Microsoft blocks Israeli military’s access to some cloud services to prevent mass surveillance – News

Microsoft Corp. said today it has stopped a unit in Israel’s Defense Ministry from accessing some of its cloud services following an investigation into claims that it was using the company’s Azure cloud platform to enable the mass surveillance of Palestinians.

Microsoft President Brad Smith revealed the decision in a blog post, where he stated that the company acted after reviewing an Aug. 6 report in The Guardian that said an Israeli Defense Forces intelligence unit was collecting and storing the telephone calls of Palestinian civilians using the Azure cloud platform.

Azure is Microsoft’s primary cloud computing service, and provides access to storage and compute infrastructure as well as artificial intelligence services. In the Guardian report, which cited interviews with anonymous sources including some Microsoft employees and Israeli officials, the British news organization alleged that the intelligence unit had access to a “customized and segregated area” within the Azure cloud.

In his blog post, Smith did not confirm that, but said the company had conducted a review of the Israeli military’s use of its cloud platform. He said it had found “evidence that supports elements of the Guardian’s reporting” relating to the IDF’s use of some AI services and storage capacity in the Netherlands.

As a result, the company has informed the Israeli Defense Ministry, which oversees the IDF, that it’s going to cut the unit’s access to some of its cloud services. Smith did not name the unit in question, but it’s widely believed to be a division of the IDF known as Unit 8200, whose role is similar to that of the U.S. National Security Agency.

Smith stressed that Microsoft will not allow its technology to be used for mass surveillance of civilians. “We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades,” Smith said.

Microsoft is not completely cutting off the IDF from using its cloud services, and Smith added that the company would continue working with it to “protect the cybersecurity of Israel” and other Middle Eastern nations. Israel’s Defense Ministry declined to comment on Microsoft’s decision, but earlier, in response to the Guardian’s original report, it pointed out that its work with the company falls under “legally supervised agreements”, and insisted that it was not working with it on “the storage or processing of data.”

The Guardian’s article wasn’t the first to allege that the IDF has been using U.S. software products to facilitate its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Some Microsoft employees have responded to earlier reports by holding internal protests, and at least five individuals were subsequently terminated by the company. Last month, Microsoft revealed that it had asked police to remove some employees who had “improperly entered” its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, to conduct protests.

The company later said it will not take action against employees who are simply expressing their views, but would respond to anyone it identified as making threats against it.

Some of the protests were led by a group called No Tech For Apartheid that was formed in 2021 to pressure Silicon Valley companies into cutting their ties with the Israeli military. More recently, an offshoot group called No Azure for Apartheid has emerged, which led the recent office invasion.

In May, one of the group’s members, a software engineer called Joe Lopez, was fired by Microsoft after he interrupted Chief Executive Satya Nadella’s keynote speech during the company’s annual Build developer conference. “Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians,” Lopez yelled inside a packed conference hall as Nadella was beginning his speech.

Microsoft’s move is unprecedented and it’s not clear if the decision is about public relations, ethics, privacy or something else, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc.

“The decision raises a lot of questions about if it should be the responsibility of cloud providers to monitor how customers use their services, and which laws and rights should govern that,” the analyst said. “The location of the data centers used is key as well, as most legislation is at a national level. It will be interesting to see how other cloud companies respond to this challenge, and it adds another dynamic to the already ongoing sovereign cloud debate in many territories.”

In any case, it’s clear that Microsoft has come under a great deal of pressure, both internally and externally, to reduce its support for the Israeli military, said Rob Enderle, founder of the Enderle Group. “The pressure ramped up this week with speeches at the UN in support of Gaza and Palestine, and Microsoft has found itself between a rock and a hard place,” he added.

The decision must have been a difficult one for Microsoft, Enderle continued, because it’s a public company that’s measured by its financial performance, and the Israeli military is an especially lucrative customer. But by supporting that customer in light of the events in Gaza, Microsoft runs the risk of being penalized.

“There is a real danger that companies providing that support will face sanctions on top of boycotts,” Enderle said. “So Microsoft and others are trying to do the minimum to avoid these adverse outcomes, but I expect that these minimums won’t be seen as enough. This is not something that most tech companies are set up to deal with, and as a result, the outcomes for them misjudging their responses will end badly.”

A spokesperson for No Azure for Apartheid told the Wall Street Journal it welcomed the company’s “significant and unprecedented” decision to stop providing some services to the IDF, but said it hasn’t gone far enough. “Microsoft has only disabled a small subset of services to only one unit of the Israeli military,” the spokesperson said. “The vast majority of Microsoft’s contract with the Israeli military remains intact.”

It’s not clear how much disruption the move will create for the IDF, but earlier today The Guardian reported that Unit 8200 was planning to migrate some of its databases that store phone call information to Amazon Web Services, an alternative public cloud service operated by Amazon.com Inc.

Amnesty International researcher Matt Mahmoudi, who has previously investigated how Israel has been using cloud technology to monitor Palestinians, also welcomed the decision. “Microsoft’s conduct should serve as a wake-up call to other companies supplying cloud infrastructure, AI and surveillance products to Israel,” he said.

Photo: Microsoft