Israel is relying on Microsoft's cloud computing for mass surveillance of Palestinians, The Guardian newspaper reveals in a joint investigation with +972 magazine and Israeli Local Call.
The report begins in late 2021, when one afternoon, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with the head of the Israeli military's "Unit 8200," which has extensive capabilities in cybersecurity and cyberwarfare.
The Israeli official had a clear agenda, as he wanted to transfer a large amount of secret intelligence material to the American company's cloud.
The meeting took place at Microsoft's headquarters near Seattle. Unit 8200 commander Yossi Sariel secured Nadella's support for a plan that would give his service access to a personalized, isolated space within Microsoft's Azure platform.
Palestinian call recording and storage system
With Azure's virtually unlimited capacity, Unit 8200 began building a new, highly intrusive tool for mass surveillance. It's a system that records and stores millions of Palestinian phone calls every day from Gaza and the West Bank.
According to the investigative report, the cloud storage system, which was put into operation in 2022, allows Israel to record and store a large volume of telephone conversations every day for long periods of time.
Microsoft claims Nadella was unaware of the type of data the Israeli agency planned to store in Azure. However, documents and interviews with 11 sources from Microsoft and Israeli military agencies reveal that Azure was used to store a vast archive of Palestinian communications./ The Guardian/
