Comment by Zigurd
4 months ago
It's a "cute" mechanism. The lawyers and the companies they work for found this to be an acceptable thing to put in a contract, when doing so could be interpreted as conspiring to evade the law. Did they get any assurances that they wouldn't get in trouble for doing this?
I don't think evade the law is the right term, at least if we stick with tax analogs. Clearly the goal was to 'avoid' the law. Doing something that avoids legal obligations is legal, doing something that evades them is illegal.
It's evasion. And it is arguably a conspiracy, since the other party in the contract is complicit in crafting language that gets around an anti-terrorism law. It's serious and wrong.
It's evasion based on what? To say that with any degree of certainty you'd need to have immense knowledge in the esoteric of the balance of US laws, international treaties, and more. Even that is probably not enough as the exact bounds and constraints of laws can be somewhat ambiguous especially when they start interacting with other laws. And then on top of all of this need to start factoring in sovereign immunity, the interplay with Israel Laws and Google, and countless other things.
And while 'anti-terrorism' is the pretext for these secret courts, secret orders, and other nonsense - in reality I expect they've done extremely little to actually stop terrorists. Yet it's certainly created a system where even a defacto Western/allied bloc government is worried that their data is going to be secretly seized. It's quite dystopic, all done in the name of errorism.
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If you're working with the people Amazon works with, the risk assessment isn't "Will we get in trouble for this?" it's "When we get in trouble for this, can we defend it on legal grounds?" Given that even the American spooks cited in this article are defending this blatantly immoral and obscene trespass, obviously Amazon's lawyers have reason to believe they can.