Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its tech in mass surveillance of Palestinians
helsinkiandrew · 9 months ago
48 comments
helsinkiandrew · 9 months ago
48 comments
srameshc · 9 months ago
> Microsoft told Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200, the military’s elite spy agency, had violated the company’s terms of service by storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform
You can spy but data is all mine.
sionisrecur · 9 months ago
What's the protocol when a client stores data that violates their terms of service? Delete it immediately? Retain it until the client can retrieve a backup? Deny access until they sign a new contract?
IlikeKitties · 9 months ago
I suspect that really depends on the content. What does Microsoft do when it's CSAM? They can't legally posses it but can't legally delete it because that would be destroying evidence. I'm sure there's a process.
Cenk · 9 months ago
> 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data – equivalent to approximately 200m hours of audio – was held in Microsoft’s Azure servers in the Netherlands
Aeolun · 9 months ago
It bothers me more that it was held in the Netherlands than that it was held on Azure servers.
It’s a fucking disgrace to any government to be facilitating anything like this, and the Netherlands seems extra complicit.
dh2022 · 9 months ago
What makes you think Netherlands government knows what data resides within its borders?
Aeolun · 9 months ago
I don’t necessarily expect them to know what resides within their borders, I merely expect them to act against atrocities. It is no accident that all this data was located in the Netherlands.
jfengel · 9 months ago
Would it have been different elsewhere in Europe?
Antibabelic · 9 months ago
It was located in the Netherlands because the Netherlands has excellent privacy and data protection laws. It's the same reason so much cybercrime is traced back to Dutch servers.
bilekas · 9 months ago
But why do you think the Netherlands govt was in anyway involved in this? I host some bsremetal in the Netherlands but I don't need to report to the government what I store..
dh2022 · 9 months ago
I wonder why IDC choose the Netherlands location. Microsoft has one Azure region in Israel itself: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/reliability/regions-...
honeycrispy · 9 months ago
Safer from ballistics
smileybarry · 9 months ago
The Israel Azure region wasn't launched until 2023, and AFAIK has substantially less services available than the others. I know Google's Israel region doesn't have as many GPU options, for example.
AlfredBarnes · 9 months ago
Why build something near or semi near conflict?
serialNumber · 9 months ago
Valid question, but just look at the huge amount of R&D / the tech companies in Israel. Even if it’s near conflict, I don’t think companies care
darkwater · 9 months ago
A company doesn't care. An army does.
warrenmiller · 9 months ago
might have something to do with the Netherlands being a large investor in Israel. the largest in the EU. It's responsible for two-thirds of EU investment in Israel. https://www.somo.nl/economic-sanctions-eu-is-israel-largest-...
ballenf · 9 months ago
How much would the bill be for this?
tiahura · 9 months ago
A little more surveillance might have prevented Oct 7.
n1b0m · 9 months ago
A lack of surveillance wasn’t the problem. It was not believing the intelligence.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/israeli-milita...
mrits · 9 months ago
Such a Monday quarterback's perspective. There is always plenty of intelligence to suggest there will be an attack
yamazakiwi · 9 months ago
The amount of intelligence to suggest there will be an attack on specific places at specific times is contextual and not comparably equal.
Every time I hear or read that expression, I stop taking the comment seriously because it attempts to shut down dialogue with a cute, esoteric phrase instead of fostering a discussion about a serious retrospective.
nemomarx · 9 months ago
Not moving troops and police away from the border might have prevented Oct 7th. I think they were more focused on the West Bank at the time.
emsign · 9 months ago
Or following up the reports of suspicious behavior in Gaza by your own IDF border troops days before the terror attack.
fph · 9 months ago
Ah, yes, the classic argument: we must ramp up surveillance because it is the only way to stop pedophiles, terrorists, and pirates.
buyucu · 9 months ago
Egyptian intelligence informed Israel before October 7. Israel chose to let it happen anyway: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67082047
Israeli government wanted October 7 to happen, because they knew it would provide a good pretext for the genocide they wanted to commit.
codeulike · 9 months ago
“I want to note our appreciation for the reporting of the Guardian,” [Microsoft’s vice-chair and president, Brad Smith] wrote, noting that it had brought to light “information we could not access in light of our customer privacy commitments”. He added: “Our review is ongoing.”
Its interesting that they seem to be saying they dont know the full details of how their customers are using Azure, due to privacy commitments.
AnonymousPlanet · 9 months ago
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"
scuff3d · 9 months ago
More likely MS was well aware of what was going on and didn't care until the Guardian forced their hand.
ms7m · 9 months ago
> 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
scuff3d · 9 months ago
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.
AlfredBarnes · 9 months ago
A tale as old as time.
lazide · 9 months ago
If they weren’t intended to be thrown under the bus, they’d be called… superordinates? I guess?
scuff3d · 9 months ago
Not to sound too much like a reddit comment... but God damnit take my upvote.
keeda · 9 months ago
And if they all just took the bus together they'd be coordinates?
lazide · 9 months ago
‘I’m shocked! shocked! that there is gambling in this establishment! This is unacceptable!’
‘Your winnings sir’
williamdclt · 9 months ago
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
ngcazz · 9 months ago
Well, the average org isn't out there literally committing genocide
madaxe_again · 9 months ago
Privacy ayatollah? Is that like an infosec shah?
dudeinjapan · 9 months ago
Grand Mullah of GDPR Compliance
saghm · 9 months ago
Metadata monitoring messiah
pyrale · 9 months ago
Privacy professing prelate
Surveillance-Suspicious Saint
spongebobism · 9 months ago
Chain of Custody Cakkavatti
lioeters · 9 months ago
Bodhisattva of Vibe Ops Infrachaos
dudeinjapan · 9 months ago
Supreme Pontiff of Vendor Asset Tagging
lazide · 9 months ago
Data pope?
thewebguyd · 9 months ago
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.
clort · 9 months ago
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)
keeda · 9 months ago
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...
Etheryte · 9 months ago
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.
IlikeKitties · 9 months ago
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.
hnlmorg · 9 months ago
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.
IlikeKitties · 9 months ago
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.
hnlmorg · 9 months ago
Ahhh I hadn’t realised that was a new term. I’ve got something new to learn. Thank you
jiggawatts · 9 months ago
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/confidential-computi...
StanislavPetrov · 9 months ago
What country does this "confidential computing" exist in, and how can I get there?
braiamp · 9 months ago
That comment is... weird, considering they disabled the accounts of certain International Court of Justice that were individually targeted.
lazide · 9 months ago
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.
covercash · 9 months ago
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...
cl0ckt0wer · 9 months ago
If they act on information their employees report, they are violating their commitments.
sc68cal · 9 months ago
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.
meowface · 9 months ago
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.
Aarostotle · 9 months ago
Did something happen in 2023 that makes it _less_ relevant for Israel to try to prevent terrorist activity?
meowface · 9 months ago
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.
JumpCrisscross · 9 months ago
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.
meowface · 9 months ago
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.
JumpCrisscross · 9 months ago
> 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.)
DaveExeter · 9 months ago
There was the Warsaw uprising.
JumpCrisscross · 9 months ago
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.
babu657 · 9 months ago
Warsaw uprising with killing babies. Sure you’re the good guys
pcthrowaway · 9 months ago
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-...
meowface · 9 months ago
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.
hashim · 9 months ago
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?
JumpCrisscross · 9 months ago
> 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.)
hashim · 9 months ago
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.
SilverElfin · 9 months ago
> 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?
hashim · 9 months ago
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.
pcthrowaway · 9 months ago
> 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.
meowface · 9 months ago
Didn't Israel end the occupation of Gaza between 2005 and 2023? They still put up a blockade, but they didn't occupy it.
sc68cal · 9 months ago
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
pcthrowaway · 9 months ago
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.
meowface · 9 months ago
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.
fsckboy · 9 months ago
>I am not saying Israel is nearly as bad as Nazi Germany
oh, that's generous of you
meowface · 9 months ago
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.
concinds · 9 months ago
No, because those employees didn't learn about it by snooping around in Azure data.
zamadatix · 9 months ago
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?
covercash · 9 months ago
> 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.
michael1999 · 9 months ago
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.
duxup · 9 months ago
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.
kevin_thibedeau · 9 months ago
They should ask their Chinese engineers in charge of sensitive Azure servers.
filoleg · 9 months ago
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.”
slt2021 · 9 months ago
JIDF and Unit 8200 have infiltrated a lot of US tech companies.
This is a very significant issue for American tech companies, they either need to restore the trust of global customers, or they will lose it completely.
nashashmi · 9 months ago
What is interesting is they gave some privacy while others they strip away.
buyucu · 9 months ago
A small step, mostly for PR I guess, but still better than nothing.
There should be no tech for genocide!
hdlothia · 9 months ago
Kinda bullish for azure that the idf chose it over aws
igleria · 9 months ago
Not sure about that. To many companies or individuals, it might make them choose another provider. Unless... they already are Azure customers, in which case they might probably want to avoid the cost of moving from a cloud provider
tasn · 9 months ago
Israel (like many governments) is very Microsoft Windows centric, so if I had to guess it wasn't chosen due to technical merits but instead based on existing business relationships.
Note: I've used Azure and it sucks. :)
dmix · 9 months ago
Azure’s web app for managing servers is a nightmare
Uses the same awful UI/plaform as their Xbox account settings
Microsoft always somehow succeeds in spite of the quality of everything they build.
AtlasBarfed · 9 months ago
If the AI systems of these companies had 1/3 their hype, their craptastic admin consoles for their 100 billion dollar cloud companies would improve.
... any day now. aaaaaany dayyyy now. Yeah.
NooneAtAll3 · 9 months ago
why would that imply bullying?
madaxe_again · 9 months ago
Bullish, as in, not bearish.
blitzar · 9 months ago
implying not bearing
asadm · 9 months ago
meh more of a bearish signal. evil using shitty evil tech.
_blk · 9 months ago
Seems to be fairly equivalent to ABC pulling Kimmel and reinstating it a few days later.
aaomidi · 9 months ago
After they fired how many protestors?
pbiggar · 9 months ago
There was an interesting point in the earlier article on this, where Microsoft tried to push their Israeli employees under a bus. They claimed their Israeli employees had lied to them about the use of Azure for war and civilian harm because they held more allegiance to their army than to Microsoft.
