Report: Microsoft blocks Israel’s access to tech used to surveil Palestinians

Pressure works, it seems. US tech giant Microsoft has blocked the Israeli military’s access to the technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system collecting millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls, the Guardian reports.

According to the British daily, Microsoft told Israeli officials late last week that the military’s elite spy agency, Unit 8200, had breached the firm’s terms of service by storing the surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform.

The Guardian had earlier reported that Azure was being used to store and process the trove of Palestinian communications in a mass surveillance programme. Microsoft worked together with Unit 8200 to move sensitive intelligence material into Azure.

After initial reports of the partnership, Microsoft – which, like any large corporation, hates negative reporting – ordered an urgent inquiry. Now, it has canceled the unit’s access to some of its cloud storage and AI services.

In an earlier statement, Microsoft said “using Azure for the storage of data files of phone calls obtained through broad or mass surveillance of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank” would be prohibited by its terms of service.

In a new internal email seen by the Guardian, Microsoft’s vice-chair and president, Brad Smith, said that the company had “ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israel Ministry of Defense.”

“We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians. We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades,” wrote Smith.

Unit 8200, the equivalent of the US National Security Agency, used Microsoft’s services extensively and was allegedly collecting the content of a million phone calls an hour.

The huge trove of intercepted data – around 8,000 terabytes of data – was reportedly held in a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands.

Israel’s Unit 8200 quickly removed the data out of the country after The Guardian published its investigation in early August. Apparently, the Israelis were planning to transfer the data to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.

For months, Microsoft employees and other tech workers have protested over Israel’s alleged use of company technology in the Gaza war – even in company events, shouting down executives and organizing campaigns such as “No Azure for Apartheid.”

Workers at other US tech giants have also protested over their ties with Israel. Google changed its AI guidelines in February, removing commitments not to use AI for surveillance or weapons.

For the activists, there’s now hope. After all, Microsoft’s decision is the first known case of a US technology company withdrawing services provided to the Israeli military since the beginning of the war in Gaza.

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