Weird, pretty sure employees brought this to their attention a few times already…

https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-azure-gaza-palestine-is...

https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-azure-gaza-israel-prote...

https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-build-israel-gaza-prote...

https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-protest-employees-fired...

If they act on information their employees report, they are violating their commitments.

There have been public reports by major news organizations on the subject of Israel using big tech companies to surveil the West Bank and Gaza, for a decade. This isn't an issue of customer privacy.

The difference is that pre-2023 it could at least have some plausible excuse of trying to detect terrorist activity. With Israel's current actions in Gaza, there is no longer any plausible excuse or defense for any security action Israel is conducting towards Palestinians.

Did something happen in 2023 that makes it _less_ relevant for Israel to try to prevent terrorist activity?

Israel has a legitimate reason to want to try to intercept and detect terrorist activity, but given what they've been doing in Gaza for the past year and a half, they simply can't be trusted. They've lost all credibility and benefit of the doubt. So they can't expect other entities to help them do something they say is legitimate, because no one can trust them to do something in a legitimate and ethical way.

I think OP’s point is Israel’s legitimate surveillance needs have risen alongside their credibility crashing. This isn’t a simply reduced problem unless one has a horse in the race.

I understand that, and I am sympathetic to those needs to some degree. They do have increased legitimate surveillance needs. But they've lost all of their good will. Partnering with them is too morally and PR-ily hazardous.

I am not saying Israel is nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, but I think this argument is overall kind of pointless because one could easily have said that Nazi Germany had greatly increased legitimate surveillance needs after they invaded Poland.

> one could easily have said that Nazi Germany had greatly increased legitimate surveillance needs after they invaded Poland

This is an interesting comparison—thank you.

That said, did the Poles launch cross-border attacks on German civilians? The closest I can come up with is Bloody Sunday [1], which was an attack on ethnically German civilians, but not a cross-border incursion. (Granted, we can only observe this ex post facto, so your argument still stands.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1939)

Why would being cross-border matter when the entire land was previously Palestinian land before being handed over by colonial powers and then "won" in subsequent "wars" (read: massacres) on the barely-armed villagers living there? The Viet Cong, South Africa's ANC, the Suffragettes and civil rights movements all used violence for their causes. Hamas was established in 1984, by the generation that had grown up with the occupation in 1948. If your country was occupied and members of your family killed, would you be as careful to keep your resistance peaceful?

> Why would being cross-border matter when the entire land was previously Palestinian

That's how borders work. (Anything else is, by definition, a border dispute.) If the Armia Krajowa had bulldozed into Lithuania on the logic that they lost it due to foreign meddling, they would have tarnished their record. (Despite the claim being true.)

> Viet Cong, South Africa's ANC, the Suffragettes and civil rights movements all used violence for their causes

On their own turf. And as for the former, against military targets--nobody serious in the Viet Cong or USSR was plotting Al Qaeda-style attacks on the American homeland.

October 7th was a terrorist attack. It was plotted like a military operation. But so was 9/11.

> would you be as careful to keep your resistance peaceful?

Not particularly. But I'd want to be fighting an actual resistance. 7 October attack was a strategic failure. The only reason it might end in a draw is because Netanyahu surrounded himself with maniacs. Even then, permanent damage has been done to the viability of a sovereign Palestine.

(There is also a massive difference between something being understandable and something being justified.)

So the problem is that you don't believe Palestinians are on their "own turf", because Israel "legally" won it from the villagers there in 1948 after having the British install them to it. Got it. Once again, the Palestinian homeland is exactly where the kibbutz (which is a military camp and outpost) was, mere miles from Gaza, and all of the people involved were actively standing members of the IDF (i.e. the occupying army akin to the Americans in Vietnam). You keep calling it a terrorist attack while appearing completely clueless that it's a largely meaningless political term. We considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist while he was locked up for 30 years, and for the UK at least he was only removed from that list in 2013.