Now obviously, this was a lie, but the implication is staggering: Microsoft can't trust it's own employees in Israel, and believes they're lying to the mothership! And if microsoft can't trust them, surely no one else should either!
hashim · 9 months ago
Unrelated, I knew I recognised that name, thank you for everything you do, I've made a few commits to T4P myself in the last few months and can't imagine the regular work that must go into it.
jajuuka · 9 months ago
Wow, they actually are pulling back. That is really surprising. Wonder if they see the winds changing on this issue and want to get on the right side of history. Big props to everyone at Microsoft who spoke out about this and risked or lost their jobs because of it. They kept that fire lit on their ass.
slantedview · 9 months ago
Last week a UN human rights commission found that Israel is carrying out a genocide. I think you're right that the winds have changed and now companies will shift their positions.
rhetocj23 · 9 months ago
Sentiment toward Israel outside of USA has changed.
The leaders of the developed nations of Europe have gone against Trump and publicly stated their recognition of Palestine.
some-guy · 9 months ago
It has changed quite a bit here in the US too, even among the Jewish population. Our synagogue is very divided on this, mainly between the young and the old.
sieep · 9 months ago
Very true. I've gone on dates with a couple Jewish women over the past two or three years & they've all staunchly supported Palestine which surprised me a bit.
zeroonetwothree · 9 months ago
Your sample size of two surely is conclusive? lol
sieep · 9 months ago
I'm just speaking from my personal experience and don't mean to draw any conclusions about anything.
khazhoux · 9 months ago
I can understand your skepticism, but this is an example of what is termed “normal human conversation,” where people share their personal experiences. Quite often, one will find people sharing stories without the backing of statistical evidence.
Aeolun · 9 months ago
Why would that surprise you? I think the opposite opinion is a lot more surprising.
One in every 50 children in Gaza was killed by the Israeli military. That’s like killing a child in every second classroom in the US…
sieep · 9 months ago
That's a fair point. My gut reaction is that people will default to tribalism, but I think this has been a different situation than most others (and going on a lot longer).
sa501428 · 9 months ago
Why is it surprising?
Fwiw my Jewish friends have also been quite vocal in opposing Netanyahu/Likud, usually more vocal than Muslim friends.
DSingularity · 9 months ago
I think it’s surprising because Israelis are very loud in their support for Netanyahu. Yeah, there are protests but it polling suggests that the overwhelming majority of Israelis support Netanyahu.
js212 · 9 months ago
No they are not. It’s like 20%
swat535 · 9 months ago
Comments like that reminds of people asserting blanket statements like: majority of Iranians support the regime and hate Jews!
Like do people not realize Iranian Jews also exist?
Anyway I digress..
DSingularity · 9 months ago
Over 60% of Israelis believe there is nobody innocent in Gaza. That’s like the core operating principle of the Netanyahu-Smotrich-Ben Gvir government. The Israeli street is thoroughly behind the Genocide and the polling has been showing this for over a year.
sieep · 9 months ago
My gut assumption is that people will default to tribalism, but that has proven to be wrong over the past few years.
js212 · 9 months ago
I think the fact that you have gone on dates with Jewish women shows they don’t really care about being Jewish.
madaxe_again · 9 months ago
My boomer Jewish stepmother surprised me when I saw her recently - complete U-turn from last year’s “all Palestinians are human animals” to “Netanyahu is a war criminal”.
lkey · 9 months ago
The statistics bear this out, millennials on down are very against this. Within the last year a true overall majority of the American Jewish population are opposed to what Israel is doing to Gaza. I expect this trend to continue. The truest supporters of Israel in America have always been Christian (for both insane and cynical reasons).
throwaway3060 · 9 months ago
Do you have a source for this?
danans · 9 months ago
Here is a good background:
https://jewishcurrents.org/antisemitic-zionists-arent-a-cont...
Joeboy · 9 months ago
“There you are, Mr. Netanyahu! Just who do you think you are, killing thousands and flattening neighborhoods, then wrapping yourself in Judaism like it’s some shield from criticism? You’re making life for Jews miserable, and life for American Jews impossible!” - Jewish character on the latest South Park, a show created and run by two Jewish people.
Also ”It’s not Jews vs. Palestine, it’s Israel vs. Palestine!”
catigula · 9 months ago
Hard to imagine that this argument exists, the real victims of mass murder aren't the actual victims of mass murder.
Joeboy · 9 months ago
If a country was killing thousands of people and saying it was to make people like you safer, might you not be inclined to point out it's having the opposite effect?
catigula · 9 months ago
No, that isn't my general reaction to Hitler saying he killed Jews to make Europeans safer.
My reaction is "what are you talking about, psycho murderer?"
That's a good look, try that.
Joeboy · 9 months ago
Perhaps we'll have to agree to differ, but I think American Jews being like "not in my name" sends a more politically effective message than "what are you talking about, psycho murderer?".
tbf I'm not primarily interested in what's a good look.
catigula · 9 months ago
I think we're stuck and have to agree to disagree but the message sent is at least indistinguishable from the message of a self-interested sociopathic community with no moral concerns beyond their own. When I do things I at least try to make it discernible from psychopathy.
Joeboy · 9 months ago
I don't really want to get into the A word thing, but your position makes more sense to me from a perspective of being anti-Jewish, rather than pro-Palestinian. From the latter perspective, I think it's better to challenge Israel's narratives than embolden them.
catigula · 9 months ago
I'm glad you realize how silly that word has become. In reality, groups of people via culture or whatever other mechanism do generate certain things that are undeserving or deserving of censure. For example, due to cultural reasons, 1930-1940s Germany produced a high preponderance of Nazis, so we destroyed them.
I'm not suggesting cultural destruction is possible or desireable (maybe it is, but it's not my purview), but if a culture is producing a large preponderance of murderous ethnic supremacists it's time to sound the alarm bells. This entire thing wouldn't have been possible if that community didn't make it so.
This is especially compounded given that this group feels above critique from outsiders. That is a dangerous concoction and unfortunately the end result is wanton murder and redirection of resources to abet it. I think we're all about sick of the killing now. With great power comes great responsibility to be a moral agent.
Joeboy · 9 months ago
I think word is sometimes used as a cudgel to derail reasonable discussion. I still think it has its place and at this point, yeah I'm going to say you're unambiguously an antisemite.
catigula · 9 months ago
[flagged]
flyinglizard · 9 months ago
Palestinians don't discern Jews and Israelis. If you listen to this recording you'll understand - they're after the Jews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bACNYtaLBQI
Joeboy · 9 months ago
I think you're probably propagandizing rather than trying to engage coherently with the conversation, but perhaps I'm missing something.
flyinglizard · 9 months ago
I was directly referring to your closing line saying ”It’s not Jews vs. Palestine, it’s Israel vs. Palestine!”. Given that about half of Israelis are Arab in origin, and about a fifth are proper Muslims, the objection of Palestinians is not to Israelis but to Jews. The video I linked demonstrates the common mode of thought in that part of the world.
Joeboy · 9 months ago
You linked audio of a phone call from a Hamas terrorist, as evidence that "Palestinians don't discern Jews and Israelis". I hope you can see the irony there.
There's also, I think, an irony that antisemites and Zionists are united in their their efforts to conflate Jewishness with the actions of the Israeli state. I think it's a welcome development that Parker / Stone / Sheila Broflovski aren't going along with it.
DSingularity · 9 months ago
Politics is weird. With the Biden administration there was lots of lip service given in opposition to the slaughter in Gaza while at the same time they were shipping unprecedented amounts of weapons to the IDF.
Now with Trump they state that they have max support for Israel while it seems like all of Europe is turning away from unconditional support for Israel and a massive change in the typical rhetoric around media in the US. That’s odd.
dmix · 9 months ago
The article says they are continuing to work with IDF. It’s the spy agency who crossed a line.
leosussan · 9 months ago
Honestly, respect to the big M.
moogly · 9 months ago
No one left to surveil, I guess.
underdeserver · 9 months ago
Estimates of deaths are around 60,000, of a 2 million strong population.
moogly · 9 months ago
I could write things here about those officially reported deaths (not estimates, which are much higher, but no one really knows and very likely never will), or the internal diaplacement, but since there might be at least 1 Palestinian still alive digging in the rubble somewhere, literalists like you would still feel the need to overcorrect.
I thought the defeated tone of my post made it clear that it was not meant to be taken that literally. I guess not.
Hikikomori · 9 months ago
That's about the latest number from Gaza health ministry that stopped counting well over a year ago as Israel had destroyed all but one hospital. It doesn't even count the people left in rubble from destroying 80% of all buildings.
amscanne · 9 months ago
This is nonsense. The Gaza health ministry continues to report estimates, of which are substantial portion are missing and presumed dead.
hashim · 9 months ago
If you think that figure is remotely accurate despite the fact Israel has decimated all hospitals, leveled entire areas, wiped out entire families and is starving those that are still alive to do the counting, you're being naive, and that's a generous interpretation. Once Israel finally allow the UN in, that figure is going up by a factor of at least 2 or 3. The true cost of most genocides are only counted years after it's over, when it's too late.
AtlasBarfed · 9 months ago
So... 1/10th of the civilian deaths in the Iraq war?
aa-jv · 9 months ago
Iraq lost 5% of its population to the US' illegal, criminal war, and Iraqi mothers are still losing children to the side effects of the DU that has been deposited all over its major cities.
So the atrocity continues in Iraq, even to this day.
aa-jv · 9 months ago
Confirmed deaths are in the 60,000's.
Estimated deaths are in the 300,000's.
The international community must be allowed into Gaza to start counting skeletons.
oefrha · 9 months ago
Military spy agency involved in ongoing war stores 11.5PB of data, Microsoft commissioned external review founds no evidence that military spy agency is using said data to target and harm people, only to backtrack after media breaking more project details? Come the fuck on. What’s the point of these performative external reviews? Just thugs hired to say whatever their customer wants them to say.
sharpshadow · 9 months ago
It would be only just if the Palestinians would get their own state after this.
barbazoo · 9 months ago
And their own datacenter!
lupusreal · 9 months ago
Right of return for all Palestinians and their descendants, worldwide.
vkou · 9 months ago
Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, here, that would have the stench of colonialism about it.
