IE criminal intent vs criminal activity, critically the criminal activity only needs to be intended not actually occur for it to be fraud. Specifying which criminal intent is applicable is reasonable but nothing I said was incorrect.

The victims are the people being deprived of their legal protections.

Not everyone agrees which information should be protected but sending information can be a form of harm. If I break into your bank, find all your financial transactions, and post it on Facebook, I have harmed you.

Courts imposing gag orders over criminal or civil matters is a critical protection, and attempting to violate those gag orders is harm. The specific victims aren’t known, but they intend for there to be victims.

so which intent of benefit at the cost of which victim do you claim that Aws had when they committed the crime?

The payoff for AWS is the contract itself. Ultimately, it’s Israel that benefits from this information but being paid by your employer to commit fraud in a call center counts even if you’re not getting a cut of that specific victim.

so who is the victim? who is Israel stealing money from? AWS that willingly signed the agreement?

The shareholders of Microsoft or Amazon are deprived of their value.

"everything is securities fraud"

then every crime is fraud. I murder you. Your employers shareholders are deprived of a worker.

That's reductive and silly. Here's the scenario:

1. You work for AWS, probably in account management or billing operations.

2. Your "buddy" in legal tells you that a subpeona has been processed that effects an Israeli government affiliated account.

3. Your buddy is breaking work rules and the law. You don't report it, as you are required to do. You're now a party to a criminal conspiracy.

4. Instead, you arrange for a payment to be made from AWS to an account in some pre-determined amount to communicate the confidential or legally sealed information that you conspired to steal.

Let's review. You're engaging in a criminal conspiracy to share restricted, sealed legal information with a foreign government. You are doing so by fraudulently stealing/embezzling money from your employer in a predetermined amount.

If that's not clearly understandable to you as a "bad thing" and a fraudulent activity, you're overthinking, lack any sense of law and ethics, are lacking cognitive ability, are a troll, or are just a schill for whatever team you're rooting for.

> You are doing so by fraudulently stealing/embezzling money from your employer

In this scenario Amazon is contractually obligated to pay Israel (unless they determine that they can't legally). If this employee is dutifully fulfilling that obligation in compliance with any relevant company approval process or other policies, then it's certainly not theft or embezzlement.

You seem to be adding a twist of "what if this is some random employee, not the one authorized to make the payments"? In that case sure, they might be defrauding their employer, but that has very little to do with the contract that this story was about.

It's like saying "what if instead of making the authorized payment to Israel, they keep the cash for themselves, then steal some monitors and assault some colleagues"? We've come up with a hypothetical where crimes are committed, yes, but it's hard to see how Israel would be to blame or would even be relevant.

Google not Microsoft. Microsoft didn't want to implicate themselves apparently.

In this scheme, the government would be deprived of its legal right to obtain information about a business's customer without the consent or knowledge of said customer.

In many/most? cases, a customer can be notified and can attempt to block such information gathering, but there are also many where it's not permitted.

then pretty much every crime is ”fraud”. You are wrong.

No, speeding and nearly every other traffic offense is just brazenly doing the thing. There’s no deception required to facilitate drunk and disorderly conduct, trespassing, dumping your sofa by the side of the road, or just walk up to someone and start beating on them.

Really most crimes don’t require deception.

if you beat someone up you are defrauding their insurance company that has to pay for it and the govt that now has an injured tax payer that can’t pay taxes as well as a tax payer that wasn’t beat up. Can you prove that insurance companies don’t have to pay a single dollar if you beat someone up?