‘A million calls an hour’: Israel using Microsoft cloud for mass surveillance of Palestine
Israel’s military intelligence unit has been relying on Microsoft to conduct mass surveillance of phone calls from Palestine, according to a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and the Local Call. The operation, enabled by a customized and segregated environment on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, is reportedly capable of processing up to 1 million phone calls an hour.
The system launched in 2022 following a meeting the year prior between Yossi Sariel, then the commander of the intelligence agency known as Unit 8200, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Leaked internal Microsoft documents as well as interviews with 11 sources, including Microsoft staff and Israeli intelligence officials, revealed that approximately 11,500 terabytes of data, equivalent to 200 million hours of audio, was stored on Microsoft servers in the Netherlands and Ireland as of July.
The captured data has reportedly been used to target Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank for blackmail, detention and arrest.
Arrests, detainments and airstrikes
“When they need to arrest someone and there isn’t a good enough reason to do so, that’s where they find the excuse,” a Unit 8200 source was quoted as saying.
Israel also dug through the data, according to the investigation, after carrying out airstrikes to find intelligence that could be cited as justification.
Captured phone calls are retained in the cloud for around one month. That time may be expanded to give Unit 8200 the ability to retrieve older telephone conversations involving people who become of interest, The Guardian said.
Microsoft denies knowledge
Microsoft said its CEO was not aware of the types of data that would be stored when he agreed to aid Unit 8200. An external review commissioned by Microsoft on the partnership, carried out earlier this year after the ties between the company and Israel were revealed, found no evidence that Azure was used to target or harm people in Palestine, the company said.
After the surveillance operation was uncovered, Microsoft again said that at no time was it “aware of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cellphone conversations using Microsoft’s services, including through the external review it commissioned.”
Internal records on the 2021 meeting between Nadella and Sariel do not show that cell phone surveillance was mentioned. Instead, Sariel is said to have referred to “sensitive workloads” of secret data.
Other documents, however, suggest Microsoft engineers in both the U.S. and Israel were aware that raw intelligence, such as audio files, would be stored in the cloud environment. Israel initially reached out to Microsoft after realizing its own internal servers were incapable of storing such vast amounts of data.
“You don’t have to be a genius to figure it out,” one source said. “You tell [Microsoft] we don’t have any more space on the servers, that it’s audio files. It’s pretty clear what it is.”
Numerous Israeli sources insisted that the mass-surveillance program had saved lives by detecting and thwarting attacks on civilians. The system, however, did not prevent the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, which has been used to justify increased surveillance.
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
