Microsoft said on Thursday that it has banned access to storage and artificial intelligence -based cloud for a unit within the Israeli army. This step is governed by an internal review caused by the Guardian and Associated Press, which claimed that the unit used Microsoft technology to perform the mass supervision of the Palestinians in Gaza and the western bank of Jordan.
According to The Guardian, this technology made it possible to capture and collect millions of telephone calls daily by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Previously, the software company faced the protests of some of its employees who accused the company of taking part in the abuse of human rights by Israel in Gaza.
At the end of last week, Microsoft reported Israeli officers from the 8200 unit, the elite Agency for the Israeli Army, that their contractual terms had raised the Azure cloud platform to store a huge data cache.
This decision came to the investigation of the Associated Press and The Guardian in Microsoft’s relationship with the Unit 8200, revealing how the Israeli Defense Ministry used the Tech Major Azure Platform to help in Gaza War and the occupation of the West Bank.
In August, in cooperation with the Israeli-Palestinian magazine 972 and the local vehicle in Hebrew, he said that the commander of the 8200, Yossi Sariel, met directly with the chairman of Microsoft and CEO in 2021 in 2021.
After the reports, Microsoft launched an external question about its relationship with the 8200 unit. The findings led to the cancellation of the unit’s access to AI and Microsoft cloud storage.
Unlimited storage capacity and computing performance of Azure reportedly allowed a unity to create a system capable of mass supervision of the entire Palestinian population.
The data center of the American technical giant is located in the Netherlands of approximately 8,000 terabytes of the data captured calls. After publishing the investigation, the unit moved data from the Netherlands.
The source familiar with this matter told Guardian that the 8200 unit is now planning to migrate data on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. However, neither AWS nor Israeli defensive forces confirmed or rejected the report.
Brad Smith, President and Vice -President of Microsoft, told employees in the internal e -mail: “We do not provide technology to facilitate the mass supervision of civilians. We have used this principle in every country around the world and we have repeatedly insisted on it for more than two decades.”
(Tagstotranslate) Unit 8200
