Microsoft's cloud technology is helping to facilitate an unprecedented Israeli surveillance system, according to a joint investigation by the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call. They report that in late 2021, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with the head of Israel's Unit 8200, the country's elite military intelligence arm, to discuss giving the unit access "to a customized and segregated area within Microsoft's Azure cloud platform." Per the report, Nadella wasn't told what the storage would be used for—retaining and analyzing millions of phone calls from Palestinians each day, something the military's own servers couldn't handle from a storage or computing perspective.
While Israel has long monitored Palestinian communications, the reach of the system—operational since 2022 and thought to involve data centers in the Netherlands and Ireland—is far broader and "captur[es] the conversations of a much larger pool of ordinary civilians," per the Guardian. Insiders say this vast trove of data has helped inform airstrikes in Gaza, though it was allegedly originally developed with an eye toward the West Bank. "When they need to arrest someone and there isn't a good enough reason to do so, that's where they find the excuse," one source said, referring to the information stored in Azure.
Microsoft maintains that it's unaware of exactly what data Unit 8200 planned to store, claiming its work with the unit focused on bolstering Israel's cybersecurity. "At no time during this engagement has Microsoft been aware of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cellphone conversations using Microsoft's services," a rep for the company said. (Read the full article here.)
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