Microsoft has blocked the Israeli military from accessing technology it used to operate a surveillance system that collected millions of phone calls from Palestinian civilians and stored the data in Microsoft’s cloud.
Microsoft has blocked the Israeli military from accessing technology it used to operate a surveillance system that collected millions of phone calls from Palestinian civilians and stored the data in Microsoft’s cloud.
According to sources in the British publication The Guardian, late last week Microsoft informed Israeli officials that Unit 8200, its elite military intelligence agency (the equivalent of the NSA in the US), had violated the company’s terms of service by storing a huge amount of surveillance data on its Azure cloud platform.
The Guardian, together with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew publication Local Call Guardian, previously conducted an investigation that revealed that Azure was being used to store and process a vast array of Palestinian communications as part of a mass surveillance program. The Guardian believes that Microsoft’s decision to close access was a consequence of this investigation.
The Guardian last month revealed how Azure was used to store and process a vast array of Palestinian communications as part of a mass surveillance program.
In a joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew publication Local Call, the Guardian revealed how Microsoft and Unit 8200 worked together on a plan to transfer large amounts of sensitive intelligence information to Azure.
It is noted that thanks to the enormous capacity and power of Azure, the 8200 unit created a new system that allows its intelligence officers to collect, play back, and analyze the content of mobile calls from the entire population.
The cache of intercepted calls, which amounted to 8 petabytes (8,000 terabytes) of data, was stored in a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands. Within days of the Guardian investigation being published, Unit 8200 is believed to have quickly moved the surveillance data out of the country. Intelligence sources say Unit 8200 planned to transfer the data to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.
Microsoft’s unusual decision to cut off the intelligence agency’s access to key technology came under pressure from employees and investors over the company’s work for the Israeli army and the role its technology played in the nearly two-year-old operation in Gaza.
On Thursday, Microsoft Vice Chairman and President Brad Smith announced the decision to block access to Azure to Israeli intelligence. In an email, he said that the company had «suspended and disabled a number of services for the unit within the Israeli Ministry of Defense,» including cloud storage and artificial intelligence services.
«We do not provide technology for mass surveillance of civilians. We apply this principle in every country in the world and have insisted on it for over two decades,» Smith wrote.
He added that the company’s internal investigation found evidence that Israeli intelligence agencies stored surveillance data in Azure storage in the Netherlands.
«We have therefore notified the Israeli Ministry of Defense of Microsoft’s decision to terminate and deactivate certain Israeli Ministry of Defense subscriptions and their services, including the use of specific cloud storage and artificial intelligence services and technologies. We have discussed this decision with the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the steps we are taking to ensure compliance with our terms of service, focusing on ensuring that our services are not used for mass surveillance of the civilian population,» Brad Smith noted and thanked the Guardian for its work.
Unit 8200 used its own extensive surveillance capabilities to intercept and collect phone calls. The intelligence agency then used a special isolated area in the Azure platform, which allowed the data to be stored for long periods of time and analyzed using artificial intelligence-based technologies.
«I am interested in the story of one state’s blind faith in the loyalty of another. About the technological laxity of officials of a country that is fighting with all its might in an endless war against fanatics. It is about infantilism, loss of control over common sense. About how 2-3 global companies roll this world into a tube, in the end,» commented the Guardian investigation, CEO of the Ukrainian data center De Novo Maksym Ageyev.
Recall that at the end of the summer, Microsoft fired four employees who participated in protests on the company’s premises against its ties with Israel during the war in Gaza.
