"Microsoft" Cancels Israeli Military Access to Technology That Monitors Palestinian Phone Calls

SadaNews - The British newspaper "The Guardian" revealed that Microsoft has terminated the Israeli army's ability to use its technologies to operate an advanced surveillance system that was collecting millions of daily phone calls from Palestinian citizens in Gaza and the West Bank.

Informed sources indicated that Microsoft informed Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200, which is the Israeli military intelligence unit, violated the company's terms of service by storing vast amounts of surveillance data on the Azure cloud platform.

This decision to halt Unit 8200's use of some Microsoft technologies is based on an investigation published by "The Guardian" last month, which uncovered the use of Azure to store and process vast amounts of Palestinian communication data in a wide-ranging surveillance program.

In a joint investigation with "+972 Magazine" and the Israeli site "Local Call," The Guardian revealed Microsoft’s collaboration with Unit 8200 to implement a plan to transfer large quantities of sensitive intelligence data to Azure.

This project began after a meeting in 2021 between Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, and then-head of Unit 8200, Yossi Sariel.

Recording Massive Amounts of Calls

In response to the investigation, Microsoft ordered an urgent external investigation to review its relationship with Unit 8200. The findings of the preliminary investigation led to the cancellation of the unit's access to some cloud storage and artificial intelligence services.

Unit 8200, thanks to the immense storage capacity and processing power provided by Azure, employed a new system that allowed its personnel to collect, review, and analyze the content of phone calls of the entire population.

The scale of the project was enormous, with one official from the unit, which is equivalent to the U.S. National Security Agency, stating that they were collecting a million calls per hour.

According to multiple sources, vast amounts of data from the recordings (around 8000 terabytes of data) were stored in Microsoft's data center in the Netherlands. Days after "The Guardian" published its investigation, it appears that Unit 8200 transferred the surveillance data out of the country.

According to informed sources, this massive data transfer occurred at the beginning of August. Intelligence sources reported that Unit 8200 was planning to transfer the data to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.

This exceptional decision by Microsoft to stop the intelligence unit's access to its sensitive technologies came under pressure from its employees and stakeholders due to its collaboration with the Israeli military and the role of its technologies in the military operation that lasted nearly two years in Gaza.