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Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians
Revealed: The Israeli military undertook an ambitious project to store a giant trove of Palestinians’ phone calls on Microsoft’s servers in Europe
Armed with Azure’s near-limitless storage capacity, Unit 8200 began building a powerful new mass surveillance tool: a sweeping and intrusive system that collects and stores recordings of millions of mobile phone calls made each day by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/ReutersIntelligence sources with knowledge of the project said Unit 8200’s leadership turned to Microsoft after concluding it did not have sufficient storage space or computing power on the military’s servers to bear the weight of an entire population’s phone calls. In the ensuing war in Gaza, the cloud-based system pioneered by Sariel has been put to frequent use alongside a series of AI-driven target recommendation tools also developed on his watch and debuted by the military in a campaign that has devastated civilian life and created a profound humanitarian crisis.
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