How Microsoft Workers Helped Halt a Major Contract With the Israeli Military

"Microsoft told Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200, the military's elite spy agency, had violated the company's terms of service by storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform, sources familiar with the situation said. The decision to cut off Unit 8200's ability to use some of its technology results directly from an investigation published by The Guardian last month. It revealed how Azure was being used to store and process the trove of Palestinian communications in a mass surveillance programme.... In response to the investigation, Microsoft ordered an urgent external inquiry to review its relationship with Unit 8200. Its initial findings have now led the company to cancel the unit's access to some of its cloud storage and AI services."

"The phrase "vast trove of surveillance data" doesn't properly communicate just how enormous and far-reaching this surveillance campaign is. The bombshell August investigation collaboratively produced and published by The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, and the Hebrew-language outlet revealed that-with the dystopian aid of AI and Azure's "near-limitless storage capacity"-Unit 8200 "had built an indiscriminate new system allowing its intelligence officers to collect, play back and analyse the content of cellular calls of an entire population." By July of this year, "11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data-equivalent to approximately 200m hours of audio-was held in Microsoft's Azure servers"

A grassroots campaign pressured Microsoft to partially terminate the Israeli military's access to proprietary cloud and AI technology. Microsoft found that Unit 8200 had stored an enormous trove of surveillance data in its Azure platform, in violation of terms of service. That misuse included storing and processing vast Palestinian communications and enabling analysis of cellular calls across entire populations using AI and extensive cloud storage. An external inquiry prompted cancellation of some cloud storage and AI service access for the unit. The revelations exposed large-scale mass surveillance capabilities and triggered corporate action to limit military access to those systems.

Read at The Nation