An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2 billion 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…








