Welp, first reminder of the day that we’re all just meaningless pawns getting in the way of absolute power by shouting things like “Laws! Ethics!”
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.
I mean it is a similar intent to a warrant canary, though more active. What they should have done is make sure all of the data is stored in their country if it’s that sensitive or use only products that allow full encryption and don’t store much metadata. There are ways to do these things if you aren’t lazy and actually hire an experienced architect (I’m one for example).
This was definitely much more of a legal overstep with explicit intent to subvert court orders than a warrant canary, though, and this unethical in it’s implementation if only questionable in its intent. However, the fact that the secretive orders exist in the first place and are not done just in cases where lives or true national security are at stake and only for limited amounts of time before being disclosed or something like that as most were originally intended outside of nations with fascist-leaning administrations like the US, China, India, etc., is the real issue and the reason for both this and warrant canaries to be necessary even if it wasn’t a fascist leaning administration doing it for possibly malicious reasons.
Contractual obligations and contract terms do not superseed laws. If anyone is doing something unlawful through Google or Amazon’s infrastructure, a NGO or union could sue in order to try to stop it.
