One afternoon in late 2021, Microsoft’s chief govt, Satya Nadella, met with the commander of Israel’s navy surveillance company, Unit 8200. On the spy chief’s agenda: shifting huge quantities of high secret intelligence materials into the US firm’s cloud.
Assembly at Microsoft’s headquarters close to Seattle, a former hen farm turned hi-tech campus, the spymaster, Yossi Sariel, received Nadella’s assist for a plan that will grant Unit 8200 entry to a personalized and segregated space inside Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
Armed with Azure’s near-limitless storage capability, Unit 8200 started constructing a strong new mass surveillance instrument: a sweeping and intrusive system that collects and shops recordings of thousands and thousands of cell phone calls made every day by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Financial institution.
Revealed right here for the primary time in an investigation by the Guardian with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Journal and Hebrew-language outlet Native Name, the cloud-based system – which first turned operational in 2022 – permits Unit 8200 to retailer a large trove of calls every day for prolonged intervals of time.
Microsoft claims Nadella was unaware of what sort of knowledge Unit 8200 deliberate to retailer in Azure. However a cache of leaked Microsoft paperwork and interviews with 11 sources from the corporate and Israeli navy intelligence reveals how Azure has been utilized by Unit 8200 to retailer this expansive archive of on a regular basis Palestinian communications.
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In accordance with three Unit 8200 sources, the cloud-based storage platform has facilitated the preparation of lethal airstrikes and has formed navy operations in Gaza and the West Financial institution.
Because of the management it exerts over Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure, Israel has lengthy intercepted telephone calls within the occupied territories. However the indiscriminate new system permits intelligence officers to play again the content material of mobile calls made by Palestinians, capturing the conversations of a a lot bigger pool of odd civilians.
Intelligence sources with data of the venture mentioned Unit 8200’s management turned to Microsoft after concluding it didn’t have ample cupboard space or computing energy on the navy’s servers to bear the burden of a whole inhabitants’s telephone calls.
A number of intelligence officers from the unit, which is akin to the US Nationwide Safety Company (NSA) in its surveillance capabilities, mentioned {that a} mantra emerged internally that captured the venture’s scale and ambition: “A million calls an hour.”
The system was constructed to take a seat on Microsoft’s servers behind enhanced layers of safety developed by the corporate’s engineers with Unit 8200’s directions. The leaked Microsoft information counsel that a big proportion of the unit’s delicate knowledge might now be sitting within the firm’s datacentres within the Netherlands and Eire.
Disclosures concerning the position of Microsoft’s Azure platform within the surveillance venture come because the US tech large faces stress from staff and buyers over its ties to Israel’s navy and the position its expertise has performed within the 22-month offensive in Gaza.
In Could, an worker disrupted a keynote speech by Nadella in an act of protest, at one level yelling: “How about you show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?”
After the Guardian and others revealed in January Israel’s reliance on Microsoft expertise through the conflict in Gaza, the corporate commissioned an exterior assessment of the connection. The assessment, Microsoft mentioned, had “found no evidence to date” that Azure or its AI merchandise had been “used to target or harm people” within the territory.
A senior Microsoft supply mentioned the corporate had held conversations with Israeli defence officers and stipulated how its expertise must be utilized in Gaza, insisting Microsoft techniques should not be employed for the identification of targets for deadly strikes.
Nevertheless, Unit 8200 sources mentioned intelligence drawn from the big repositories of telephone calls held in Azure had been used to analysis and establish bombing targets in Gaza. One of many sources mentioned that when planning an airstrike on a person positioned inside densely populated areas the place excessive numbers of civilians are current, officers would use the cloud-based system to look at calls made by individuals within the instant neighborhood.
The sources additionally mentioned use of the system had elevated through the marketing campaign in Gaza, which has killed greater than 60,000 individuals within the territory, nearly all of whom are civilians, together with over 18,000 youngsters.
Q&A
What number of Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s marketing campaign in opposition to Gaza?
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In accordance with well being officers in Gaza, not less than 60,000 individuals have been killed throughout Israel’s present navy marketing campaign, launched after the Hamas-led assault on 7 October 2023 which killed almost 1,200 individuals.
The precise demise toll is more likely to be considerably increased, because the determine solely contains Palestinians killed by bombs or bullets whose our bodies have been recovered, leaving out hundreds trapped underneath the rubble or killed by hunger and different oblique victims of the marketing campaign.
