Microsoft probing if Israel has used its cloud to build a Palestinian surveillance system

Over the past two years, Microsoft has been hampered by accusations – inside and outside the company – that its technology helps the Israeli war effort. Microsoft’s own employees protested the company’s contracts with Israel, and the demonstrators disrupted the various conferences and conferences of the company. Even the 50th anniversary of the company was ruined by cries of one of its own employees, who would have shouted “shame on you” while calling the company’s head of AI as “war profiteer” who “used the AI for genocide”. Now the company says it has launched an “urgent” survey to find out whether its Cloud activity is used by Israel to conduct a massive surveillance operation in Gaza.

The company’s announcement comes on a report published by The Guardian, which claims that unit 8200, the Ghost importance agency of Israel, used Microsoft’s Cloud Azure servers. The report said that, as part of an agreement with the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, the spy unit had obtained access to a “personalized And the separate area in the Microsoft Cloud Azure platform. The partitioned cloud configuration was finally used to build a “scanning and intrusive system” designed to collect and store “recordings of millions of mobile calls made every day by Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank,” said the report.

On Friday, Microsoft told the Guardian: “Microsoft appreciates that the recent Guardian report raises additional and precise allegations that deserve a complete and urgent exam.” The examination of Microsoft’s relations with Israel will be supervised by law firm of the law firm Covington & Burling, wrote the point of sale.

Gizmodo contacted Microsoft for more information. In a statement previously shared with The Guardian, the company said that if Israel “uses Azure for the storage of data calls from the telephone calls obtained by the wide or mass monitoring of civilians in Gaza and in the West Bank”, it would represent a violation of its service conditions.

This is the second legal probe that Microsoft opened on its relationship with the Israeli government. The previous probe took place earlier this year, after the demonstrations of its employees. In May, Microsoft published a report in which he claimed to have found “no evidence to date that the Azure and AI technologies of Microsoft have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza.”

Other large technological companies – notably Amazon and Google – have also been accused of complicity in the military efforts of Israel. In July, a United Nations group published a report that said that Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon Grant Israel on a practically government -level cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, improving data processing, decision -making and monitoring and analysis capacities. »»