Microsoft has terminated the Israeli military’s access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls made each day in Gaza and the West Bank, the Guardian can reveal.
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.
So genocide is totally fine with microsoft, but the precious terms of service of data storage? Now that’s consequential to them 😒🙄
Still good news for Palestinians overall
Apparently genocide is ok but mass surveillance isn’t, so they’ll continue to do business with Israel but just won’t let one unit use it.
Microsoft must completely stop all service to everyone in Israel. Anything less is still supporting genocide.
Mass surveillance was definitely okay with them though, as long as they could hide behind flimsy plausible deniability; I remember one of the early 972mag pieces about this that called bullshit on their claim that they have no knowledge that they are supporting mass surveillance — if military/intelligence services come to you and say “hey, we need servers to store terabytes of audio files”, then it’s bloody obvious what the point
It’s almost like solid journalism improves the world. It’s still shit overall, but the coverage effected change.
Too little too late.
