How Israel used Microsoft technology to spy on Palestinians

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, when Israel's spy chief met Microsoft's CEO.

0:23In November 2021, an Israeli intelligence commander landed in Seattle for a series of confidential meetings. His name is Yossi Sariel, and at the time he was in charge of Unit 8200, a branch of Israel's military intelligence. He had a plan for a massive clandestine surveillance project, but it would need advanced computing power. So Sariel went to one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Microsoft. So the campus looks a little bit like a university. It's very big, it's quite green, you have engineers wandering around with laptops. and he spent the day on the campus talking to executives, holding meetings and it was during his trip to the headquarters that he met with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft.

1:10This is Harry Davis, investigations correspondent at The Guardian who has exclusively revealed what was discussed between one of the most powerful men in Israel and a titan in the tech industry. There was one meeting in particular later in the afternoon And what we can tell from the records and documents that we've seen is that Sariel had spoken to Microsoft about a plan to transfer large amounts of Unit 800's data, including top secret information into Microsoft's cloud platform, which is called Azure.

1:45As Harry revealed, this data would come to include millions of hours of private phone calls from the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians calling their mum, dad, their spouses, their doctors. All of it being hoovered up by Unit 8200, which needed Microsoft's help to store and process it. Sariel left Seattle with what he needed. But what exactly had Microsoft agreed to? And how might that data be used to target Palestinians? From The Guardian, I'm Nashin Iqbal. Today in Focus, how Israel used Microsoft's technology to spy on Palestinians.

2:26Ari, can you tell us about Unit 8200? What is it? So Unit 8200 or 8200 is known as a unit, but unit sounds quite small. and it's actually quite a large part of Israeli military intelligence. It's rather like the US NSA or the UK's GCHQ. It is a signals intelligence collection agency, so it's an eavesdropping agency. It collects the content of calls and metadata about communications and internet traffic, but it also is involved in offensive cyber operations. So it has a track record of operations, for example, in Iran, hackers who are working on penetrating Iranian government systems, particularly in relation to the nuclear program.

3:06It also breeds a crop of engineers and digital spies who then move into the private sector where offensive cyber tools and various bits of spyware which have been available to governments around the world have sort of been developed. So Unit 800 in a way is a kind of founderhead of some of that activity and it is known in the intelligence world as being particularly effective. So incredibly sophisticated and incredibly influential by all sounds. Harry, in 2021, a new commander took over control of the unit. Can you tell me about him? So Yossi Sariel was in his mid-40s when he became the commander of 8200.

3:44And this is an incredibly prestigious job within Israeli military intelligence. His identity for a long time was secret. There were no images of him online. From the accounts that we've heard is that he was something of a tech evangelist. Just before he took up the job, he'd spent, we think, about a year on a kind of sabbatical in the United States at a US military college where he spent some time researching and thinking about the way intelligence agencies like his could incorporate and harness the sort of new advances in AI into the sort of business of military intelligence, intelligence gathering and analysis.

4:22Interestingly, for a spy chief, he actually wrote a book. Right. The book was written under a pen name, which wasn't especially original. It was Brigadier YS. It's not that coded for a spy chief, I'm about to say. No, right. I mean, it also wasn't revealed in the book that he was talking about Israeli intelligence. Nonetheless, he remained the kind of secret author of this book. It was quite a niche book. It wasn't on the bestseller lists, but you could find it on Amazon. And in April last year, we then revealed that he was the secret author of the book. The book is called The Human Machine Team, and the book articulates a vision for how within intelligence agencies and militaries, he thought that humans could work with machines, with AI.

5:09is less about automated weapon systems or allowing AI to make decisions for you. It's much more about how humans and AI can work together to analyze the sort of increasingly large volumes of data they're collecting and how the increasingly large storage capacities of, let's say, the commercial cloud providers could be useful to intelligence agencies and militaries. and he advocates and suggests that intelligence agencies migrate their data to the cloud. And who would have been the intended audience for this book or was it just a big application for a job that he eventually got? I think it was for people within the intelligence community and I think it sort of solidified his reputation as a kind of tech guru within that world and I think it was also a way in which he was able to articulate a quite appealing, almost sort of sexy vision that he could sell internally.

6:05And he articulated a kind of blueprint for what we then started to see in Israel's war on Gaza, in which it began using quite novel AI-driven target recommendation tools. And he speaks about those in the book as well.