It's not their land to 'return to' - after all, people already live there and they have no moral right to displace them.
lupusreal · 9 months ago
They have been deliberately displaced by Israeli's apartheid government giving Jewish people around the world a "right to return" to Israel. Except unlike the Palestinians, they were never from Israel in the first place so the term "right to return" as used by Israel is nothing but colonialist propaganda.
Undoing colonialism isn't colonialism.
lazide · 9 months ago
It’s all just the ‘hopes and prayers’ of the left anyway. When someone doesn’t give a damn (like Israel right now), all the public shaming is just another version of the UN’s strongly worded letter.
hashim · 9 months ago
Yes, the shameless and evil generally aren't to be reasoned with, in which case things will come to a head and there are other ways to stop genocides. See for example, the Nazis.
albulab · 9 months ago
Hey chatgpt how many jews displaced from Arab countries in 1948? and how many descendants they have today?
hashim · 9 months ago
So you think the Jews imported by the One Million Plan and the tens of others like it were "displaced"? There's a reason that the multiplicity of Jews in Israel today are American and European immigrants with no connection to the land whatsoever.
throwforfeds · 9 months ago
Honestly can't tell if this is satire or not.
buellerbueller · 9 months ago
Poe's law! Welcome to the internet!
lupusreal · 9 months ago
I can only hope it is, and assume it isn't.
basilgohar · 9 months ago
How do you think Israel was formed in the first place? Or is your comment intentionally ironic?
ars · 9 months ago
In the fist place? That was 3,000 or so years ago.
basilgohar · 9 months ago
There was never a country called Israel until 1948. It was always Palestine.
The idea of a nation called Israel is the invention of Zionists in the 19th and 20th century.
hashim · 9 months ago
And spearheaded by the Haganah and Irgun, who were violent terrorists whose many bombings "persuaded" the British to hand the land over to them.
SilverElfin · 9 months ago
Ancient Israelites existed approximately 2000 years before your incorrect claimed timeline. Today’s Jews are descendants of Israelites.
It is also trivially simply to disprove “It was always Palestine”. It was made up by Romans. Again, much later than when Jewish people lived there.
lupusreal · 9 months ago
Today's Israel has absolutely nothing to do with ancient Israel. They took on the name as propaganda, a cynically constructed state origin myth.
ars · 9 months ago
Really? Nothing?
It's the same people, on the same land, practicing the same religion, speaking the same language, with the same alphabet, with the same capital, with the same place names, with the same cities, with the same core texts, with the same national holidays.
But that's somehow nothing? At this point you'd have to actually work hard to figure out what's not the same.
Israel is an example of anti-colonialism, where the original inhabitants of the land were able to take it back from invaders.
basilgohar · 9 months ago
It's amazing how everything you say above is proveably false.
They are not the same people. Modern day Palestinians share more ethnic heritage with the land's original inhabitants than European Zionist settlers.
The religion of the region has been different throughout time. Judaism is one religion of that region, and not the only nor even the first.
The language is not the same. Modern Hebrew that is spoken in Israel diverges significantly from the original Hebrew, which is more closely spoke by Yemeni Jews, for example.
Everything else is in your list is done by fiat, as even the the UN and the vast, vast majority of the world do not recognize Jerusalem as the capital.
Israel is the last major European colony and it's an anachronism that will go down in history as the final failed attempt at Western Imperialism.
mupuff1234 · 9 months ago
You do realize all nations are man made inventions, right?
jameshilliard · 9 months ago
> There was never a country called Israel until 1948. It was always Palestine.
Palestine was never a country before 1948, immediately prior to 1948 there was a British Mandate[0] with the name Palestine, but this mandate included land that would eventually turn into countries like Jordan(which just so happens to be a country with a Palestinian majority population). After 1948 and before 1967 the West Bank was annexed by Jordan and Gaza was occupied and administered by Egypt.
The idea of a nation called Palestine is arguably a more recent invention than the nation of Israel.
buyucu · 9 months ago
Israel was formed by invading Palestine, murdering Palestinians and forcing them to migrate.
jameshilliard · 9 months ago
Jewish immigration to Palestine was initially accomplished by buying land from Arab landowners during the time when it was ruled by the Ottoman Empire.
buyucu · 9 months ago
Is that why millions of Palestinians are refugees in other countries?
Israel's founding principles are mass murder and invasion.
jameshilliard · 9 months ago
> Is that why millions of Palestinians are refugees in other countries?
Palestinian refugees are defined differently by the UN vs essentially all other refugees.
Palestinian refugees fall under the UNRWA while normal refugees(i.e. refugees from essentially all other countries) fall under the UNHCR. The UNRWA definition is hereditary while the UNHCR definition is not. This hereditary definition is largely why the Palestinian refugee populations can increase over time in other countries so easily vs normal refugees.
buyucu · 9 months ago
no matter how you define it, those people had to run away from Palestine because of Israeli murderers.
jameshilliard · 9 months ago
> those people had to run away from Palestine because of Israeli murderers
There were multiple reason they(or their ancestors) left, there was plenty of violence when Israel was created but it wasn't like it was just one side attacking either. Regardless it's quite strange that someone is still considered a refugee despite potentially having never even been to the country they are supposedly a refugee from, especially since that doesn't happen for refugees from other countries(at least with how the UN defines refugee).
buyucu · 9 months ago
Are you seriously defending expelling millions of people from their homes? What is wrong with you?
jameshilliard · 9 months ago
There was a war, people fled and were expelled from their homes for various reasons, Jews lost their homes as well due to the war. Sometimes fleeing a conflict is the least bad option. I have grandparents that had to flee their homes due to living in a country that was on the losing side of a war, they never got their homes/land back. I would probably even be considered a refugee by the UNRWA definition of refugee used for Palestinians. After Israels independence most Jews living in Arab countries were also forced out of their homes/land, I don't see Jews trying to get their original homes back in those Arab countries either. We can't go back in time and fix all the historical wrongs in the world, we have to move forwards.
mupuff1234 · 9 months ago
How do you think most countries or borders were formed? It's almost all wars and displacement.
flyinglizard · 9 months ago
Israel was not formed by displacement. That's a common misconception. Jews bought lands all across Palestine in early 1900's, with bodies such as the JNF. The displacement ("Nakba") came in 1948, during the Israeli War of Independence (started by the Arabs in Palestine and abroad), and even that mostly concerned areas which participated in the war. Areas that remained peaceful integrated into Israel (today's Israeli Arabs, 23% of the population).
Hikikomori · 9 months ago
Started by the Arabs is charitable when Jewish terrorists went around massacring villages.
Saline9515 · 9 months ago
It wasn't started by the Palestinians. Israelis conduced ethnic cleansing operations against civilians to displace them, including biowarfare and well poisoning. It continues today, in Gaza and in the West Bank.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_expulsion_from_L...
flyinglizard · 9 months ago
The article you linked refers to events during the war of 1948, when Israel was already formalized. It's establishment up to that point was primarily based on lawful acquisition, not expulsion. When it turned to an all out war, then yes, expulsion took place.
Saline9515 · 9 months ago
Palestinians still owned most of the land... and buying land doesn't give you the right to rule over the peasants who till it. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/Pa...
hashim · 9 months ago
Yes, it was so lawful that the Irgun had to bomb the British and Palestinians to lawfully convince them to hand it to them.
pessimizer · 9 months ago
Imagine you kill my dad, steal his house and turn me out into the street; you get convicted and sent to jail and your son gets to keep the house.
ars · 9 months ago
That what Jordan did to the Jews in Jerusalem, and then handed the house to Palestinians who decided they want to make it their capital.
basilgohar · 9 months ago
You say "the Jews" but you're leaving out that there are Arab Jews and European ones. Arab Jews have lived in Palestine for hundreds of years alongside other Arabs peacefully in coexistence.
The arrival of Zionist European Jews was a phenomonen of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Zionist Jews that came from Europe brought with them a supremecist ideology that, in their eyes, justified all forms of violence committed against the Muslim, Christian, and yes, Jewish Palestians that opposed their colonization.
I don't know what you're making or misrepresenting in your statememt about Jordan and Jerusalem, but Jews have always lived in Jerusalem since the Muslims first took control of it 1400 years ago when Umar ibn El-Khattab brought back in Jews who had been expelled by the Christian rulers prior to that.
Jews have always prospered under actual religious Muslim rule, whether in Palestine, Spain, Morocco, Iran, or otherwise. Zionism is what drove a rift between Muslims and Jews in past two centuries, as prior to this there never was one.
ars · 9 months ago
> I don't know what you're making or misrepresenting in your statememt about Jordan and Jerusalem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanian_annexation_of_the_We...
"The Jordanians immediately expelled all the Jewish residents of East Jerusalem.[54] Mark Tessler cites John Oesterreicher as writing that during Jordanian rule, "34 out of the Old City's 35 synagogues were dynamited. Some were turned into stables, others into chicken coops.""
Which is why Palestinians should never get East Jerusalem as their capital, it's simply not theirs, not even in the nebulous way that the West Bank is.
This:
> Jews have always prospered under actual religious Muslim rule, whether in Palestine, Spain, Morocco, Iran, or otherwise. Zionism is what drove a rift between Muslims and Jews in past two centuries, as prior to this there never was one.
Is not true, as even a cursory view of the history will reveal endless massacres of Jews by Muslims.
basilgohar · 9 months ago
This is completely in the context of the formation of Israel in 1948.
Also, you are lying about "endless massacres of Jews by Muslims". This is not, has never been, and continues to not be, true whatsoever.
Arabs and Muslims didn't even have antisemitism before Zionism existed. You can only look to times after Zionism with its supremeist ideology to find hostility from Arabs and Muslims specifically targeting Jews for being Jewish. It simply did not exist and they have coexisted for nearly the entirety of the history of Islam. Only when Europeans came down into the Middle East and they segmented and separated the society did this occur.
Avi Shlaim [0], an Israeli and also Arab Jew, talks extensively about the peaceful coexistence Muslims and Jews had for hundreds of years in the Middle East prior to Zionism.
