In order to circumvent legal restrictions, Google and Amazon secretly agreed with the government of Israel to implement a scheme for preliminary notification about data requests from foreign jurisdictions. This system, codenamed Winking, became part of the large-scale Project Nimbus contract, signed in 2021 and valued at $1.2 billion.
The concern of the Israeli authorities was caused by the potential possibility of leakage of confidential information belonging to the army, intelligence services, and state agencies, stored in the Amazon and Google cloud storage, as a result of legal requests from other states. As a preventive measure, a special communication mechanism was developed, providing for covert notification of the Israeli side about such requests via encrypted payments.
The system functioned as follows: in case of receiving a data transfer request from the United States, the company made a transfer of 1000 shekels (corresponding to the country’s telephone code +1). For requests from Italy, the amount was 3900 shekels, and 4900 shekels for requests from Germany. In cases where disclosure of the requesting country was prohibited, the companies were obliged to transfer 100,000 shekels to the state budget of Israel. According to the terms of the agreement, all payments had to be made within 24 hours of the information transfer.
An internal memo from the Israeli Ministry of Finance confirmed that Google and Amazon are aware of the sensitive nature of the situation and have agreed to the proposed terms. Lawyers in the US expressed concern about potential legal risks associated with this scheme. Google and Amazon denied allegations of circumventing the laws. However, documents show: Israel achieved unprecedented concessions and gained almost complete control over its data in the global cloud infrastructure.