6:28So what did he do? How did he transform Unit 8200? After Sariel took over as Commander 800, I think it's fair to say that the volume of incepted Palestinian communications that the unit was collecting significantly increased. That's because they embarked on this project to collect millions of calls every day that are made by Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. and the objective was to collect as much as possible and then retain that information. Irrespective of whether it was criminal, sinister, anything, just collect and keep the data. Yes, because the idea was that a conversation that happened two weeks ago, you might not have known that it was useful or important from an intelligence point of view at the time.

7:19But if you're able to go back into this repository and then play back a recording and read a transcript of that call, then you're able to effectively go back in time and find things that once upon a time you wouldn't have had at your disposal if you're an intelligence officer. And how does that kind of intelligence work? In the sense that how would Israel justify monitoring phone calls made by Palestinian civilians? What would they say it was for? For Sariel, this was about keeping Israeli citizens safe and anticipating attacks. So back in 2015, there was the so-called knife intifada where Israel began to see the wave of quote-unquote lone wolf attacks where often young Palestinians, some of them teenagers, were committing attacks against Israeli citizens.

8:13And they were unknown to the security services. And that, I think, shook 8200. And one of the strategies that they pursued afterwards and that Sariel was closely involved in was a project where they would really expand the information they were collecting on Palestinian citizens. So that rather than focusing on groups of people that were of interest or individuals that were of interest, specific targets, the ambition was to collect as much information about the entire population as possible.

8:58Harry, you and Yuval Abraham worked with two media outlets in Israel, Plus 972 Magazine and Local Call, on this investigation into the 2021 meeting between Spy Chief Yossi Sarayal and Microsoft's Chief Executive Satya Nadella. That meeting was key to stepping up Israel's intelligence and military operations. But why did the Israelis need Microsoft's help? So Yossi Serial's ambition was quite a big one. And in 2015, he had overseen a project that allowed Unit 100 to collect the text messages of millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories and ingest them and then analyse them. And when he became the head of the unit, he seemed to be keen to expand that collection capability to include the content of calls as well as the content of text messages.

9:53But to collect data on that scale, millions of calls every day required a huge amount of storage capacity on servers to store it and then the computing power to analyze and process it. And Unit 800 didn't have enough of that. So Sariel was keen to include and involve commercial cloud providers who have these enormous data centers around the world to process, analyze, store this enormous repository of data that he wanted the unit to have. Why Microsoft? Why not Google or Apple? Why specifically them? So Unit 800 had a particularly close relationship with Microsoft. Microsoft has been a trusted provider for systems and services where the unit is dealing with more sensitive intelligence material.

10:42And while the military does also work with Google and Amazon for cloud storage services and other things, Microsoft seems to have been quite closely embedded within Unit 800. and for Yossi Sariel, he would later boast to colleagues and people he worked with about his close relationship with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. I mean, Microsoft later denied that and said they didn't have a close relationship, but I think that some would say he was quite in awe of these big tech companies and he was keen to involve them in his sort of grand designs and projects. And as we now know, Sariel did exactly that.

11:23He got a key meeting at Microsoft HQ in Seattle. Harry, what was on the agenda? So what's clear is that in this meeting that Nadella attended, now the company says he only attended for 10 minutes at the end, but it's clear that at that meeting, Yossi Serial's plan to migrate a very large chunk of Unit 800's data into the cloud, as much as 70%, was what was being discussed at the time. Satya Nadella discussed that plan, that he spoke about that 70 % figure, and committed support to a plan. Now, whether he knew specifically what Unit 8200 was going to store within the cloud, the company insists that he did not know that intercepted Palestinian communications would be in the cloud.

12:07But what's clear is the company and senior executives knew that what was going to be stored in the cloud was going to be sensitive intelligence material. I think it's also worth asking at this point if you are going to do business with Unit 8200, a spy agency that is part of its job description is incepting communications and as part of and under a military occupation. I think you could ask, what did Microsoft think Unit 8200 were going to be putting into their cloud? Well, quite. So in 2022, Unit 8200 began using Microsoft's cloud to store and process vast amounts of data which allow it to realize Saril's ambition to capture millions of phone calls made by Palestinians every single day.

12:57Basically, a program of mass surveillance. How much was this specific deal worth to Microsoft? So Microsoft's executives anticipated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue as a result of this project over several years. But for them, I don't think it was just about revenue. is also about working with this vaunted military surveillance agency, which has a reputation for being particularly adept at cyber operations and cyber security, and that they saw that this partnership, they could learn things where their engineers were working side by side with Unate 100 engineers to build security protections into the Azure cloud platform, which they could then say to their clients, look how wonderful and secure our cloud is.

