By Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
Copyright truthout
Microsoft has blocked the Israeli army’s access to technology it was using to store data on Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank after an investigation conducted by the Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call exposed the practice.
The investigation, published in August, revealed that Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s cyberwarfare agency, had been intercepting millions of phone calls made by Palestinians and storing the information on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. This information was used to plan deadly attacks on Gaza.
Since October, Israel has destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure and forcibly displaced about 90 percent of the population. The UN has declared that Israel has “deliberately deprived Palestinians in Gaza of resources indispensable for their survival,” and is committing genocide.
On Thursday, Microsoft’s vice-chair and president, Brad Smith, told staff in an email that the company had “ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israel ministry of defense (IMOD).”
A copy of the email was posted on Microsoft’s website.
“We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians,” he wrote. “We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades.”
However, he continued, the decision to stop the unit’s access to Azure will “not impact the important work that Microsoft continues to do to protect the cybersecurity of Israel and other countries in the Middle East,” Smith said.
No Azure for Apartheid said Microsoft’s decision is “an unprecedented win for our campaign,” but that much remains to be done. No Azure for Apartheid is part of a growing movement of tech workers, including No Tech for Apartheid, demanding that Microsoft, dating mining company Palantir, and others drop their contracts with Israel. Activists have staged protests at the company’s offices throughout the country.
“Microsoft’s decision today only cuts a specific subset of its cloud and AI services to a specific unit in the Israeli military,” No Azure for Apartheid said in a statement.
The company’s decision does not impact “the vast majority of Microsoft’s tech sales” to the Israeli military, or its hundreds of subscriptions.
“Microsoft and its executives Satya Nadella and Brad Smith must understand there’s no legal, ethical, or moral way of doing any business with an entity committing genocide and ethnic cleansing,” the group said. “By choosing to maintain this deep partnership with the Israeli military, Microsoft insists on continuing to serve as the technological backbone to the ongoing genocide and apartheid.”
No Azure For Apartheid also noted that Unit 8200 had transferred their data from Microsoft to Amazon Web Services, stating that their group stands “in solidarity with Amazon workers of conscience.”
“To all workers of conscience: it is time to rise up against the companies and entities enabling the genocide,” the group wrote. “We renew our call for a Worker Intifada across all tech companies and all sectors to reclaim our labor and to refuse to be cogs in the Israeli genocidal war machine.”