> when the entire land was previously Palestinian land

No such thing as Palestinian. Just Islamic Arab. Choosing to label yourself the same as one name for the land doesn’t make the land yours. But also - who do you think occupied the land previously?

Sure, that must be why the very text of the Balfour Declaration specifies "Palestine" and why coins from the 19th century have been proven to show the same. I'm afraid the hasbara isn't gonna work anymore.

> Hamas was established in 1984, by the generation that had grown up with the occupation in 1948

Correction, Gaza was first occupied by Israel for a few months in 1956, then occupied continuously since 1967.

Regardless, by 1984, nearly half of the people in Gaza would have lived their entire lives under occupation, and the most would have lived at least half their lives under occupation.

Didn't Israel end the occupation of Gaza between 2005 and 2023? They still put up a blockade, but they didn't occupy it.

Israel may have withdrawn from Gaza and forcibly removed their settlers, but they did not end the occupation since they created a naval blockade and control all entrance and exits from Gaza and decide what is allowed in for two decades

I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Israel's position is that the ended they occupation. The United Nations on the other hand, still considered Gaza occupied under international law this whole time.

The only way one could argue that it is no longer occupied is to say there wasn't a continuous Israeli military presence of boots on ground inside of Gaza. It was still being surveilled by satellite and the entire perimeter, people venturing too far at sea from the coast would be shot, drones would occasionally bomb people, everything and everyone going in and out was controlled by Israel (until Hamas tunnels were built), all cell phones allowed in contained surveillance technology, a fence with military outposts was constructed on the perimeter, and Israel bombed the one airport they tried to build.

So arguing it was "no longer occupied" after they pulled out the settlers is disingenuous, unless you're trying to argue that it couldn't be both an occupation and a concentration camp.

There was the Warsaw uprising.

Not cross border. The only purpose German surveillance of Poland would have furthered would have been (again, with the benefit of hindsight) their own occupation. Not the safety of Germans in Germany.

If the Armia Krajowa had carried out an October 7 style attack on the German homeland, against German civilians, their memory would be mixed, not the virtually unblemished heroism they deservedly command in the historic record.

Warsaw uprising with killing babies. Sure you’re the good guys

The Palestinian-led military operation on October 7 did not involve killing babies.

One baby was killed. Another died 14 hours after birth after its pregnant mother was shot. Only one of those was conclusively shot by insurgents from Gaza (the UN fact-finding report[1], on page 44, notes that many Israelis were killed and injured by "friendly fire")

Out of 1200 non-Gazans killed, 33 were children, or 2.7%, and again, at least some of these deaths can be attributed to the Israeli military response. It should be noted that the casualty rate of Israel's response in Gaza has been at least 30% children.

It's bizarre that you bring up the infant casualties of Hamas October 7, of which there was 1, as evidence for calling it a terrorist attack, when the actual number of babies killed by Israel is an order of magnitude greater than the total number of people killed by Hamas on October 7

[1]: https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/a-hrc-...

All of my comments in this thread are on the anti-Israel side but this is just such a terrible comparison in so many ways. One can detest what Israel is doing without at all trying to defend Hamas's October 7th attack.

Israel's incursion into Gaza in October 2023 was more justifiable than Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, yes. I wasn't trying to provide a full comparison between Nazi Germany and Israel, and I prefaced the sentence appropriately. My only point is that a nation having legitimate surveillance needs to protect their soldiers' and civilians' safety isn't a reason to support their surveillance efforts by itself.

>I am not saying Israel is nearly as bad as Nazi Germany

oh, that's generous of you

Nah, it's pretty undeniable. But this is mainly because Nazi Germany was singularly more of a force for evil than any other nation or organization in many centuries. They were uniquely horrible. So it's hard for anyone to be as bad as they were.

Oh, don't worry, there's plenty of lost credibility to go around. Nobody's coming out of this situation smelling like roses, other than maybe some Israeli and Gazan peace activists.