Zionism tried to force a wedge between Arab Jews and Muslims that simply wasn't there beforehand.
Sporktacular · 9 months ago
I'm as against the genocide as you can be, but what you are saying is historically completely inaccurate. Discrimination against Jews is old, older than Israel or Zionism. The arguments against the land theft and genocide are strong enough without the hyperbole.
nailer · 9 months ago
Also for the 850K middle eastern Jews that were kicked out of their countries by arabs?
octopoc · 9 months ago
If committing genocide puts the genociders in a tough spot, then I’m actually cool with that
MSFT_Edging · 9 months ago
On genetic terms, the Palestinians are virtually identical to Semitic Jews.
There's been plenty of slander to try to say they're more arab, but they're essentially close cousins.
Which leads one to believe, perhaps a large amount of the jews in the region simply moved on with the times with the new religion taking hold.
Essentially Israel/Palestine is a fight between cousins, and one side's inlaws who never actually came from the region but converted elsewhere.
So converts vs converts. Do the local converts have a say over the foreign converts?
The idea that land rights can be derived from the bible or spans of 1000s of years is silly, but the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine going back to 1945 is within living memory.
worik · 9 months ago
> On genetic terms...
...race is fiction.
Genetic analysis does not match "racial" classifications
"Race" is a social construct
MSFT_Edging · 9 months ago
I think you missed my point. I'm trying to say a people split, some left, some stayed. The part that left is now doing violence on the part that stayed, claiming ownership of the area.
The goal of the genetic stuff is to point this split out, not delineate races.
Sadly though, this conflict is full of racism. The Gazans are described as "Arabs" and therefore undeserving of the land. If it turns out the Gazans are not Arabs, but also locals to the region, then what does that mean?
hashim · 9 months ago
Kicked out? Is that what you call the One Million Plan and all the other plans like it? They were imported there because that's been the MO of the state of Israel since the Irgun and Haganah first envisioned it.
bhouston · 9 months ago
> It would be only just if the Palestinians would get their own state after this.
This seems off topic. I will flag it.
bhouston · 9 months ago
Good on Microsoft! This is really amazing.
baobun · 9 months ago
All: Please actually read the article before posting conclusions based on the headline or a quick skim. Most of this thread is confused.
throwaway314155 · 9 months ago
This is off-topic, but I'd like to hijack your comment to remind everyone that your comment is _technically_ against the rules. I hope this particular example reveals that the rule against "RTFA" is misguided and should be changed or removed because it creates a culture where people are deliberately misinformed seeking only a summary in the comment section (if that) and some kind of hot take to fume about.
notmyjob · 9 months ago
I agree but there are some dodgy links that make it through and a good way to lower risk is being hesitant to click random links, or at least not being the first person to do so.
hashim · 9 months ago
Articles should probably come with a similar delay that comment replies do, to prevent comments in the first few minutes after it's posted.
lupusreal · 9 months ago
Wow! This is fantastic news, I wouldn't have bet on Microsoft ever doing something like this. I pray it's just the start and other American companies start to do the same.
politelemon · 9 months ago
I am seeing several kneejerk "Microsoft bad" reactions here, which HNers don't do for many other companies. I encourage many of you to read what is written.
They listened to their internal staff and stakeholders and public pressure, and did terminated the contract instead of ignoring it or doubling down.
That is a good thing.
n1b0m · 9 months ago
They fired staff who protested against the firm’s ties to the IDF.
sugarpimpdorsey · 9 months ago
That's a funny way to say "they fired staff that vandalized company property, broke into the CEO's office, and used an internal company website to publish and promote anti-company propaganda".
That will get you fired from bussing tables or washing dishes, let alone a six-figure job at MS.
Edit: Source on the last one; the first two were widely reported on in media:
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/fired-microsoft-employee-enco...
nashashmi · 9 months ago
One protestor was fired after interrupting a CEO's speech.
keanb · 9 months ago
And?
t1amat · 9 months ago
You might have 1A rights as an American but it seems to me the manner in which this person protested would be grounds for termination in many jurisdictions.
thewebguyd · 9 months ago
1A doesn't apply to private entities anyway. 1A protects against government prosecution for your speech, and the government may make no laws "abridging the freedom of speech."
But your employer? They can put whatever rules and restrictions they want on your speech, and with at-will employment, can fire you for any reason anyway, at anytime.
You can say whatever you want, but you aren't free from the consequences of that speech.
throwaway74628 · 9 months ago
This comment sums up well how the spirit of the law is not being upheld, given that the biggest players in government, finance, and the corporate world are working together hand in glove.
>”Corporations cannot exist without government intervention”
>”Some privates companies and financiers are too big to fail/of strategic national importance”
>”1A does not apply to private entities (including the above)”
>”We have a free, competitive market”
I find it very difficult to resolve these seemingly contradictory statements.
platevoltage · 9 months ago
Literally nothing to do with 1A
BrenBarn · 9 months ago
That's because 1A only has to do with a limited subset of the actual concept of freedom of speech.
duxup · 9 months ago
I feel like interrupting a CEO's speech at a big conference is pretty well understood to be a social indicator of a high level of insubordination. I suspect the protestor knew that too.
The consequences were appropriate, even if I might share some of the protestor's concerns.
snickerdoodle14 · 9 months ago
> insubordination
Are we talking about the military or some company?
duxup · 9 months ago
I think that term can be / is used for individuals at companies.
gmueckl · 9 months ago
US corporate culture has a stronger sense of hierarchy than many other countries. It is an environment where one can get fired quickly and suddenly and that instills a lot of obedience and discipline (if not outright fear) in employees.
duxup · 9 months ago
I don't even think you need a strong sense of hierarchy. The meaning of the word would apply anywhere.
fluoridation · 9 months ago
LOL. The military isn't the only organization with a hierarchy.
rkachowski · 9 months ago
You feel that being fired is an appropriate consequence to interrupting a CEO?
duxup · 9 months ago
When doing a presentation at a big conference, yes.
If it was an open discussion in a meeting with 5 people, no.
sugarpimpdorsey · 9 months ago
Interrupting a speech? Yes. It demonstrates a lack of maturity, decorum, and is completely unprofessional. Someone who pulls these shenanigans is unworthy of the role they were hired for. This isn't high school anymore. They were hired to perform productive work not be disruptive and play pretend activist.
34679 · 9 months ago
You lost me at "pretend activist". This person put their job on the line for what they believe in, and in a public enough way that complete strangers are discussing it on the internet. That's real activism.
sugarpimpdorsey · 9 months ago
If they don't like it, they don't have to work there.
All these people hate on their employer and customers whilst simultaneously drawing a salary.
If they put their money where their mouth is, they can all quit en masse and let the company deal with customers without employees to support.
nashashmi · 9 months ago
If they don't like it, they can voice what they don't like. And that is what happened here.
Dylan16807 · 9 months ago
In general, continuing to get paid while being disruptive and forcing them to fire you is more activist than quitting.
ecshafer · 9 months ago
You are trivializing what they did. This is not that they were in a meeting with the CEO and accidentally spoke interrupting him. They started yelling disrupting the CEOs speech at a large event. Name a single company that wouldn't fire someone for that.
kayodelycaon · 9 months ago
Half the jobs I’ve worked, I’d be immediately fired if I interrupted a CEO’s speech. The other half, I’d be in serious trouble and I’d be first on any layoff.
cm2187 · 9 months ago
I know a story of a guy who got fired for just talking to the CEO of his large company!
snickerdoodle14 · 9 months ago
america sounds like such a hell-hole
that would be a nice compensation package in any first world country
mikestew · 9 months ago
You’re going to base an opinion on a third-hand story? That might not even be true just to illustrate a point?
I know a guy that passed BillG in a hallway and said, “hey, Bill, how’s it hangin’?” (Saw him do it; I was mortified.) Just a bottom-tier IC at the time. 20 years later, he still works there. Still an IC, though, so make of it what you will. :-)
So there, now you have another folksy anecdote to balance things out.
cm2187 · 9 months ago
Well, not quite third-hand, the guy was working in my team. But not a US company, not in the US either though.
rolph · 9 months ago
failure to use acceptable method of interdepartmental communication ?
mikestew · 9 months ago
If I interrupt the CEOs speech at a public conference, yeah, I fully expect to get canned. It’s not like this was an internal all-hands or summat.
ecshafer · 9 months ago
If I did what the protestor did at an internal all-hands or summit I would expect to get canned as well. You can't go up yelling and interrupting the CEO. In an internal all-hands/summit situation you need to maintain decorum, if you have a point you wait until a QA session, then express your displeasure.
tormeh · 9 months ago
Oh, it was an event with custoners invited? Yeah, that's grounds for dismissal anywhere, I'd think. Even in countries with strong labor laws you could just show the court the video recording of an employee doing willfull sabotage.
progbits · 9 months ago
Oh no, is the CEO ok?
n1b0m · 9 months ago
Source?
natebc · 9 months ago
https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-azure-gaza-israel-prote...
There's a couple of sub links off of that one. Not sure if that's what GP was referring too but there is mention in there of employees being terminated related to protests
belorn · 9 months ago
I would also like to read the source for the last claim of that statement. The break-in is well established in multiple sources, and also documented on Wikipedia (citing one of those sources). CNBC also add that they planted microphones (using phones) as listening devices.
"In the aftermath of the protests, Smith claimed that the protestors had blocked people out of the office, planted listening devices in the form of phones, and refused to leave until they were removed by police. " (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/microsoft-fires-two-employee...)
Protestors (in associated with the firing) also projected "Microsoft powers genocide" on the office wall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft).
nashadelic · 9 months ago
They've been raising the alarm for months. If this extreme action is what it took Microsoft to look into genocide and then terminate the contract, it was absolutely the right call
Waterluvian · 9 months ago
Not that you're implying this, but making an "absolutely the right call" does not in any way shield one from consequences.
Heck, it's usually because one will be punished that doing the right thing is in any manner noble. Otherwise it's just meeting minimum expectations as a human.
MomsAVoxell · 9 months ago
After all, why would anyone want to work for a company which actively supports genocide.
lo_zamoyski · 9 months ago
Some people seem to think rioting and vandalism are acceptable behaviors.
