The effects from yesterday’s Amazon Web Services disruption were virtually unavoidable. Communication applications like WhatsApp and Snapchat went down; payment companies like Venmo and banks like Lloyds were unavailable, as was the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S. Zoom went down, gaming sites cratered, even Ring doorbells saw outages.
It was a reminder of how much of modern society relies on the integrity of cloud computing giants.
It was also a warning of a new theater of warfare, especially for those who are already being targeted by hostile elements within this fragile ecosystem—Israel being the prime example.
The Amazon outage wasn’t an act of foreign sabotage, but that’s not what Israel and its democratic allies are most concerned about anyway. The key to understanding this situation is a minor, but telling, incident in September. Israel was accused by activists of surveilling Palestinians and storing the data on Microsoft cloud services. Microsoft responded to pressure by disabling the IDF’s access to certain services.
Israel had reportedly moved the data to Amazon’s cloud before being cut off from access by Microsoft. But that only highlights one of the problems with reliance on the clouds: There are only three companies that dominate the industry, with Google joining Microsoft and Amazon. That’s why Monday’s outage was so disruptive: Once upon a time, private companies hosted their own data. That soon became not only inefficient but in its own way unsafe. An anarchic data-storage industry made smaller companies easy prey and prevented streamlined rules to more clearly regulate cloud security and access.
Which is to say: Putting all the public’s data eggs in three cloud baskets is, in certain crucial ways, an improvement over the more “democratized” system that preceded it.
But it also concretized the public’s dependence on these cloud giants. To wit: Even if a small company wanted complete storage independence, they probably couldn’t achieve it anymore. Sure, a single company could host its own data, but as Emily Peck pointed out, “the many software services that companies buy would still be using AWS or another cloud provider.” No company is an island anymore.
When it comes to national security, neither is Israel.
We saw earlier in the war how this plays out on one corner of the stage: weapons. Arms embargoes became a popular way for Western countries to “punish” Israel in their attempts to placate pro-Hamas protesters. But in most cases, the effects weren’t significant. Britain, for example, wasn’t a major supplier. The lion’s share of Israel’s arms imports come from the U.S. Germany’s exports to Israel aren’t insignificant, but Berlin’s restrictions were partial and seem set to resume now anyway. The real fight centered on the Biden administration’s sudden willingness to withhold arms transfers to Israel last year, feeding anti-Israel activists’ hope that a full offensive-weapons embargo was possible while adding fuel to the global movement to boycott and isolate the Jewish state.
In response, Israel has explored the possibility of increasing domestic weapons production. Cloud computing is no less complicated. After Microsoft announced it would investigate Israel’s use of its cloud services to hold surveillance data, some suggested that, instead of moving its data over to another of the Big Three, Israel could migrate it to domestic storage sites being constructed under Project Nimbus, the country’s attempt to house its data closer to home.
But that’s only a partial solution, and therefore not really a solution at all, as Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler wrote in early September: “The massive Nimbus enterprise is based on mega-contracts signed with Google and Amazon to establish local zones in Israel and operate storage and memory services through these companies. In principle, nothing has changed: the infrastructure may be local, but the dependency on the tech giants’ terms of use remains.”
That is, Israel’s access to its data would still be vulnerable thanks to activists within these companies and their allies in the media who amplify any Israel-related controversy. Just as Western publishing houses became hostage to their low-level woke minority, cloud storage companies could bow to pressure from employee-activists who act as cutouts for Chinese and Qatari propaganda campaigns. The anti-West axis would go to war through American corporations susceptible to foreign manipulation.
As Altshuler says: “In Israel’s case, reasonable people can disagree about whether the government places sufficient emphasis on human rights. What cannot be ignored, however, is that the tech giants align themselves with that discourse.”
That does not just mean that, for now, tech giants like Microsoft get a say in Israeli security policy. It means they get a shifting, unpredictable say in Israeli policy.
Israel should be working toward “data sovereignty” immediately. Until then, its contracts with these tech companies should be sufficiently padded with safeguards to ensure that the companies’ obligations to Israel are upheld and that some “Globalize the Intifada” intern can’t nag Microsoft into switching off the Jewish state’s ability to defend itself.