It is obvious that Israel is committing genocide. They don't even try to hide it! Indeed they revel in their cruelty. [1]

This historian[2] argues that openly committing genocide is a feature, not a bug, because it will lead to anti-semitism that will make diaspora Jews feel unsafe and bind them to Israel.

[1]https://www.thecanary.co/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/snapins-... [2]https://youtu.be/sS9xidsyxXY?t=330

There is no doubt that people are suffering. But trying to pin that on Israel is only prolonging their suffering.

Let me ask you, who benefits from Palestinians dying? Or did you think that Hamas care about the Palestinian people. They do not - they care only about the Palestinian state.

> Let me ask you, who benefits from Palestinians dying?

Israel does. There's no need for a two state solution, the project of Greater Israel can be accomplished if they just kill anyone who they aren't able to forcibly expel from the land.

At some point, when basically the entire world is saying one thing and only two countries (the US & Israel) are saying the opposite, you really need something strong to convince someone that basically the whole world is wrong.

This is some lame right-wing outlet whose front page contains things like:

>The assessment, shared exclusively with the Free Beacon, follows mainstream media claims that cuts to global health funding will endanger life-saving programs

While not mentioning that, yes, the Trump administration's USAID cuts absolutely will kill millions of people.

The rest is shitting on Democrats and supporting Trump. Obviously some right-wing site is going to say whatever they can think of to try to defend Israel's actions.

If this was how the world worked, we'd all be using Athenian democracy. There are plenty of things the whole world once believed that turned out to be wrong.

I see the war in radically different terms than you. It's not a battle between who has the better historical claim to the land. It's a religious battle. It's a battle between radical Islam and the secular west.

For a fuller treatment of the defense of Israel from a secular view point.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38926431-what-justice-de...

I'm grateful that what little good pieces are left in the American right their defense of Israel remains in place.

At least you're honest. This is why the vast majority of Westerners support Israel, its colonialism and its right to kill as many brown people as they can, they just don't say it out loud.

Isn’t it the inverse? Gazans voted for Hamas, and still support them per polls. Hamas’s charter is to destroy Israel in particular but also to subordinate women, subordinate all other religions, undermine Western powers, etc. Their goals and ideology are explicitly in conflict with liberal orders that support things like women’s rights, gay rights, free speech, freedom of religion, and so on.

Do you really think Hamas has killed more Israelis than Israel has killed Palestinians? Do you even know why Hamas exists? Do you have any idea how many years passed between the occupation in 1948 and massacres like the Nakba and Deir Yassin before Hamas was established?

That's funny. In mid-October 2023 the narrative was "It doesn't matter who killed more" and now that so many Palestinians are dying - both by Israeli bombs and by Hamas rockets (1/3 to 1/5 fall back into the densely-populated Gaza strip) - the narrative is "Hamas has killed less Israelis than Israel has killed Palestinians".

The pro-Palestinian narrative adapts and changes as per the tides of war and the media. The Israeli narrative has remained consistent, even when it hurts.

Furthermore, your ideas about the colour of people's skin is an artifact of you dragging American racial issues into a place where they don't belong. The varied skin colours here favour neither side as darker or lighter.

No, the Palestinian narrative for those of us actually knowledgeable of history has not changed since 1948. As for Israel being consistent - how are those hostages doing? Cause it definitely doesn't care about any of them now (those it hasn't killed itself), and Netanyahu and others in the cabinet have admitted they want to occupy the land once more.

I'm not American, but you must be if you think racism magically stops outside of America. The racism most Americans and Zionists have towards brown people and the Islamophobia they have towards Muslims are some of their most prejudiced, and at least equal to any form of anti-Semitism you've ever experienced, but for some reason, you only believe in one of those. To be clear, "brown people" don't have to be "brown" just like black people aren't all black, it's a generic term that indicates a rough place of origin, and the point that you're clearly trying to obscure is that racism towards Palestinians is still racism no matter what colour they actually are.