It's important that people engaging in such activity are dealt with swiftly and justly. Such behavior further encourages violence and destruction as acceptable behaviors in society, which they are not.
blitzar · 9 months ago
Pardons all round then
mossTechnician · 9 months ago
The United States has a history of rioting, vandalism, and violence. The Boston Tea Party comes to mind. The more important question is the contexts in which it is unacceptable, and who should be given the authority to swiftly deal with it - an authority that will itself require the ability to commit violence.
thewebguyd · 9 months ago
Rioting and vandalism are unacceptable...until they aren't and are instead necessary.
Is everyone so quick to forget that the rights we have today in the US were won through violence after all other methods failed? The 40 hour work week we enjoy today was also won through blood.
Now, in this case between employees and Microsoft I'd agree, no, vandalism wasn't necessary at all.
But when it comes to defending our rights and freedoms, there will come a day when its absolutely necessary, and it's just as valid of a tool as peaceful protest is in enforcing the constitution.
dmix · 9 months ago
There’s been a couple studies showing that disruptive protests (blocking roads, yelling at people entering buildings, etc) cause public support for their cause to decrease or even increase opposition.
If the ideas are good then support will build through effectively communicating those ideas. Being noisy is fine but there’s an obvious line that selfish activists cross. The sort of people who want their toys now and don’t want to patiently do the hard work of organically building up a critical mass. So they immediately start getting aggressive and violent in small groups. Which is counter productive.
lomase · 9 months ago
I think the people is just more vocal, not that the protest changed its opinion, but now they have an excuse, violence, to go against the cause they did not like.
"Violence" like stoping the traffic. If that is violence...
BurningFrog · 9 months ago
Stopping traffic can easily kill people if it stops a medical transport, for example.
Even if it just ruins the day for thousands of people, I have zero sympathy for such assholery. Whether you call it "violence" is unimportant.
lomase · 9 months ago
Using your car every day create trafic and congestion.
I have zero sympathy for people like yourself that use their car every day and put their time before others peoples lifes.
jajuuka · 9 months ago
The classic "an effective protest is one that is neither seen nor heard". Which is just ahistorical. Civil rights in the US was not passed because black folks explained to white people that they are people deserving the same rights as them. I hate this white washing of history as a series of peaceful movements that everyone agreed with.
coredog64 · 9 months ago
The other side of this is that the people doing the protesting have to have the fortitude to accept judicial punishment. If the punishment is out of whack WRT the crime, then you get popular support (e.g. a year in jail for sitting at a lunch counter). But the current situation where folks can break the law and then suffer no consequences? F that noise.
jajuuka · 9 months ago
Sitting at a lunch counter was illegal and the punishment was widely viewed as too light for the protesters. Like the racist violence going on right now, people of color were framed as disturbing the peace and disturbing a private business. There were called animals and criminals. Like I said, buying the white washed version of history where everyone was on the right side.
stale2002 · 9 months ago
There is nothing wrong with being seen or heard. Instead it is that being violently disruptive tends to lose you support.
You are posing a false dilemma where the only thing a person can do to voice there opinion is to destroy or disrupt things.
That's not true though. Instead you can simply voice your options. You can put out manifestos, publish articles in the newspaper, post to social media, or even talk to people in person.
All those methods are how speech and ideas are normally distributed in a normal society. And if people aren't convinced by what you say, then it is time for you to get better arguments.
jajuuka · 9 months ago
If you think being violently disruptive loses you support you should look at any equality movement. I'm not posing a false dilemma, I'm saying that when peaceful means are not working then violence will follow. "A riot is the language of the unheard".
The idea that everyone can just be convinced with a good argument is a nice fantasy but just never true in reality. You've also rigged the game since you can just dig in your heels are refuse any argument and just say "get better arguments". It's a situation no one else can win. If people could so easily be convinced that different people deserve the same rights then we wouldn't have had to spend over a century trying to get them.
kbelder · 9 months ago
It's a difficult question, because obviously violence is out of line for protests about many topics, while just as obviously necessary for some.
I think think that violence or vandalism in this case was unwarranted, but there are some other in this thread who believe otherwise.
I guess that I'd say that, probably, vandals/criminals should always be punished, because they're doing clearly illegal things... and it's up to the protestors to judge whether the cause they're supporting is really worth going to jail for. If sufficient numbers of people feel that, you have a revolution.
(And also, a separate issue, whether the violence is actually going to benefit their cause. It probably won't.)
I certainly don't think that we should be in a position where courts are are judging certain crimes as forgivable because of their cause, while supporters of other causes get the full weight of the law for similar actions. I think the vandals on Jan 6th should get the same punishment as, for instance, similar vandals during BLM.
Forgeties79 · 9 months ago
It’s amazing how many discussions I’ve had in the past decade about how people are supposed to “properly” protest (I.e. in a way that commands as little attention as possible) and how few I’ve had discussing the merits of what people are protesting about.
Except of course Jan 6th, which somehow normalized the belief that the 2020 election was stolen AND gaslit a ton of the country into thinking the violence that occurred did not and therefore doesn’t need to be critiqued.
This admin is truly adept at labeling all forms of dissent or disagreement as unacceptable actions that make discussing the issues at hand impossible.
6510 · 9 months ago
That would put you in the pro genocide camp and subject you to consequences.
themafia · 9 months ago
The employees weren't "rioting."
Vandalism can be measured in dollars. How much did this vandalism actually cost Microsoft to repair?
It's important that we don't ignore context.
worik · 9 months ago
Some people think it is ok to do business with genociders
Forgeties79 · 9 months ago
Every protest we praise in history broke the law at some point.
“Promote company-hating propaganda” is an interesting way to describe what happened.
kayodelycaon · 9 months ago
I think laws enforced by the government are a difference in kind from social standards or company rules.
Laws are backed by legal, physical violence.
sugarpimpdorsey · 9 months ago
Building a website on internal Microsoft infra that ledes with a picture of "Azure Kills Kids" is beyond the pale.
Forgeties79 · 9 months ago
That’s a pretty low bar for “beyond the pale.” Company PR isn’t some sacred thing and these people paid a hefty price for their protest. They should be praised for their bravery even if you disagree with their message.
sugarpimpdorsey · 9 months ago
I make no comment on their message but you cannot use company resources to do it and not expect consequences.
Sorry if that is unclear.
This is a fireable offense in nearly every company handbook in existence.
Forgeties79 · 9 months ago
When did I say they shouldn’t expect consequences or that it wasn’t a fireable offense? The whole point of this discussion is that cries for people to “protest properly” are ridiculous and designed to make protests ineffective.
Clearly I get that their jobs and more were at risk, hence why I said they were brave. The only thing unclear is where you got the impression I thought otherwise.
hashim · 9 months ago
I'm not sure you know what "beyond the pale" means. You probably shouldn't look into the history of the suffragette or civil rights movements, for your own sanity.
vkou · 9 months ago
Killing kids is not beyond the pale, building a website criticizing is.
Hikikomori · 9 months ago
Saying what has happened is worse than it happening? American missiles kill kids, and so does intelligence and support systems they use to do so.
GOD_Over_Djinn · 9 months ago
How can it be “beyond the pale” when it is quite literally true?
duxup · 9 months ago
I think how you protest matters.
I can agree with protestors, also think their choices are bad.
catlover76 · 9 months ago
I am deeply opposed to the Israeli military, and sympathetic to the cause of the employees, but as the other poster pointed out, they were legitimately fired.
Moreover, their actions didn't improve anything and only serve as further fodder for painting their side here as radical.
evolve2k · 9 months ago
Yes it’s a good thing AND we don’t need to be celebrating companies when they finally do the bare minimum.
Nobody with any semblance of ethical, just or just plain being a basic good corporate citizen would say.. oh yeah mass surveillance of the comms of a whole population for money is in any way acceptable or ok. This shouldn’t be a tech side note this should be a total meltdown front page scandal. What a disgusting abuse of power by all involved.
bhouston · 9 months ago
> Yes it’s a good thing AND we don’t need to be celebrating companies when they finally do the bare minimum.
I think we should give props here. This is an important step forward. Thank you Microsoft!
I think we should protest when companies do things that are wrong and we should give them kudos when they make good moves. Carrot and stick.
I am not fans of those that say because you did wrong things in the past, I will never recognize when you change and make good moves.
I want to encourage more companies to correct their involvement in this.
collinmcnulty · 9 months ago
I agree. If we want our pressure campaigns to be successful, we need to reward companies that respond to them.
BrenBarn · 9 months ago
But the question is do you want to actually reward behavior that is just less bad than before? Or should that reward just be in the form of less punishment? I agree the consequences should get better in relative terms, but I don't think bad behavior should be rewarded with a positive response, even if the behavior is less bad than before.
It's like, if someone steals a million dollars and then steals a thousand dollars, you don't reward them for making progress.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai · 9 months ago
What kind of pressure campaign are we talking about here? And what kind of reward? Are we now buying Microsoft products because Microsoft's cloud storage is no longer allowed to be used in genocide, only Office and email? That's absurd. What this is about is public opinion, and that takes years and decades to change. And that's a good thing. If you change your tune after every Microsoft PR release, it's not you who's holding the carrot and the stick, it's Microsoft.
hashim · 9 months ago
I disagree that we shouldn't give them their props when companies finally give in, because most are still not doing that (see Project Nimbus). The problem here is that we don't even know they have done the bare minimum yet, since this is only one contract and to my knowledge they have several, including still actively working with the IDF.
nashashmi · 9 months ago
The Guardian last month reported a meeting between Microsoft CEO and Unit 8200. That means this comes from high level and they did not cancel because of protestors but because of media publicity.
t-writescode · 9 months ago
Did the protestors help the media publicity?
colpabar · 9 months ago
I really wonder if a company like microsoft has any real concern over people tweeting negative things about it. It seems like companies are finally realizing a lot of it can just be ignored, but with microsoft specifically, what’s the risk? Who in a position to deny ms enough money that they’d care or even notice is going to decide to do it based on people protesting?
squigz · 9 months ago
The problem here is thinking that the only form of protest anyone ever engages in is tweeting things. Some people stop supporting companies they disagree with, both individually and, if they're able, with their own company.
colpabar · 9 months ago
But that’s my point - who will do that? Who is going to go to their company’s CEO and convince them to put in the massive amount of effort to switch cloud providers? Who is going to say “I don’t think we should use Teams anymore” and actually be able to switch to something else? I have no idea if microsoft even cares about retail customers anymore, but are there really enough people who are going to boycott microsoft products (I honestly don’t know what those products even are) over this?