13:45And that in one of the documents we saw, this partnership on this particular cloud project was referred to as, quote, an incredibly powerful brand moment. And so for the company, certainly some of the executives within Microsoft saw this as a potentially lucrative commercial opportunity in terms of the revenues it could generate, but also it seems to have been something of a kind of marketing opportunity too.

14:19Harry, what did this surveillance operation look like for Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza? How did it work? If they were making a phone call, an old-fashioned phone call on their mobile, one mobile to another, then within the system, the call would have been recorded twice. On one side, the person who made the call, and then on the other side, the person who received the call. But if the caller is calling an international number or an Israeli number or just a number that sits outside of the Palestinian communications network, then they would just have one copy, if you like. I think an important thing to remember here is that Israel exerts a great deal of control over the Palestinian telecommunications network and infrastructure.

15:01So this has meant that they've been able to keep Palestinians in Gaza on 2G, 2G network, and in the West Bank, 3G. And so as a result of that, it can be more challenging to make WhatsApp calls, for example. So you might be relying on more old-fashioned cellular mobile-to-mobile calls, which are much easier for Unit 8200 to collect. So in a sense, while Unit 8200 is celebrated as being deeply sophisticated, it also has a great deal of ease to collect information about people who are living under a military occupation. Because there's no checks and balances on that? Very few. Harry, what would Unit 8200 be doing with all this data?

15:48How are they analysing it? One of the things that Yossi Sariel championed and wanted his intelligence officers to do was to use machine learning methods, AI-driven techniques to query and analyse the data. So, for example, there may be a set of words that Unit 8200 has decided are problematic or indicators of future terrorist activity as they perceive it. And that those keywords would then be automatically searched for within the repository of data that they are collecting. So if you use a word in a conversation which has been deemed to be problematic or an indicator of what the unit might perceive as terrorist activity, then that conversation may be automatically flagged.

16:38And so the intelligence officer would be able to go in, look at that conversation and decide whether they thought there was anything there to further investigate, whether this is an individual they wanted to look for. But they could also look for specific phrases or you could ask the system to flag calls that were made by a certain individual over a certain period of time in a particular place. Right. So irrespective of how innocent the context may be, I mean, say a neighbour was killed and that was being discussed over the phone, but there are key words like Israeli, military, killing. Yes. That would have picked up.

17:14That could have been flagged. And then at that point, it's then for the intelligence officer to look at that call and decide on the intelligence value of it. And then how would that intelligence be used? So the initial focus of this cloud-based system was the West Bank. And what the sources we've spoken to have explained is that the intelligence that would be gleaned from the phone calls that were held in this system had been used in various ways that have shaped military operations in the West Bank, arrests, detentions, raids. and sometimes that information that was gleaned or taken from phone calls could be used, for example, to blackmail people and we also heard one claim which was that intelligence could be even used to justify a killing after it had occurred.

18:18So, Sarev's ambition for the way his unit would monitor and track Palestinians became operational with help from Microsoft in 2022, prior to the October 7th attacks. How have these tools been used since Israel began its war on Gaza? So the sources from the unit that we've spoken to say that intelligence drawn from this enormous repository of phone calls, which is held in Microsoft's cloud platform, has been used to research and identify bombing targets in Israel's war in Gaza. For example, one source we spoke to explained that when they were planning an airstrike on an individual who was located in a densely populated area where there were high numbers of civilians present, the calls would be used to determine who else that individual was in touch with as part of the sort of intelligence case for making that strike.

19:13Microsoft have denied that there is any evidence linking its technologies to target and or harm civilians. How much would Microsoft have known about the data and what Unit 8200 are doing with it? Microsoft has insisted that it doesn't know what its clients are holding within the cloud. You kind of wouldn't expect or want a cloud provider to necessarily know what you're storing within its cloud and that there is a degree of confidentiality which Unit 800 enjoys in its data in the cloud. But this isn't just a normal customer who is renting out a bit of server and putting some things in. This is a part of a big partnership where engineers are working side by side with military intelligence personnel to create a segregated, customized area within the cloud in which Unit 800 can move its data.

20:06The company insists that it did not know that Unit 800 was going to be storing vast amounts of incepted Palestinian phone calls in the cloud. What we know based on the conversations we've had and the documents we've seen is that Unit 800 told Microsoft of their plan to move this huge amount of data into the cloud. And that included secret and top secret intelligence material, classified, sensitive raw intelligence material. And that was known at a relatively senior level in the company, well, at a very senior level in the company. Right. And then when you get down to the engineers who are specifically working on the project, the information that we've seen and the conversations we've had suggests that the engineers, particularly in Israel, who are working for the company and working side by side with the unit, were aware that some of this information was going to include audio files.