You're right - such association with colour is not limited to Americans. I almost forgot being told about the slaves in the Gaza strip.

It turns out that Gazans call black-skinned Gazans "slaves". I've met black-skinned Bedouins but not black-skinned Gazans, and I don't know if the black-skinned Gazans are also Bedouins. I actually didn't know the word for slave in Arabic, but it was similar enough to the word in Hebrew that I was able to figure it out. I'd later have it confirmed. Not only do they called the black-skinned Gazans "slaves", they treat them as such as well. No lack of colour-motivated racism in the Gaza strip. Yes, I speak with Gazans in Arabic, and before October 7th I'd have conversations with them face to face.

As for Israeli racism - I think that we're the only country in the world who went out to help dark-skinned people immigrate en masse. Israel has a large Ethiopean community. I've had Ethiopean commanders in the army, and I work with quite a few Ethiopeans. I don't feel that they treat me in any unusual way, nor do I treat them in any unusual way.

I'm sure the Gazan friends you spoke to will be overjoyed you had face-to-face conversations with them before going online to advocate for their genocide, and that those conversations you had make them clearly savage enough to justify said genocide.

Are you really so wrapped up in your tech bubble in Tel Aviv that you can believe that? Here's some reading on a story even I knew off from the top of my head: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/28/ethiopian-wome.... And here's the rest of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Israel. Israel is easily the most racist "Western" country in the world, ahead of even the modern US. Hmm, maybe a genocide against Israelis would actually be justified because Israelis are just racist savages that think black people should be forcibly sterilised against their will?

I knew that somebody would bring up the contraceptives the moment that I mentioned Ethiopians. Here, have a read: https://www.reddit.com/r/IsraelPalestine/comments/o49jqp/myt...

  > I'm sure the Gazan friends you spoke to will be overjoyed you had face-to-face conversations with them while advocating for their genocide, and that those conversations make them clearly savage enough to justify said genocide.

Since October 7th I haven't seen any Gazans face to face, but we have spoken on the phone and on Telegram. And I've never advocated for their genocide, rather I've advocated against the genocide of Jews. Anybody who supports Hamas, their goals, or their idealogy supports the genocide of Jews. It's right there in the Hamas charter.

I'll say it clearly. There is no genocide of Arabs, or Muslims, or Palestinians, or Gazans in the Gaza strip. There are many Gazans dying, and many of them are children. Many of them are killed as a result of Israeli actions, and many of them are killed as a result of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other organizations' actions. Israel does not systematically target children, only Hamas benefits from dead children. They say it clearly themselves.

So in your warped logic, the few thousand combined killed by all of the groups you named are more evil than the 60,000 killed by Israel (likely 100,000+ after Israel finally lets the UN in) and the true cost of the genocide can be calculated. Also, Israel just accidentally ended up with a collateral damage rate of 50%, just like several medical doctors have attested to it accidentally sniping tens of kids and people waiting for aid, and accidentally shooting 300 bullets into the vehicle holding Hind Rajab. I suggest you wake up and start moving toward the right side of history, along with the UN, Amnesty International, Oxfam and virtually every other major human rights organisation, because very soon it'll be too late and history isn't going to forget active enablers and propagandists like yourself.

I can only tell you that when I was in high school decades ago, I shared a viewpoint that was similar to yours. But after watching history unfold in real time for the last 35+ years, my viewpoint has had to shift. And shift a lot it has. I have had to begin accept some uncomfortable truths that were not yet reaching me. I see them now.

Considering that your view point is bolstered by a vast ecosystem, I do wonder what propaganda are you thinking of that is responsible for my change in views? Like what do you think I tune into that promotes the viewpoint I hold? I'm asking because I'd love to know what is so that I can listen to more of it! Mine is very hard to find. So if you know where it is - please tell me.