I just don’t think they have anything to worry about. I personally think it’s good what they’re doing here, but I guess I’m too cynical to believe they are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, and I don’t think the real reason is that they’re worried about bad publicity.
MangoToupe · 9 months ago
> Who is going to go to their company’s CEO and convince them to put in the massive amount of effort to switch cloud providers?
Surely if any movement leads to this, it's BDS, likely the most popular and widely-known boycott since before the end of South African apartheid.
They even appear to have a page and a visualization devoted to compiling publicly visible impacts: https://bdsmovement.net/our-impact
lucasmullens · 9 months ago
Some people like me are running a company and are still picking out their tech stack. I don't like Microsoft, and that absolutely affects how likely I am to use their services. My situation might not be that common but PR surely still matters some.
squigz · 9 months ago
> are there really enough people who are going to boycott microsoft products
Maybe not, but some is better than none, and I'll continue to push more people to do it, rather than tell them nothing they do matters.
> over this?
Maybe it's not just this. Maybe this is the straw that breaks the user's back. Or maybe the next thing is.
My point was to address your belief that they're too big for anyone to make any difference. That isn't true, and the belief that you or any other citizen can't make a difference is their biggest advantage.
(I put this last because I know what HN will say to this, but: are CEOs and other executives not people too? Can they not make principled moves either?)
bornfreddy · 9 months ago
> (I put this last because I know what HN will say to this, but: are CEOs and other executives not people too? Can they not make principled moves either?)
Not sure what you mean by "what HN will say to this", but for me the answer is clear - they are, they can, and they often do. As do their employees - or at least they push in the direction which is better aligned with their values.
squigz · 9 months ago
> Not sure what you mean by "what HN will say to this"
I fully expect some form of cynical "No" as an answer.
I originally had phrased it, "Are CEOs not humans too?" which might make it clearer what I expected :P
colpabar · 9 months ago
That's fair. For the record, I recently dumped windows for linux and won't ever buy/use a microsoft product again if I can help it, and I will encourage others to do the same, but that decision had nothing to do with politics.
I don't think I actually disagree with anything you've said. I am just very cynical, and while I want to believe like you do, I find it very difficult.
edit: "Can they not make principled moves either?" - Yeah, they _could_, but does that _ever_ happen at companies as big as microsoft?
squigz · 9 months ago
Don't worry, so do I :)
hashim · 9 months ago
Not just some people - a lot of people, and an increasing amount of people in the last year or so, including whole countries like Ireland, Spain and Slovenia. See the BDS movement/website/Facebook pages. As a lifelong Windows user I've been seriously considering moving to a Linux distro for my next desktop. I'll need to dig into the news some more, but this decision more than likely means I can stick with Windows.
hashim · 9 months ago
Yes, unfortunately this is what happens when you have people who are constantly critical of Microsoft based on what they know of the company from the 90s and 00s, it devalues genuine modern criticisms and makes all criticism meaningless.
lostlogin · 9 months ago
> this is what happens when you have people who are constantly critical of Microsoft based on what they know of the company from the 90s and 00s
There are more than a couple of us who have Office or Teams imposed on us. There is plenty to complain about that is current and most definitely valid.
hashim · 9 months ago
"Software with slightly worse UX than the competing products" is not an ethical concern.
WD-42 · 9 months ago
Have you used a modern Microsoft OS? They are somehow worse than they were in the 90s and 00s. I don’t remember having to agree to sell my personal information in the 90s or having advertising baked into the start menu in windows xp.
hashim · 9 months ago
I agree that in-OS advertising for a paid product is dumb, but a) I thankfully still use Windows 10 which doesn't have those, and b) those are ultimately UX concerns, not ethical. And no, Microsoft doesn't sell your data no matter how many in tech subscribe to that conspiracy theory.
WD-42 · 9 months ago
Last time I installed windows 11 in a VM I had to agree to at least 3, possibly more, un-skippable Eulas that required me to agree to share my personal information. Maybe they aren’t selling it outside of MS, but MS is such a giant company if they are using it for ads I don’t see the distinction.
hashim · 9 months ago
The distinction is consent, and it's a pretty big one, because it's the difference between Microsoft sharing it among their services (they don't need to sell it to themselves) for the reasons outlined in the EULAs, and companies that aren't Microsoft using it for whatever reason they want. You can be assured they're following the EULAs because the consequences of not doing so would make them vulnerable to millions if not billions in fines if only one sufficiently motivated individual, like an ex-employee, leaked the evidence. More targeted (i.e. relevant) ads are really not the evil many make them out to be. Ads in a paid product are also not quite evil, but they are incredibly idiotic and a step backwards. Either way, makes no difference to me because at this rate it seems my next OS will be a Windows-like Linux distro anyway.
WD-42 · 9 months ago
I appreciate the nuanced and intelligent analysis of the situation. Admittedly I haven’t thought about it very deeply because as it appears you agree Linux has made operating systems commodity at this point, at least to moderately technical users, so I really see no benefit to using any MS OS at this point.
thisislife2 · 9 months ago
You are right that with the Trump administration (well, bipartisan support), US companies don't have to worry about any adverse political action by cooperating with Israel. Negative publicity from the common people also won't adversely affect their bottom line. But they do have to worry about the legal aspects - the US is one of the few countries actually having laws against genocide / war crimes. Trump may be ready to bomb the Hague and the ICC, but we know he can't bomb US courts for any similar proceedings against any US or foreign firms ...
colpabar · 9 months ago
Trying to pin support for israel on one side and not on the entirety of the us government at all levels is either profoundly naive or profoundly dishonest.
thisislife2 · 9 months ago
Well, Biden was claiming that "there is no genocide" while approving the building of (future) concentration camps for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, while Trump is worried only about the "optics" but is fine as long as a "beautiful resort is finally built in Gaza", after herding the Palestinians into these new "refugee centres" (i.e. the concentration camps) and from there to Egypt (who has been promised to be made the future gas hub for Europe) to complete Israeli occupation of Gaza. I'll leave it to you to decide whether I am being naive or dishonest or who planned the genocide and who is complicit in it - Here's the "propaganda" sources based on which I am making these assertions:
1. Trump criticizes Israel for releasing photos and videos of its devastating war in Gaza - https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-criticizes-israels-pho...
2. Trump ruthless take on Israel's war on Gaza: 'Finish the problem' - https://www.newarab.com/news/trump-israels-war-gaza-finish-p...
3. Satellite photos show Egypt building Gaza wall as Israel’s Rafah push looms - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/16/satellite-photos-sh...
4. Israel’s plan to build Gaza ‘concentration camps’ was rolled out months ago - https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/israels-plan-to-build-gaza-co...
5. Trump’s Gaza takeover all about natural gas - https://asiatimes.com/2025/02/trumps-gaza-takeover-all-about...
lostlogin · 9 months ago
> the US is one of the few countries actually having laws against genocide / war crimes.
Yet the US does not allow prosecutions in the international criminal court.
How do you explain Mai Lai what went on more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_Intern...
MangoToupe · 9 months ago
I can't speak to Microsoft specifically, but bad press has certainly hurt other similar companies (eg Meta) when it comes to hiring.
BDS is also about as formidable as a boycott movement gets.
hashim · 9 months ago
You know a boycott movement is effective when Israel has tens of lobbies like the IAF that are dedicated entirely to passing legislation to make it illegal. Germany has already passed it and the UK is unfortunately looking very close.
worik · 9 months ago
> BDS is also about as formidable as a boycott movement gets.
Barely gotten started.
This is what made the difference in South Africa, but the boycotts were much bigger
Amazon, Google and Oracle will have to boycott too. I am boycotting them
platevoltage · 9 months ago
Isn't media publicity the entire point of peaceful protest?
pmontra · 9 months ago
I guess that one needs some help to transfer "swiftly" 8000 Terabytes of data. At 1 Terabit per second it would take about 18 hours.
8000*8 Tb / 60s / 60 / 24 = .740740...
24 h *.740 = 17.76 h
I think this has been another case of "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" (Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981). Maybe rack units of disks? For very important data I would pay for the privilege of removing my disks at a very short notice.
rolph · 9 months ago
that would be an interesting service contract.
the rack and infra are yours; the storage media and all contents are mine.
coredog64 · 9 months ago
AWS Snowball can be used to get data out of S3. They copy it onto portable devices, ship them to you, and you can copy the data off without saturating your DirectConnect bandwidth.
yieldcrv · 9 months ago
or it means that they met with Unit 8200 to see if there was common ground that would rationalize keeping the contract and their tech being used for a way that respected human rights, dignity, and a coherent strategy to getting to that place,
and there wasn't
hashim · 9 months ago
I want to believe this is true, but it would only be true if they cancel all the contracts they have with Israel that enable the genocide, rather than just the ones that have made the most noise. Otherwise it's just PR, not ethics. In other words, a lot is resting on the "some" in that quote.
righthand · 9 months ago
> did terminated the contract instead of ignoring it or doubling down
This was after they ignored it and doubled down for almost 3 years*. What was the total gain in profits and how many Palestinians died during that time? You’re going to ignore the full cost because they did the least they could do almost 3 years later?
* if the starting line is set to October 2022 attacks, if not how long were they making money off this contract?
selimthegrim · 9 months ago
October 2023
mock-possum · 9 months ago
M$ is bad, just not cause of this
jimbo808 · 9 months ago
I mean, they have thoroughly soiled their reputation with the US tech workforce by being the most egregious abusers of the H1B program.
WhereIsTheTruth · 9 months ago
Will Microsoft rehire the employees who were fired for protesting?
No? Hmm, then you should not let Microsoft whitewash its record by taking credit for the very cause those workers were punished for defending
JumpCrisscross · 9 months ago
> Will Microsoft rehire the employees who were fired for protesting?
