The president of Microsoft has said it’s cutting parts of the Israeli military off from Azure after reports that the army was using the platform in a mass surveillance operation against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Brad Smith issued a statement following reports in British newspaper The Guardian that Israel’s Unit 8200 cyber unit was using Redmond’s cloud network to harvest a “million phone calls an hour.” The reports claim that Unit 8200 harvested phone details, sorted them using AI technology, and stored them on European servers, and then used the data for targeting military operations.
Smith thanked the paper for reporting on the database, which has reportedly been in operation since 2022, and said that Microsoft is cutting off the Israeli Ministry of Defence (IMOD) from some of its services. That said, the surveillance system is now reportedly operating using Amazon’s services instead.
“We have informed IMOD of Microsoft’s decision to cease and disable specified IMOD subscriptions and their services, including their use of specific cloud storage and AI services and technologies,” Smith said in a public blog post.
“We have reviewed this decision with IMOD and the steps we are taking to ensure compliance with our terms of service, focused on ensuring our services are not used for mass surveillance of civilians.”
Redmond has declined to comment further on the matter. The IMOD has not commented, nor has Amazon.
The surveillance scheme, according to leaked documents reported by the Guardian, built up a continuously updated record of calls from the occupied territories that were stored on Azure servers in the Netherlands. These could be mined for information to target individuals in the region.
More than 1,000 Microsoft staff signed a “No Azure for Apartheid” petition protesting the use of Redmond’s technology in the ongoing conflict. Last month Microsoft reportedly fired four staffers for launching public protests against the use of the software slinger’s involvement in the affair. Investors are also reportedly unhappy with Redmond’s involvement in aiding the Israeli military.
Unit 8200 is the Israeli equivalent of the US National Security Agency and had reportedly built up a huge collection of phone calls from the troubled region that amounted to 8,000 TB of data which could be searched and used for intelligence purposes. It apparently set up the database in a specially partitioned section of Azure for processing.
Smith didn’t say exactly what services it was discontinuing for IMOD, but said that Microsoft had reviewed the contract and found that it – at least – was in the clear in terms of breaking rules on surveillance using its products.
“At no point has Microsoft accessed IMOD’s customer content,” he stated. “Rather, the review has focused on Microsoft’s own business records, including financial statements, internal documents, and email and messaging communications, among other records.”
He thanked journalists for bringing the matter to Microsoft’s attention and said that the cloud provider has stuck to its principles.
“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,” he asserted.
Microsoft isn’t the only US tech firm to face ire for its involvement in the ongoing war in Palestine. In April Google fired 28 staffers for staging a sit-in protest at its offices in New York and California over the Chocolate Factory’s support for the Israeli military with Project Nimbus – a joint scheme with AWS that was apparently being used to help in the war effort. ®