I wouldn’t have believed this until a few weeks ago. I then stated finding a lot of social media posts where people at pro-Palestine / anti-Israel protests talk about their goals, and many of them flat out say it is to bring down America and end its “empire”. They seem to use the same phrases in talking about this - I wonder if they get a script to use from the nonprofits they are a part of.

They have since then been openly carrying out a genocide. Trying to paper it over with excuses about terrorism isn’t working anymore.

Same bogus website used earlier. Please don't copy pasta bad hasbara

Dismissing something as a “bogus website” or attacking the source isn’t an argument. It’s a logical fallacy.

It was debunked in another comment so I didn't copy paste the debunking, sorry

You’re the one openly promoting genocide.

No, because those employees didn't learn about it by snooping around in Azure data.

Can anyone help clean up these sources/verify?

The first one seems to be after Microsoft's claim "and Microsoft has said it is reviewing a report in a British newspaper this month that Israel has used it to facilitate attacks on Palestinian targets".

The second one looks similar "Microsoft late last week said it was tapping a law firm to investigate allegations reported by British newspaper The Guardian".

The 3rd one seems to be a genuine example that Microsoft employees were reporting this specific contract violation concern - but I feel like there are more genuine examples I've heard of than just this one report.

The 4th one is a bit unclear, it seems to be a general complaint about the contract - not about specific violations of it.

Perhaps the more confounding question remaining is "what was so different about the report from The Guardian". It's not like these kinds of claims are new, or in small papers only, but maybe The Guardian was able to put together hard evidence from outside that allowed Microsoft to determine things without themselves going in breach of contract details?

> Perhaps the more confounding question remaining is "what was so different about the report from The Guardian".

I think timing. The world is finally ready to stop ignoring what Israel has been doing so it’s significantly easier for countries, companies, and even individuals to stand up, speak out, and take action.

I think it's the latter -- Microsoft was unable to look internally, or able to pretend they were ignorant. But the Guardian report was just too detailed to ignore.

I actually think understanding exactly how your customers do a thing is not an easy thing to be 100% sure of.

I've had sales, customer reps, even engineers and customers describe how a customer / they work ... and then I go and look and ... it's not how anyone said they work IRL.

  > I actually think understanding exactly how your customers do a thing is not an easy thing to be 100% sure of.

Nor is surveillance even necessarily a bad thing given the context. Would it be a better world in which Israel were not able to precisely target Hamas entities and assets? Surveillance is a big part of properly targeting the correct targets.

I wasn't addressing any of that. More generally that knowing what your customer is doing, even if someone "tells" you, it might not be accurate.

> Would it be a better world in which Israel were not able to precisely target Hamas entities and assets

They are already not doing that

50% of Gaza destroyed, 100% of the hospitals. It's a good thing they precisely targeted Hamas assets

Do you deny that Hamas Bobby traps houses - that kills both Israeli soldiers and Gazan children.

Many of the houses are destroyed when they are identified as traps. Hamas brags about have trapped so many homes. Did you not see the recent video of the girl getting blown up by an IED? They tried to pin that one, like them all, on Israel but enough Gazans online pointed out that the reason there was a camera pointed at the incident was because it was another Hamas trap. All these similar deaths are pinned on Israel, this makes sense in Muslim media where culturally, dying in battle with the infidel is their highest honour, no matter who shoots. But it does not make sense in Western media where human life has more value.

Likewise with the hospitals. They continuously shoot rockets at Israel from hospitals. They show it in their own media. That, on top of using hospitals for sniper fire and for command centers and for tunnels. Just read channels like عزه الان (or any of dozens of others), they are not even shy to discuss it, it is not taboo in their culture.

I don't know if it's _true_, but it seems right? I don't want Microsoft to have this level of visibility into my usage of Azure, just like I don't want my phone provider to eavesdrop on my conversations. I'm no privacy ayatollah, but this seems like a reasonable amount of privacy from Microsoft

Privacy ayatollah? Is that like an infosec shah?

