Chalk this one up under “The most clever (alleged) legal sidesteps this side of Tony Soprano.” On Wednesday, The Guardian published a report about a so-called “winking mechanism” regarding Israeli cloud computing contracts with Amazon and Google. The stipulation from 2021’s Project Nimbus is said to require the US companies to send coded messages to Israel. According to the report, whenever Google or Amazon secretly complies with an overseas legal request for Israeli data, they’re required to send money to Israel. The dollar amount indicates which country issued the request.
The coding system reportedly involves country dialing prefixes. For example, if Google or Amazon hand over Israeli data to the US (dialing code +1), they would send Israel 1,000 shekels. For Italy (code +39), they would send 3,900 shekels. (Out of morbid curiosity, I discovered that the highest dialing code is Uzbekistan’s +998.) There’s reportedly even a failsafe: If a gag order prevents the companies from using the standard signal, they can notify Israel by sending 100,000 shekels.
The Guardian says Microsoft, which bid for the Nimbus contract, lost out in part because it refused to accept some of Israel’s terms.
In a statement to Engadget, an Amazon spokesperson highlighted customer privacy. “We respect the privacy of our customers, and we do not discuss our relationship without their consent, or have visibility into their workloads,” they wrote.
The Amazon spokesperson denied that the company has any underhanded workarounds in place. “We have a rigorous global process for responding to lawful and binding orders for requests related to customer data,” they said. “[Amazon Web Services] carefully reviews each request to assess any non-disclosure obligations, and we maintain confidentiality in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. While AWS does not disclose customer information in response to government demands unless we’re absolutely required to do so, we recognize the legitimate needs of law enforcement agencies to investigate serious crimes. We do not have any processes in place to circumvent our confidentiality obligations on lawfully binding orders.”
Google also denied any wrongdoing. “The accusations in this reporting are false, and imply that we somehow were involved in illegal activity, which is absurd,” a company spokesperson said. “As is common in public sector agreements, an RFP does not reflect a final contract. The idea that we would evade our legal obligations to the US government as a US company, or in any other country, is categorically wrong.”
“We’ve been very clear about the Nimbus contract, what it’s directed to, and the Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy that govern it,” the Google spokesperson continued. “Nothing has changed. This appears to be yet another attempt to falsely imply otherwise.”
We also reached out to the Israeli government for a statement, and we’ll update this story if we hear back. The Guardian’s full report has much more detail on the alleged leak.
Update, October 29, 2025, 6:29 PM ET: This story has been updated to add a statement from a Google spokesperson.