In accordance with the info – which incorporates the deaths of militants – ladies, youngsters, and aged individuals account for roughly 55% of the recorded deaths.
However the preliminary focus of the system was the West Financial institution, the place an estimated 3 million Palestinians stay underneath Israeli navy occupation. Unit 8200 sources mentioned the data saved in Azure amounted to a wealthy repository of intelligence about its inhabitants that some within the unit claimed had been used to blackmail individuals, place them in detention, and even justify their killing after the actual fact.
“When they need to arrest someone and there isn’t a good enough reason to do so, that’s where they find the excuse,” one mentioned, referring to the data saved within the cloud.
A Microsoft spokesperson mentioned it had “no information” concerning the type of knowledge saved by Unit 8200 in its cloud. They mentioned the corporate’s “engagement with Unit 8200 has been based on strengthening cybersecurity and protecting Israel from nation state and terrorist cyber-attacks”.
“At no time during this engagement,” they added, “has Microsoft been aware of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cellphone conversations using Microsoft’s services, including through the external review it commissioned.”
‘Tracking everyone, all the time’
The driving drive behind the cloud venture – described by one supply as a “revolution” throughout the unit – was Sariel, commander of Unit 8200 between early 2021 and late 2024. A profession intelligence officer, Sariel was a robust advocate for tasks of this scale.
Following a 2015 wave of lethal so-called “lone wolf” assaults by younger Palestinians, lots of whom had been youngsters unknown to the safety providers, Sariel had overseen a major enlargement of the amount of Palestinian communications that Unit 8200 intercepted and saved.
His reply was to start “tracking everyone, all the time”, mentioned an officer who labored for Sariel on the time. As an alternative of conventional surveillance of particular targets, Sariel’s venture relied on mass surveillance of Palestinians within the West Financial institution and used novel AI strategies to extract insights.
“Suddenly the entire public was our enemy,” mentioned one other supply who labored on the venture, which sought to foretell whether or not somebody represented a risk to Israeli safety.
One system developed on this interval, sources mentioned, scanned all textual content messages between Palestinians within the West Financial institution and assigned every message a threat ranking based mostly on an automatic evaluation of whether or not it included phrases deemed to be suspicious. Nonetheless in use, the system – often known as “noisy message” – can establish textual content messages by which individuals speak about weapons or focus on desirous to die.
When Sariel turned Unit 8200 commander in early 2021, he prioritised forging a partnership with Microsoft that will give the unit the flexibility to go additional and seize and analyse the content material of thousands and thousands of telephone calls every day.
At his assembly with Nadella later that 12 months, Sariel doesn’t seem to have explicitly acknowledged his plan to retailer Palestinian telephone calls within the cloud, referring as a substitute to “sensitive workloads” of secret knowledge, in keeping with inside information of the assembly.
However paperwork counsel that Microsoft engineers understood the info saved in Azure would come with uncooked intelligence, together with audio information, whereas some Israel-based Microsoft workers, together with alumni of Unit 8200, seem to have recognized about what the unit hoped the joint venture would obtain.
“You don’t have to be a genius to figure it out,” one supply mentioned. “You tell [Microsoft] we don’t have any more space on the servers, that it’s audio files. It’s pretty clear what it is.”
Microsoft’s spokesperson mentioned: “We are not aware of Azure being used for the storage of such data.” They mentioned Unit 8200 was merely a buyer of its cloud providers and Microsoft “did not build or consult with Unit 8200” on a cloud-based surveillance system.
Nevertheless, in early 2022, Microsoft and Unit 8200 engineers labored rapidly and carefully collectively to design and implement superior safety measures inside Azure to satisfy the unit’s requirements. “The rhythm of interaction with [the unit] is daily, top down and bottom up,” one doc famous.
Amongst Microsoft workers, the venture was shrouded in appreciable secrecy and engineers had been advised to not point out Unit 8200 by identify. Underneath the plan, huge troves of uncooked intelligence materials would sit in Microsoft’s datacentres abroad.
Information counsel that by July this 12 months, 11,500 terabytes of Israeli navy knowledge – equal to roughly 200m hours of audio – was held in Microsoft’s Azure servers within the Netherlands, whereas a smaller proportion was saved in Eire. It’s unclear if all of this knowledge belongs to Unit 8200; some might belong to different Israeli navy items.