One can be correct in theory and wrong in practice at the same time.
ModernMech · 9 months ago
Yes, Microsoft was right in theory for firing the protestors, but wrong in practice because Microsoft should have listened to their employees before it got to the point they felt they had to mount a protest to get executives' attentions.
thisislife2 · 9 months ago
> The project began after a meeting in 2021 between Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, and the unit’s then commander, Yossi Sariel ... In response to the investigation, Microsoft ordered an urgent external inquiry to review its relationship with Unit 8200. Its initial findings have now led the company to cancel the unit’s access to some of its cloud storage and AI services.
"Some" ... Microsoft's chief executive was involved in cementing a collaboration for a secret military / intelligence project with an AI component, to spy on people against whom a genocide is ongoing by their colonial occupiers. This only "ended" when the public became aware of it, for political and (possibly) legal reasons, clearly indicating that they would have continued with "business as usual" if the public hadn't become aware of it. What other Israeli projects are Microsoft hiding and supporting, that possibly aids Israel's genocide, is what concerns me ...
gruez · 9 months ago
>to spy on people against whom a genocide is ongoing by their colonial occupiers
To be fair in 2021 you'd be laughed out of the room (or be in a DSA conference) if you called what was happening in Palestine a "genocide".
jasonvorhe · 9 months ago
True, the correct term back then would've been apartheid.
evil-olive · 9 months ago
> To be fair in 2021 you'd be laughed out of the room (or be in a DSA conference) if you called what was happening in Palestine a "genocide".
you have a very narrow historical lens if you think a DSA conference in 2021 is the only place that has treated allegations of genocide seriously.
I'd recommend reading through [0] which has a very nice chronological timeline.
for example, way back in 1982 the UN General Assembly voted to declare the Sabra and Shatila massacre [1] an act of genocide. it was carried out against a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, by a militia allied with the Israeli military, and during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon:
> In February 1983, an independent commission chaired by Irish diplomat Seán MacBride, assistant to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, concluded that the IDF, as the then occupying power over Sabra and Shatila, bore responsibility for the militia's massacre. The commission also stated that the massacre was a form of genocide.
there's also a long history of "well...it's not genocide, because genocide only comes from the Geno region of Nazi Germany, everything else is sparkling ethnic cleansing" type of rhetoric:
> At the UN-backed 2001 Durban Conference Against Racism, the majority of delegates approved a declaration that accused Israel of being a "racist apartheid state" guilty of "war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing". Reed Brody, the then-executive director of Human Rights Watch, criticised the declaration, arguing that "Israel has committed serious crimes against Palestinian people but it is simply not accurate to use the word genocide", while Claudio Cordone, a spokesman for Amnesty International, stated that "we are not ready to make the assertion that Israel is engaged in genocide"
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_genocide_accusatio...
hashim · 9 months ago
What concerns me is that Project Nimbus is a public project that is still actively being enabled by Google and Amazon. Secret projects are one thing, but largely meaningless, because companies, people and governments have shown they don't even care when they're in the open.
ilt · 9 months ago
It has come a tad too late to be called a good thing.
BrenBarn · 9 months ago
The problem is that if you're very very bad, you can do a good thing and still be very bad.
hashim · 9 months ago
What other reasons are Microsoft very very bad? Genuinely curious about what your definition of "very, very bad" is and whether it aligns with mine.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai · 9 months ago
Search for "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
hashim · 9 months ago
So the criticisms from the 90s that I mentioned in my other comment? Yeah, I prefer to live in the modern world. It isn't Microsoft that needs to be hit with antitrusts in 2025. It's Apple and Google. Live moves on, and in 2025, Microsoft is one of the more ethical tech companies around, unless you're one of the many sheltered people in tech that think targeted advertising is manifest evil that's on par with enabling a genocide.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai · 9 months ago
I'm 40. For me, the modern world didn't just start in 2019. And the list is additive. The fact that Microsoft has been on it since the 90s doesn't stop me from also listing Google, Apple, and Amazon.
hashim · 9 months ago
Modern by definition means the modern day, I'm not sure what 2019 was but we don't get to redefine terms for our own use. The list is only "additive" if the criticisms still apply. Your presumably best example was a corporate strategy from the 90s. Companies, just like (most) people, change. 2025 Microsoft is pro-Linux and a much better force for good than most other tech companies, yet almost invariably I find the people triggered by the mention of Microsoft tend to be relatively quiet about and/or active consumers of Apple, Amazon, Google et al.
inkysigma · 9 months ago
I think you're selling this too far with "one of the more ethical tech companies around" and "a force for good". You'll have to clarify what exactly that comparison is based on.
I'm not a total fan of Apple here but it's weird to contrast them with Apple in this case when they don't enable a genocide (having a closed ecosystem is a UX decision compared to genocide). You mention that Microsoft is now "pro-Linux", but if that's your measure, many other tech companies contribute significantly more to the Linux kernel. https://lwn.net/Articles/1031161/
With respect to anti-trust, some of their bundling decisions absolutely deserve to be scrutinized (e.g. Teams).
Furthermore, Microsoft is still doing business with the IDF. If your bar is "enabling a genocide" (presumably by being in contract with the IDF), I don't think that's changed too much, just the most egregious example of cloud services in service of that are being challenged (Unit 8200 stuff). It looks like that work is now moving the AWS though.
hashim · 9 months ago
You're right, I was operating on the assumption this was the last of their ties before I'd properly read the article and looked into the issue, unfortunately it looks like it's still on the boycott list until they actually divest from Israeli military at the least. Apple is therefore not as unethical as the genocide-enabling companies (and isn't one of them to the best of my knowledge), but it's still far more unethical than most people in tech tend to acknowledge - their pricing practices are akin to price-gouging, including 2-3x markup on like-for-like hardware and locking you into their own accessories before the EU forced them to standardise, and the whole "walled garden" ecosystem was never anything but an excuse to limit what consumers can do with their software/hardware. They almost single-handedly raised the prices of mobile phones for the vast majority of people because other manufacturers saw what their consumers were letting them get away with. And that's before we even get started on the sweatshops.
worik · 9 months ago
> What other reasons are Microsoft very very bad
Their laziness, greed and business acumen have left us in the position that the world's dominant personal OS is insecure, unreliable and running a protection racket with virus detection (and virus writers)
This is an ongoing rolling clusterfuck, and is entirely due to MS
BrenBarn · 9 months ago
In other comments replying to another user you dismissed "criticisms from the 90s", but I think that's not entirely justified. If the bad things they did in the 90s are still having bad effects today, and they built their success on those bad things, then it's not really enough just to stop doing them; they would need to actively try to right those past wrongs.
However, even in the present, the increasing intrusiveness of their update schemes, forcing people to have a Microsoft account even to install Windows, shoving AI into people's faces at every opportunity, etc., would all count as reasons I think they are bad. Also I tend to think in general that simply existing as a giant corporation with large market share is bad.
To be clear, I also think that Apple, Google, Amazon, etc., are also very very bad. I think I'd agree that these days Microsoft is on the lower end of badness among these megacorps. However, that's partly just because it's become somewhat weaker than it was at the height of its badness. You could argue that this isn't "badness" but something like "ability to implement badness" but I see those as pretty closely tied. Basically the bigger a corporation becomes, the harder it has to work to avoid being bad.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai · 9 months ago
That's a very dishonest framing. The article contains some not particularly subtle relativizations in various places, e.g., “ability to use SOME of its technology,” which make it clear that Microsoft is not reacting decisively here in any way, but is trying to muddle through somehow and make a few publicly visible concessions.
Furthermore, why do you think the reactions are knee-jerk? That implies a rather biased attitude on your part.
tmtvl · 9 months ago
If we tally up all the good things Microsoft did and weighed them to some of the bad things, it'd be like weighing a few grains of sand versus Mount Olympus.
bArray · 9 months ago
The issue that people have with Israel's actions is the death of civilians, not the death of Hamas, the widely recognised terrorist. I believe it also to be true that the IDF do not want to kill civilians, and that their target is only Hamas.
In which case, is it prudent to remove the IDF's ability to successfully target the correct people? Precise military intelligence is absolutely necessary for minimising civilian casualties.
roughly · 9 months ago
> I believe it also to be true that the IDF do not want to kill civilians, and that their target is only Hamas.
I think it’s this second assertion that relies on facts not in evidence. Previous Guardian reporting on IDF use of compute for targeting indicated they were using it to increase, not decrease, the number of approved targets.
flumpcakes · 9 months ago
Quantity doesn't correlate with accuracy. OP's point was that surely having more intelligence means you are more accurate and thus less collateral damage.
bArray · 9 months ago
Exactly. And an increase in accurate targets would lead to the faster removal of Hamas, and the process of repair can begin faster.
roughly · 9 months ago
Again, prior reporting on the IDF’s computational efforts do not indicate that less collateral damage was a driver - quite the contrary, the algorithm was being used to pad out targeting lists: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
You’re describing what ought to be, not what currently is.
jameshilliard · 9 months ago
Hamas is quite open about their desire to increase civilian casualties by deliberately using civilians as human shields(which is of course a war crime). It's clearly part of their overall strategy.
elcritch · 9 months ago
This shouldn’t be a controversial statement. It’s well documented that Hamas utilizes this strategy by their own statements. On the Israeli side it’s much harder to determine what tactics some (military) groups utilize.
DSingularity · 9 months ago
Israel claims that they “don’t want to kill civilians” but historically have not substantially changed course when the killings became grotesquely excessive. It’s also arguably true that they have never even sincerely investigated any issues.
Israel just gets more aggressive in the murder and bombing.
rozap · 9 months ago
[edited to remove snark] there is a ton of evidence to the contrary, that the killing of civilians is intentional and systematic. that's why the ICC (finally) determined it is a genocide.
rashkov · 9 months ago
The ICC did no such thing, you're probably thinking of the ICJ, which also did no such thing according to one of the judges that ruled on that decision:
“I’m glad I have a chance to address that because the court’s test for deciding whether to impose measures uses the idea of plausibility. But the test is the plausibility of the rights that are asserted by the applicant, in this case South Africa” she told the BBC show HARDtalk.
