📢 BREAKING: After admitting brave reporters uncovered an evil partnership with Israel, Microsoft ends the agreement

Credit to The Guardian — reporting by Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham (with +972 Magazine & Local Call) — for exposing a nefarious partnership between Microsoft and Israel. Now they've moved to Amazon.

Family,

This work only survives because you sustain it — no ads, no billionaire owners, no algorithmic favors. If you value independent, people-powered reporting that names names and pulls receipts, please click here to become a member today (monthly, annual, or founding). Your support keeps this coverage free for everyone who can’t pay — and it keeps me loud, clear, and unafraid.

Credit where it’s due — and what it means

This is an absolutely HUGE deal. It shouldn’t be unprecedented but so far it is.

The Guardian just broke one of the most consequential tech-and-human-rights stories of the year. In a joint investigation with +972 Magazine and Local Call, reporters Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham revealed that Israel’s Spy Unit 8200 used Microsoft’s Azure cloud and AI stack to build and run a sweeping, indiscriminate mass-surveillance system that let intelligence officers collect, play back, and analyze the content of entire-population phone calls from Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Their sources inside Unit 8200 described the internal mantra: “a million calls an hour.” After that reporting, Microsoft launched an external review.

According to The Guardian, Microsoft has now “ceased and disabled” a set of services to a unit within Israel’s Ministry of Defense — cutting off cloud storage and AI access used for the surveillance operation. Company president Brad Smith told staff: “We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians.” Microsoft says the review is ongoing, but the access for this unit is terminated.

What Microsoft found — and what Unit 8200 built

Per The Guardian’s sources, up to 8,000 terabytes of intercepted Palestinian calls were held in a Microsoft datacenter in the Netherlands. Within days of publication, Unit 8200 appears to have moved the trove out of the EU; sources say they aimed to transfer to Amazon Web Services. The surveillance program, The Guardian reports, assisted targeting for lethal airstrikes during the Gaza offensive. Microsoft’s internal note acknowledged “evidence that supports elements of the Guardian’s reporting.”

This wasn’t an accidental sprawl. The Guardian traces the project to a 2021 meeting between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and then–Unit 8200 commander Yossi Sariel, after which the parties planned to move large volumes of sensitive intelligence into Azure. With near-limitless storage and compute, Unit 8200 scaled. With AI-driven analytics, it weaponized that scale.

This is a line crossed twice: first by a military unit vacuuming up civilian communications at population scale, and second by a major U.S. tech company hosting the apparatus that made it operationally effortless.

Why this matters right now

The Guardian notes that this is the first known case since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in which a U.S. tech company has withdrawn services from the Israeli military over mass-surveillance of civilians. The decision followed employee and investor pressure, including the worker-led campaign No Azure for Apartheid and protests in Seattle and at a European datacenter. It also lands amid intensifying legal and moral scrutiny: The Guardian references a United Nations commission of inquiry that concluded Israel committed genocide in Gaza (a charge Israel denies, but which many international-law experts support).

If tech platforms quietly normalize total-population dragnet surveillance, the “exception” becomes the standard. And if Big Tech’s infrastructure can be used to profile, sort, and target an entire people during a declared genocide, then corporate “neutrality” isn’t neutral — it’s complicity.

What this story confirms (and what comes next)

• Mass surveillance at industrial scale is now point-and-click when militaries tap U.S. hyperscale clouds. The moral burden isn’t theoretical; it’s architectural.

• Corporate privacy promises collapse under state pressure unless firms draw hard red lines and enforce them — even against lucrative national-security clients.

• Employee organizing works. Microsoft moved after internal dissent, public reporting, and investor agitation converged. That is a blueprint.

• The exit ramps are already paved. Unit 8200 reportedly moving this data to AWS is a warning: If one hyperscaler enforces its standards, another must not become the backdoor.

The unresolved questions we must press

Will Amazon decline the transfer? If The Guardian’s sources are right, AWS is the next stop. That makes this a test of industry-wide ethics, not just Microsoft’s review. Will Google follow suit if similar uses of its cloud or AI are identified? Will European regulators respond to the alleged EU-hosted storage of bulk civilian intercepts? Will Congress examine U.S. firms’ role in enabling lethal targeting of civilians in Gaza?

And inside Microsoft itself: What did leaders know and when? Brad Smith’s note says Microsoft executives — including Nadella — were not aware that Unit 8200 planned or ultimately used Azure to store content of intercepted calls. The company says its second review (run by Covington & Burling) is reviewing internal documents and messages. Given the stakes, that investigation cannot stop at “policy compliance.” It must produce transparent, auditable guardrails that hold across all customers and all conflicts.

Moral clarity

Family, we don’t need euphemisms. Siphoning the voice of a people at population scale — then using it to help pick targets — is how modern atrocity is organized. Call it what it is: mass surveillance of civilians in the service of a campaign that the UN’s commission of inquiry says is genocide.

That The Guardian forced a trillion-dollar company to act is a rare victory — and a map for more. Journalism did this. Workers did this. Pressure did this. Now every cloud and AI provider must answer the same question: Will you be the infrastructure of repression — or not?

What I’m asking of you

I will keep following this story — pressing Amazon, Google, and regulators with direct, public questions; mapping the contracts and the infrastructure; showing how “a million calls an hour” becomes “a thousand names a day” when AI is pointed at the wrong thing. But I can only do that at the depth it requires if you stand with me.

Please click here to become a member today — monthly, annual, or founding. There’s no ad money cushioning this work. It’s just us. Your membership keeps Gaza coverage free, funds investigative reporting, and protects a platform where silence does not win.

Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun

Keep Reading, Keep Fighting

Here are 3 free articles with no paywall that I’d love for you to read and share: