Comment by sebzim4500
4 months ago
In what sense would the payments be fraudulent? It would be real money paid out of Amazon's accounts as part of a contract they willingly signed with Israel.
4 months ago
In what sense would the payments be fraudulent? It would be real money paid out of Amazon's accounts as part of a contract they willingly signed with Israel.
It is two crimes:
1. Alerting a country to secret actions taken by a third party government (my nation of citizenship, the US, definitely has rules against that)
2. Passing money to commit a crime. See money laundering.
Honestly, the second crime seems aggravated and stupid. Just pass random digits in an API call if you want to tell Israel you did something.
Wouldn't just having 1000 canaries be a "legal" way to do the alerting?
A government can compel Amazon to avoid notifying a target (Israel in this case) that their information has been subpoenaed, but can't compel Amazon to lie and say it hasn't sent their info.
Or is the concept of a canary pretty much useless now?
I'm personally one of the "activists" who is trying to avoid Amazon and Google to a practical degree, due to project Nimbus, so I'd be more than happy if their data could be accessed, and even happier to see Amazon and Google just cut ties with them altogether.
And I'm personally one of the "activists" who is trying to avoid Amazon and Google to a practical degree, because they might be ordered by a foreign government (or my own government) to turn over my data to that government and be legally forbidden from saying that they have been required to do this. Or because they might succumb to activist pressure to deplatform me.
> (my nation of citizenship, the US, definitely has rules against that)
US rules are, unfortunately, nortoriously and outlandishly broken whenever it comes to Israel: Foreign Agent Registration Act, the Leahy Law, and probably a bunch of others as well.
I'm not disputing that the company would be breaking the law by doing this. That's not what fraud is though.
Fraud is intentional deception + criminal intent. The deception comes from using payments as a code instead of say an encrypted channel.
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The payments are an act of fraud as they deprive the company of resources for no tangible business purpose. No contract authorizes the use of payments to bypass communications controls and exfiltrate data.
The act of communicating privileged or sealed information on itself is at minimum contempt of court and perhaps theft of government property, wire fraud or other crimes. Typically accounts payable aren’t aware of evidence gathering or discovery, so the actor is also facing conspiracy or other felonies.