Grand Mullah of GDPR Compliance

Metadata monitoring messiah

Privacy professing prelate

Surveillance-Suspicious Saint

Chain of Custody Cakkavatti

Bodhisattva of Vibe Ops Infrachaos

Supreme Pontiff of Vendor Asset Tagging

Data pope?

Thanks for this one, putting in request to my manager to change my job title to data pope, since our titles are all meaningless anyway might as well have a fun one.

No, a Shah is a hereditary ruler (a King), whereas an Ayatollah is more like a Bishop (ie a religious leader, but not the top guy such as the Pope in Roman Catholicism)

I have seen "czar" used as an informal title to denote ownership of a domain, e.g. the "security czar."

I suppose it originates from the term "border czar" and others in politics e.g. https://www.politico.com/story/2009/09/president-obamas-czar...

Well, the average org isn't out there literally committing genocide

The UN says differently. Should I just take Israel's word for it?

No, you should not just take Israel's word for it. But you should most certainly understand who the UN is, and how they have come to the conclusions they have come to. Here is a good start:

https://freebeacon.com/israel/the-u-n-genocide-report-agains...

Bad Hasbara copy paste. Not the good kind that mentions Matt Lieb or Daniel Mate either

"Don't take Israel's word for it. Take this far-right pro-war website's word instead!"

The whole point of confidential computing is that the cloud provider can't access your data and can't tell what you're doing with it. This is a must have requirement in many government contracts and other highly legislated fields.

I've personally never seen anything requiring confidential computing in anything. Is this required in the USA? I find that hard to believe, because the technology on a cloud level is still very beta-feeling. I think that Microsoft just never looked because they did not want to know.

They have services literally dedicated to things like health data records.

But you don’t even need to go that sensitive, literally any type of online service might run the risk of handling PII. Which is why CIS, NIST et al have security frameworks that cover things like encryption at rest.

But encryption at rest is not confidential compute. And Confidential compute is pretty new in terms of tech and i would be genuinely suprised if it's already required for some stuff. I am genuinely interested though, if you have any links about it please enlighten me.

Ahhh I hadn’t realised that was a new term. I’ve got something new to learn. Thank you

What country does this "confidential computing" exist in, and how can I get there?

It could also mean "now that someone else has seen it, we can finally act on what we have only privately seen but couldn't admit seeing"

More likely MS was well aware of what was going on and didn't care until the Guardian forced their hand.

> The disclosures caused alarm among senior Microsoft executives, sparking concerns that some of its Israel-based employees may not have been fully transparent about their knowledge of how Unit 8200 used Azure when questioned as part of the review.

Highly likely, or at least a bit naive -- Completely reasonable to have local staff for a contract this big, but Microsoft should have independently 'double-checked' sooner

The head of that Israeli unit met directly with the CEO of MS. I don't buy a second the execs at MS didn't know what was going on. Blaming the local contractors is just MS throwing people under the bus.

I've worked for big corporations for nearly 20 years, I've seen this more times then I can count. Higher ups always happy to turn a blind eye to a bad situation as long as it's making the company money, and then immediately throwing subordinates under the bus when it bites them in the ass.

A tale as old as time.

If they weren’t intended to be thrown under the bus, they’d be called… superordinates? I guess?

And if they all just took the bus together they'd be coordinates?

Not to sound too much like a reddit comment... but God damnit take my upvote.

‘I’m shocked! shocked! that there is gambling in this establishment! This is unacceptable!’

‘Your winnings sir’

That comment is... weird, considering they disabled the accounts of certain International Court of Justice that were individually targeted.

The reality is that no one can tell whose ass it is safe to kiss now a days, so it’s all scandal driven actions. Unless someone can create a big enough scandal, no one is going to do squat.

They should ask their Chinese engineers in charge of sensitive Azure servers.

That’s the best part, they cannot. Well, they technically can, but the answer from the company that runs chinese azure servers is gonna be “none of your business.”

What is interesting is they gave some privacy while others they strip away.