21:14Harry, I guess one of the most obvious questions amid all of this seems to be that if Unit 8200 were engaged in such a complex and widespread level of surveillance across the West Bank and Gaza for the safety and security of Israelis, why did they fail to prevent the October 7th attacks by Hamas. So in the wake of October 7th, Sariel and his unit faced criticism for, in particular for his prioritization of what have been described as addictive and exciting technologies over old-fashioned intelligence methods that would, for example, see an officer listening to every call of a particular suspect and thinking about nuances and things they were saying.

21:56And there was a criticism that the unit was effectively rather overwhelmed by all of this data that was now collecting on an entire population. And there were some warnings within 8200. There was a particular analyst who got hold of a plan that Hamas had written that was articulating a kind of strategy that was very similar to the one that they then pursued in the run-up to and on the day of October 7th. And that there was certainly a sense within Unit 800 that they had missed some specific warnings in the year leading up to the attacks in southern Israel. Sarial, interestingly, when he stepped down from 8 to 100, said that the responsibility of October 7th squarely falls on his shoulders.

22:41So he stepped down as a consequence? Yes, he stepped down at the end of last year.

22:50Coming up. Microsoft battles against a growing backlash.

23:04Harry, you and Yuval have been investigating the relationship between Microsoft and Israel for some time. How has your reporting gone down within the company? In January, Yuval and I published a story about the way in which the relationship between the IDF and Microsoft had deepened during the war, the way in which the military was relying upon a whole suite of Microsoft services. And in response to that story and the sort of growing dissent within the company, Microsoft commissioned a report, an external review into its relationship with the military. and that review went on for several months and then in May they published, not the findings, but they published a blog post which said that to date they had found no evidence that its Azure cloud platform and its AI technologies have been used to harm people or had been involved in targeting people within Gaza.

24:03But there is a sense that they're also marking their own homework here. Yes, it's a little unclear who did this report, how it was done. The report hasn't been published. And what we understand now is that there were certain conclusions that were made in that review, which are now being reappraised or looked at again by Microsoft following our reporting. And what about Microsoft employees? How have they responded to all of this? There's been a great deal of internal dissent within Microsoft. Employees of the company who are looking at what's happening in Gaza and thinking about the role that Microsoft and its technology has played in Israel's operations in the territory and raise concerns about whether the company has been complicit in some of the documented war crimes in the operation there.

24:53So at one point in May, Satya Nadella was on stage giving a keynote speech about new Microsoft products and services. And in an act of protest, one employee got up and began shouting. Satya! How about you show them how Microsoft is killing Palestinians? How about you show them how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure? As a Microsoft worker, I refuse to be complicit in this genocide. He was then swiftly escorted out of the room. As one would expect. Bundled out. Yeah, and he was one of many Microsoft employees who were raising concerns internally, both privately but also publicly, about the role that Microsoft's technology has been playing in military operations in Gaza.

25:47And can you tell me anything about the wider public response to your reporting? Shortly after we published our story last week, a group of activists in the Netherlands went to a big data centre that Microsoft operates in the north of the country and scaled the roof. They were on top of the roof. They had flares. They also chained themselves at the entrance of the data center. And they were calling for Microsoft to effectively dispose of the 11 ,500 terabytes of Israeli military information that they hold in the country. Free, free, free Palestine! Free, free, free Palestine! Free Palestine! Free Palestine!

26:29Harry, what has this investigation shown you about the impact big tech has in supporting military and intelligence services across the world? So we think of these technology companies as civilian companies in many ways. We use their services, we use them for our email, to organise our lives, to buy things, to store our photographs. And we perhaps don't spend enough time thinking about them as effectively as defense contractors, as part of military industrial complexes, as providers of very important capabilities and services to militaries and intelligence agencies. And we've been focusing on its work with the Israeli military.

27:07And the Israeli military for the past 22 months has been involved in a campaign that has flattened a territory where 2.2 million people live. It has destroyed civilian life. And I think that the role that a company like Microsoft plays in military operations is one which should be closely scrutinized. And that's what we've been trying to do in our reporting. Harry, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

27:44That was Harry Davis, Investigations Correspondent at The Guardian. My thanks to him and to Yuval Abraham. You can read their reporting on this story and more at theguardian.com.