Microsoft Cuts Israel’s Cloud Access Over Their Surveillance of Gaza
Photo by No Azure for Apartheid
There is more news in the ongoing ostracization of Israel from civilized society while report on August 6th about how “Israel [is] relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians.” Israel’s goal reportedly was to surveil “a million calls an hour” and Microsoft helped them work towards it, per Microsoft.
“I want to let you know that Microsoft has ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israel Ministry of Defense (IMOD),” wrote Brad Smith in
Microsoft initially said in May that they looked into it and they didn’t find evidence indicating that Israel was using their technologies to harm people. But post-Guardian report in August, all of a sudden, they “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.” This year is really demonstrating the power of good journalism and its ability to affect change, because our capitalist giants cannot be trusted to do the right thing in any instance anymore.
Smith made no mention of the fired employees, or the Microsoft deepened ties with Israeli military to provide tech support during Gaza war,” nor any of the other scores of stories about Microsoft providing the digital infrastructure Israel needed and didn’t have in order to facilitate a genocide.
“The amount of data [Israel] stored on Microsoft servers doubled between [October 7th] and July 2024 to more than 13.6 petabytes,” reported the AP in February. “Roughly 350 times the digital memory needed to store every book in the Library of Congress.” Israel’s military has long called AI a “game-changer” for how they identify targets in this mass slaughter, and by all indications, that was and perhaps still is taking place on Microsoft servers. The word “Microsoft” appears 32 times across AP‘s report, and when you combine it with The Guardian forcing Microsoft to admit the protesters they ordered arrested were right, it all looks pretty damning for the third-largest company in the world.
This saga within Microsoft follows the same general pattern of the rest of the discourse in America over Israel’s genocide of Gaza since October 7th. especially in the Democratic Party). Now Microsoft and Maersk and other giants around the world are concluding that business as usual with the globe’s most genocidal apartheid state actually does risk putting them in legal peril–assuming that laws may ever be real again in the authoritarian world these capitalist giants were more than happy to help usher in, both here and abroad.
