Microsoft cuts access to technology that Israel has used to monitor Palestinians

Microsoft announced on Thursday that it suppressed access to some of its services provided to a unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense after learning that its technology was used to carry out a mass surveillance campaign against Palestinian citizens.

The agency in the Israeli defense forces is known as unit 8200, a spy unit known for its role in the collection of signal intelligence and the conduct of cyber-warwarfare. Thanks to reports from The Guardian earlier this year, it was revealed that the unit collected and stored records of cellular calls made by the Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank. The report indicates that the agency collected millions of calls every day and stored them and treated them via Microsoft’s Cloud Azure platform. The Guardian reported that 8,000 data of data collected by unit 8200 were stored in the Microsoft data center in the Netherlands.

Microsoft, in a blog post of the president of the company Brad Smith, publicly confirmed some of the reports. “Although our examination is underway, we have found evidence that supports the elements of the Guardian reports. These evidence includes information relating to IMOD consumption of the Azure storage capacity in the Netherlands and the use of AI services,” Smith wrote. Consequently, the company “Cess and deactivate” certain services provided for unit 8200, “including their use of storage and specific AI services and technologies”.

He notably seemed not to directly recognize the mass surveillance campaign, explaining that “we do not accept the content of our customers in this type of survey”, and by declaring that “we have examined this decision with IMOD and the measures that we take to ensure the compliance of our service conditions, focused on the guarantee of ensuring that our services are not used for massive civlicile surveillance.”

Although Smith may not have directly identified the surveillance program, the decision to deactivate access to its services marks a striking contrast to where the company was just a few months ago. In May, Microsoft said that there was “no evidence” that his technologies were used to target or harm the Palestinians. It is unlikely that unit 8200 launched its mass surveillance net only after this survey. According to The Guardian reports, Microsoft’s managing director Satya Nadella met the head of unit 8200 at the end of 2021 to discuss the accommodation of intelligence equipment on Microsoft’s cloud platform.

Microsoft’s decision to review and cancel (at least for the moment) its contracts with Unit 8200 is involved following a current pressure campaign of the company’s own employees to end financial arrangements with the Israeli government, which is in the process of committing what the International Commission for the United Nations Independent Survey (COO) recently declared a genocide. The NO Azure organization for apartheid organized a certain number of actions intended for Microsoft, in particular by disturbing the presentation of Nadella during the construction conference of Microsoft and demonstrating during one of the events of the 50th anniversary of the company. Last month, the group organized a sit-in that occupied Smith’s office, which led to several employees who participated in the demonstration.

“The news of today is a significant and unprecedented victory for the campaign and our organization. In less than a month of our sit-in in the Brad Smith office, Microsoft has made the important decision to become the first American technological enterprise to stop the sale of certain technologies in the Israeli army since the start of the genocide in Gaza,” said Hossam Nasr, an organizer from Microsoft. “This crack in Microsoft’s unshakable support wall to Israel’s genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleaning in Palestine was only possible for our pressure and our supported organization in the past two years.”

NASR made a point of calling that Microsoft has only disabled “a small subset of a single Israeli army unit” and that “the vast majority of Microsoft’s contract with the Israeli army remains intact”. Smith, in his declaration, suggests the same thing. “Microsoft continues to protect the cybersecurity of Israel and other countries in the Middle East, including under the Abraham agreements,” he wrote.

“While the Palestinians continue to be bombed, killed, cleaned ethnically and strengthened by the Israeli army, he is unacceptable and morally indefensible so that Microsoft continues to provide all the technologies whether to this soldier.