Technology

Article in Hebrew

The tech giant developed a customized version of its cloud platform for Israel’s Unit 8200, which is housing audio files of millions of calls by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, a joint investigation reveals.

The Israeli army’s elite cyber warfare unit is using Microsoft’s cloud servers to store masses of intelligence on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — information that has been used to plan deadly airstrikes and shape military operations, an investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian can reveal.

Unit 8200, roughly equivalent in function to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), has transferred audio files of millions of calls by Palestinians in the occupied territories onto Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, operationalizing what is likely one of the world’s largest and most intrusive collections of surveillance data over a single population group. This is according to interviews with 11 Microsoft and Israeli intelligence sources in addition to a cache of leaked internal Microsoft documents obtained by the Guardian.

In a meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle in late 2021, the then-head of Unit 8200, Yossi Sariel, won the support of the tech giant’s CEO, Satya Nadella, to develop a customized and segregated area within Azure that has facilitated the army’s mass surveillance project. According to the sources, Sariel approached Microsoft because the scope of Israel’s intelligence on millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is so vast that it cannot be stored on military servers alone.

Microsoft’s immense storage and computing power capabilities enabled what multiple Israeli sources described as the project’s ambitious goal: to store “a million calls an hour.”

Following the 2021 meeting, a dedicated team of Microsoft engineers began working directly with Unit 8200 to build a model that would allow the intelligence unit to use the American company’s cloud services from within its own bases. According to one intelligence source, some of these Microsoft employees were themselves alumni of Unit 8200, which made the collaboration “much easier.”

According to the Guardian’s reporting, the leaked documents suggest that 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data — equivalent to roughly 200 million hours of audio — were being stored on Microsoft’s servers in the Netherlands by July of this year, while smaller portions were being stored in Ireland and Israel. It is not possible to tell how much of this data belongs specifically to Unit 8200; as a previous investigation by +972, Local Call, and the Guardian revealed earlier this year, dozens of Israeli army units have purchased cloud computing services from Microsoft, and the company has a footprint in all major military infrastructures in Israel.