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

Nothing says criminal regime quite like being terrified that others will found out what you’re doing.

Israel demanded that if amazon or google comply with any requests from law enforcement, they send israel a secret payment equal to 1000 times the country’s international dialing code in shekels.

A clause of “You have to tip us off if anyone is investigating our crimes”, makes it clear that israel is intentionally committing crimes and google and amazon agreed to be their accomplices.

Subverting legal orders is obviously illegal and you can’t have a valid legal contract which obligates one party to engage in illegal actions. Whatever is going on here is very odd, it’s surprising only Microsoft’s lawyers were willing to veto a deal over this. Pre-agreeing to send secret signals hidden from law enforcement like this is exactly the kind of thing that should be raising major red flags that you are entering into a criminal conspiracy rather than a legitimate contract.