In accordance with the information, Unit 8200 knowledgeable Microsoft that it deliberate to maneuver over time as a lot as 70% of its knowledge, together with secret and high secret knowledge, into Azure and was keen to “push the envelope” with the type of delicate and labeled info that intelligence companies usually held on their very own servers. “They’re always trying to challenge the status quo,” one govt famous.
Requested about Sariel’s assembly with Nadella, Microsoft’s spokesperson mentioned it “is not accurate” to say the CEO offered his private assist for the venture with Unit 8200. They mentioned Nadella “attended for 10 minutes at the end of the meeting” and there was “no discussion” of the content material of the info the unit deliberate to maneuver into Azure.
Nevertheless, in keeping with inside Microsoft information of the assembly seen by the Guardian, Nadella supplied assist for Sariel’s aspiration to maneuver a lot of the elite surveillance unit’s knowledge into the cloud, described earlier within the assembly as together with delicate intelligence materials.
“Satya suggested that we identify certain workloads to begin with and then gradually move towards the 70% mark,” one document states. It provides that Nadella mentioned “building the partnership is so critical” and “Microsoft is committed to providing resources to support.”
‘The solution to our problems’
A number of months earlier than assembly Microsoft CEO Nadella in 2021, Sariel had printed a e-book about synthetic intelligence underneath a pen identify – revealed by the Guardian to be the spy chief’s – by which he urged militaries and intelligence companies to “migrate to the cloud”.
Identified inside Israeli intelligence as a tech evangelist, Sariel valued what he characterised to colleagues as a pleasant relationship with Nadella, in keeping with a senior intelligence supply. “Yossi bragged a lot, even to me, about his connection with Satya,” they mentioned. (Microsoft denied that Nadella and Sariel had an in depth relationship.)
“He sold [the partnership] internally and got a huge budget,” one other former intelligence colleague mentioned. “He claimed it was the solution to our problems in the Palestinian arena.”
Sariel declined to remark and referred the Guardian’s questions concerning the venture to the Israel Defence Forces. An IDF spokesperson mentioned its work with corporations equivalent to Microsoft was based mostly on “legally supervised agreements”.
They added: “The IDF operates in accordance with international law, with the aim of countering terrorism and ensuring the security of the state and its citizens.”
For its half, Microsoft seen the multiyear partnership as a profitable business alternative. Executives anticipated a whole lot in thousands and thousands of {dollars} in income and “an incredibly powerful brand moment” for Azure, in keeping with the information.
“[Unit 8200’s] leadership hopes to expand the mission-critical work tenfold in the coming years,” one govt famous.
As Unit 8200 started to utilize Azure’s storage capabilities in 2022, intelligence officers quickly grasped the brand new powers at their disposal. “The cloud is infinite storage,” one supply acquainted with the system mentioned.
Calls – which embody calls made by Palestinians to worldwide and Israeli numbers – are usually retained within the cloud for about one month, although storage could be scaled up, permitting the unit to maintain maintain of requires longer intervals of time when wanted, a number of intelligence sources defined.
This permits the unit to return in time and retrieve the telephone conversations of people that change into of curiosity, they mentioned. Beforehand, surveillance targets would should be pre-selected for his or her conversations to be intercepted and saved.
A number of of the sources insisted the cloud-based system had prevented lethal assaults in opposition to Israelis. One mentioned “saving lives” of Israelis was the principal motivation behind Sariel’s imaginative and prescient for the system. Nevertheless it notably failed to stop the Hamas-led assaults of seven October 2023 by which almost 1,200 individuals had been killed in southern Israel and 240 individuals had been kidnapped.
Within the wake of the assaults, Sariel confronted criticism for his obvious prioritisation of “addictive and exciting” expertise over old school intelligence strategies, which some critics mentioned contributed to the catastrophe. Sariel resigned final 12 months, accepting accountability for “8200’s part in the intelligence and operational failure”.
Within the ensuing conflict in Gaza, the cloud-based system pioneered by Sariel has been put to frequent use alongside a collection of AI-driven goal advice instruments additionally developed on his watch and debuted by the navy in a marketing campaign that has devastated civilian life and created a profound humanitarian disaster.
Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s telecoms infrastructure has diminished the amount of telephone calls within the territory however sources mentioned the info held within the cloud remained helpful. In accordance with one, enthusiasm for the system had grown amongst intelligence officers engaged on Gaza because the conflict progressed and so they noticed the navy is “heading towards long-term control there”.
