is never carried out (in breach of contract). The mob tried your argument generations ago. It never worked.
    - voganmother42 1y ago
      The US Gov effectively is the mob now, laws don’t matter anymore
      - DaSHacka 1y ago
        Source?
        voganmother42 1y ago
outside415 1y ago
[dead]
coliveira 1y ago
It's a criminal scheme to spy on law enforcement. Both the company and the scheming country are committing crimes.
- dummydummy1234 1y ago
  Can a country commit a crime?
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    No, it's the government that commits it. People use the country = government metaphor as a shortcut for communication, but this one takes it further than usual.
    - blharr 1y ago
      > country = government metaphor This will probably never be particularly useful, but this figure of speech is a "synecdoche" (a "metonymy" instead of a "metaphor")
      - brookst 1y ago
        As long as we’re being pedantic, synecdoche means referring to part as the whole (nice wheels = car, nice threads = clothes). Saying the US did something when referring to the government is metonymy, but not synecdoche.
        StackRanker3000 1y ago
        A synecdoche can either be when you use a part to represent the whole, or conversely use the whole to represent a part I think it’s valid to consider the US government a part of the US. Thus, referring to the US government when saying that the US did something is a synecdoche
  - largbae 1y ago
    Extradition by tectonic subduction
Spooky23 1y ago
I’d assume they have agents inside the companies smoothing the way or even running interference against any inconvenient questions.
alt187 1y ago
Obviously illegal lowbrow schemes asixe, it's hilarious that the company has to SEND money to Israel to notify them of a breach.
- hsuduebc2 1y ago
  It seems weirdly complicated. At this point I would assume it's much easier and secure just to bribe someone to tell them directly. This is like roleplay of secret sleeper agents during the cold war.
  - alt187 1y ago
    Maybe they just really need the 555 shekels or so.
tzahifadida 1y ago
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...
- StackRanker3000 1y ago
  Do you have any thoughts on these reports from 2019? https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/israel-white-house-spying-devices-1491351 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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

by rwmj 1y ago

levi-turner 1y ago

> 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).

rwmj 1y ago
That's my experience too, but it seems impossible that a competent legal team would have agreed to this.
- gadders 1y ago
  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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - bostik 1y ago
    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?"
belter 1y ago
(b) weren't heavily scrutinized by legal ... You mean like in financing a ball room?

IshKebab 1y ago

> 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?

skeeter2020 1y ago
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.

shevy-java 1y ago

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?

sebzim4500 1y ago
It's not about money, it's about sending information while arguably staying within the letter of US law
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  Kinda similar to a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary 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".
  - dredmorbius 1y ago
    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-cana.html https://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/australia-outlaws-warrant-...>.)
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      Any such case seems likely to wind up in something like the secret FISA court. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
  - cogman10 1y ago
    Except this is an affirmative action. Warrant canaries are simply removing from the TOS that the company has not/will not interact with law enforcement. This is directly violating gag orders. Passing a message, even if it's encrypted or obfuscated is absolutely illegal. The article is a little BS as this sort of thing has been tested in court. The only reason warrant canaries are in the gray zone is because they are specifically crafted that the business has to remove their cooperation clause to keep the ToS contract valid. There's nothing like that at play here. It's literally "Just break the gag order, here's our secret handshake".

nitwit005 1y ago

It does seem a bit baffling. This method just adds a second potential crime, in the form of fraudulent payments.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
sebzim4500 1y ago
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.
- master_crab 1y ago
  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.
  - sebzim4500 1y ago
    I'm not disputing that the company would be breaking the law by doing this. That's not what fraud is though.
    - Retric 1y ago
      Fraud is intentional deception + criminal intent. The deception comes from using payments as a code instead of say an encrypted channel.
      - gmueckl 1y ago
        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.

Havoc 1y ago

Very much doubt something this hot in an agreement with a foreign government as counterparty gets signed off by some random salesman

8note 1y ago

> 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.

toast0 1y ago
> 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)

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> 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.;

tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
I'm always surprised how often crimes get put in writing in big companies, often despite the same companies having various "don't put crimes in writing" trainings.
NewJazz 1y ago
To be fair it is not necessarily true that they did this. Devil's advocate (emphasis on the devil part) -- google and amazon may have agreed to do this / put it in the contract but never followed through.
- Cheer2171 1y ago
  It is criminal conspiracy, a federal felony in the US, if you contract to commit a crime. Conspiracy is a standalone crime on its own, independent if the contracted crime is never carried out (in breach of contract). The mob tried your argument generations ago. It never worked.
  - voganmother42 1y ago
    The US Gov effectively is the mob now, laws don’t matter anymore
    - DaSHacka 1y ago
      Source?
      - voganmother42 1y ago

outside415 1y ago

[dead]

coliveira 1y ago

It's a criminal scheme to spy on law enforcement. Both the company and the scheming country are committing crimes.

dummydummy1234 1y ago
Can a country commit a crime?
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  No, it's the government that commits it. People use the country = government metaphor as a shortcut for communication, but this one takes it further than usual.
  - blharr 1y ago
    > country = government metaphor This will probably never be particularly useful, but this figure of speech is a "synecdoche" (a "metonymy" instead of a "metaphor")
    - brookst 1y ago
      As long as we’re being pedantic, synecdoche means referring to part as the whole (nice wheels = car, nice threads = clothes). Saying the US did something when referring to the government is metonymy, but not synecdoche.
      - StackRanker3000 1y ago
        A synecdoche can either be when you use a part to represent the whole, or conversely use the whole to represent a part I think it’s valid to consider the US government a part of the US. Thus, referring to the US government when saying that the US did something is a synecdoche
- largbae 1y ago
  Extradition by tectonic subduction

Spooky23 1y ago

I’d assume they have agents inside the companies smoothing the way or even running interference against any inconvenient questions.

alt187 1y ago

Obviously illegal lowbrow schemes asixe, it's hilarious that the company has to SEND money to Israel to notify them of a breach.

hsuduebc2 1y ago
It seems weirdly complicated. At this point I would assume it's much easier and secure just to bribe someone to tell them directly. This is like roleplay of secret sleeper agents during the cold war.
- alt187 1y ago
  Maybe they just really need the 555 shekels or so.

tzahifadida 1y ago

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...

StackRanker3000 1y ago
Do you have any thoughts on these reports from 2019? https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/israel-white-house-spying-devices-1491351 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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]