The Guardian is reporting that Microsoft has cut off the Israeli military’s access to the technology that it has been using to conduct surveillance on phone calls in Palestine. According to the report, the Xbox company told Israeli officials that the military’s spy agency, Unit 8200, violated its terms of service by “storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform.”
This follows previous Guardian reporting from August on how Azure was being used to store Palestine communications, as Israel had been surveilling civilian phone calls in Gaza and the West Bank. Following the report, Microsoft had an external investigation conducted into its relationship with Unit 8200, which led to the cancellation of the unit’s access to its cloud storage and AI services. You can read the Guardian‘s story for more of the minutiae, but the long and short of it is that this is a huge win for both the employees and external forces that have been calling for a boycott of Microsoft due to its relationship with the Israeli government, as it continues its ongoing attacks on the people of Palestine. Microsoft was added to the BDS Movement’s boycott list earlier this year, with the movement calling the company “perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.” This included calls to cancel subscriptions to Xbox Game Pass, as well as boycotting games like Candy Crush, Minecraft, and Call of Duty, which are all owned by Microsoft’s various studios. We’ve reached out to the BDS Movement for comment and will update the story if we hear back.
Brad Smith, the Vice Chair & President of Microsoft, sent an email to employees that was published on the company’s blog, in which he cited The Guardian’s reporting as the catalyst for this decision.
While our review is ongoing, we have found evidence that supports elements of The Guardian’s reporting. This evidence includes information relating to IMOD consumption of Azure storage capacity in the Netherlands and the use of AI services.
We therefore have informed IMOD of Microsoft’s decision to cease and disable specified IMOD subscriptions and their services, including their use of specific cloud storage and AI services and technologies. We have reviewed this decision with IMOD and the steps we are taking to ensure compliance with our terms of service, focused on ensuring our services are not used for mass surveillance of civilians.
As I said at our recent employee townhall, this does not impact the important work that Microsoft continues to do to protect the cybersecurity of Israel and other countries in the Middle East, including under the Abraham Accords.
I want to note our appreciation for the reporting of The Guardian. Its reports were based in part on sources outside Microsoft that had information we could not access in light of our customer privacy commitments. This helped inform our review.
While this is a victory, as both Smith and The Guardian note, Microsoft still has other longstanding relationships with the Israel Defense Forces, which include access to certain tech and services. But this is the first example of a United States company pulling its resources from Israel since the war with Gaza began.
