Revealed: Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret ‘wink’ to sidestep legal orders

The tech giants agreed to extraordinary terms to clinch a lucrative contract with the Israeli government, documents show

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.