“The court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court,” Donoghue said. “It then looked at the facts as well. But it did not decide—and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media—it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”
“It did emphasize in the order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide,” she added. “But the shorthand that often appears, which is that there’s a plausible case of genocide, isn’t what the court decided.”
Donoghue’s term on the bench expired a few days after the court delivered its initial ruling on Jan. 26.
https://www.jns.org/former-top-hague-judge-media-wrong-to-re...
komali2 · 9 months ago
It is interesting to me that all this sweat and tears are spent deliberating over the use of a word in faraway courts while all of us can see with our eyes the horrors Palestinians are subjected to by the occupying IDF. "We didn't say there was a genocide! We acknowledged the plausibility of the possibility that potentially maybe an investigation might perhaps occur into the possibility of maybe Palestinians being able to experience a genocide by someone."
It reminds me of a conversation I had with an Israeli a few weeks back. He asked me, "if what Israel is doing is so bad, why does nobody stop it?"
A great question. I don't know. And the bodies of children continue to pile up.
rashkov · 9 months ago
If you want to redefine genocide to mean "a very bad thing" then go ahead, but doing so would hollow out the term.
There's nothing stopping people from discussing the events in Gaza as a tragedy and a war crime, but activists are intent on attaching the word genocide to this. Referring to it as a genocide has become a litmus test to be considered pro-Palestinian.
notmyjob · 9 months ago
To be fair, the UN working group that declared it genocide was completely precise in how they defined it and the criteria they used. Totally fair to disagree either with the existence of that working group, their definition of genocide, or with the facts they cite as evidence, but to pretend it’s just a bunch internet activists playing rhetorical tricks is clearly subterfuge.
rashkov · 9 months ago
are you referring to "UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory"? Their report came out 10 days ago. This has been referred to as a genocide far longer than that
notmyjob · 9 months ago
People say Hamas is inherently genocidal. Some believe the state of Israel to be inherently genocidal. I’m not responding to those claims. The thread was discussing the recent UN report, and that was the context of my comment.
hashim · 9 months ago
The answer is simple - racism, same reason the Brits gave them the land in the first place when they knew it already had brown people on it that had been living there for almost a thousand years. How many deaths did it take for most Westerners and Western governments to start caring about Ukraine and start moving towards action? Barely a handful if any. How many deaths has Israel racked up since 1948 while the self-appointed human rights arbiters of the world wring their hands and say it's just not quite genocide yet?
AtlasBarfed · 9 months ago
Nobody stops it because it's not worth it, for whatever you want to measure "it" by.
Israel-Palestine used to be really important, because it was a surrogate conflict for Western vs Arab control of the Middle East, and what that is really about is of course oil.
The Arab-Israeli wars of the 1950s/1960s were direct conflicts, but it became apparent that the West wouldn't let Israel lose because Israel represents the latent threat of Western invasion if the Arabs ever really turned off the oil spigot.
So the Palestinians became the thorn for the Middle East to keep Israel at bay, so you get strange bedfellows of Iran and Qatar (Sunni and Shiite) funding them, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But a funny thing happened over 75 years of relative stability of borders and global trade: the status quo established itself, oil price and supply was managed and stabilized, security agreements established and backed up (with the Iraq invasion of Kuwait). Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel in fact are effectively allies against Iran and Turkey.
And the US has its own supply of oil with Dakota shale oil. A FUCKTON of it. So strangely, the Arabian peninsula isn't afraid of the US. They are afraid of Iran and Turkey. And who has the best army to counteract Iran and Turkey?
Israel.
The Palestinians don't have a geopolitical use anymore. The Palestinians used to number around 400,000. Now? They number 4,000,000. That is ... not good. The Palestinians have no economy, and rely almost entirely on external aid. So the scope of a humanitarian burden on Arab sponsors has risen from 400,000 people to 4,000,000 people. AGAIN: the humanitarian burden has risen by a factor of 10, while their geopolitical value has DECREASED, almost evaporated.
And that is without the decreasing value of oil from EVs/alt energy and the long term specter of global warming.
That is NOT GOOD for the Palestinians.
istjohn · 9 months ago
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem determined that it is a genocide in a report released September 16: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...
rashkov · 9 months ago
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) is not a legal body, which would be the sort of body that is able to make a genocide determination. It also does not speak on behalf of the UN, given that it an independent commission of inquiry.
I am curious to see what the ICJ ruling in South Africa's case will be. That would be an actual legal body charged with making a genocide determination.
perfmode · 9 months ago
Evidence indicates the intention is to kill indiscriminately, hence the genocide determinations.
bArray · 9 months ago
I would be interested to read the evidence for myself if you have sources?
dunekid · 9 months ago
Would you accept it even if it was shown? Or would you go on with adjacents to say how it is not evidence? Get new points from the ITF. Maybe hold them to the a fraction of accountability that you throw around.
zawaideh · 9 months ago
umanwizard · 9 months ago
> Precise military intelligence is absolutely necessary for minimising civilian casualties.
Whatever they've been doing on that front doesn't seem to be working so far...
ars · 9 months ago
It's so weird how people think the casualty rate in Gaza is high, it's actually incredibly low, virtually no other army in the world could achieve such a low collateral damage rate in urban warfare against guerillas.
Moru · 9 months ago
The killings are not only direct hits with bullets. They are also blocking food, medicine and healthcare. Noone can survive without food. The goal is not to kill hamas, that was just the excuse, it is to clear the ground for new settlements.
ars · 9 months ago
I think the total reported deaths from food issues - as reported by Hamas mind you - are in the 1,000 range. Which is still a very small number for a war zone.
> The goal is not to kill hamas, that was just the excuse, it is to clear the ground for new settlements.
Israel has explicitly stated that this is NOT the goal, are you in a position to change their policy or something? I don't get how you think you can determine their goals for them, unless you are a member of their government (are you?).
Your stated goal doesn't even make any sense - why would they even need to "clear ground" in the first place? Just go live in those houses. And if you mean "kill people", then why are the deaths so low?
Moru · 9 months ago
I watch independent news from official sources, not an american news source.
Moru · 9 months ago
The 1000 civilians dead were in connection to food distribution. That number should be 0 even in a war zone.
Israel has been taking over palestinian villages for a very long time, murdering the inhabitants. The government is fueling the hate. They aren't even affraid to say it out aloud. I have seen several reports where they are calling for genocide.
zawaideh · 9 months ago
It is a genocide. They are targeting civilians.
davidjeet · 9 months ago
Proof? Or just what is convenient for you to believe?
If anything, quite the opposite. Think about this logically - why the need for expensive surveillance if your chief goal was to annihilate a population?
rcpt · 9 months ago
It's already been linked in the thread
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intent_and_incitement_in_the...
dunekid · 9 months ago
>why the need for expensive surveillance if your chief goal was to annihilate a population
A question suited for ITF and Netanyahu maybe? Ask them spend less. He gets to prolong this Genocide, then he gets to stay out of trial for his previous crimes. Maybe ITF is not in a hurry.
zawaideh · 9 months ago
For those looking for direct sources on the findings of genocide in Gaza, here are several key reports and legal conclusions from human rights organizations, international courts, and genocide scholars:
1. UN Commission of Inquiry: Concluded that Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip. * Report: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c... * Press Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trUcK8hHaIA
2. Amnesty International: Concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. * Statement: https://www.amnesty.org/en/petition/end-israels-genocide-aga...
3. B'Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories): Published their conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. * Report ("Our Genocide"): https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide
4. International Court of Justice (ICJ): Ruled in January 2024 that it is plausible Israel's acts could violate the Genocide Convention. * Case Details: https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192
5. Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention: Issued an "Active Genocide Alert" in October 2023, warning of the high risk of genocide. * Alert: https://www.lemkininstitute.com/active-genocide-alert-1/acti...
Beyond these formal reports, it's crucial to acknowledge that this has been one of the most documented atrocities in history, often livestreamed by Palestinians on the ground. Their testimonies have been consistent from the beginning, yet they are frequently dismissed until a non-Palestinian, "human" source validates their lived experience.
Sporktacular · 9 months ago
Genocide is not the same as extermination. The goal of expulsion is to obtain land. Surveillance programs facilitate ethnic cleansing by countering resistance.
adultSwim · 9 months ago
> why the need for expensive surveillance if your chief goal was to annihilate a population?
Gaza has long been a showroom and R&D space for technologies of oppression. Field proven platforms sell.
basilgohar · 9 months ago
It is the IDF and Israel governments explicit goal, as stated by high up government officials and leaders, to eradicate all Palestians in Gaza. A cursory view into their own Hebrew media make this abundantly clear.
They are committing a genocide in both word and deed.
js212 · 9 months ago
A few government officials have said this. No one part of the War Cabinet has said this and it is definitely NOT the explicitly goal of the IDF.
This is entirely made up.
Hikikomori · 9 months ago
>I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.
jameshilliard · 9 months ago
> I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip.
For some additional context this initial complete siege lasted for roughly two weeks.
zdragnar · 9 months ago
> We are fighting human animals
What else do you call people who rape and murder civilians, then parade their dead bodies around to cheering crowds?
Hamas will never have any sympathy from most people who watched the October 7 attack footage.
mrguyorama · 9 months ago
Refusing to distinguish between random Palestinians and Hamas members is literally the entire problem
I have ZERO issue with the IDF killing Hamas. That's what you do in a war. But we have ample evidence that Israel and the IDF is not making any effort to not kill random Palestinians.
They made some stupid AI algorithm to feed data into in order to generate target lists. They accepted something like 10:1 "innocent palestinian":"literal terrorist" ratios. They have no qualms about killing a 10 innocent Palestinians to kill a single Hamas terrorist
This is unacceptable.
SilverElfin · 9 months ago
> Refusing to distinguish between random Palestinians and Hamas members is literally the entire problem
Well, it is difficult to distinguish between the two when you’re hunting down terrorists who hide among civilians. But also, let’s not forget - the civilian population of Gaza VOTED for Hamas. In polls they still show support for Hamas even after October 7. There are videos of those civilians cheering in the streets while the naked bodies of raped / murdered women were paraded down the street by Hamas terrorists. I don’t think you can pretend “random Palestinians” are entirely innocent either.
nahuel0x · 9 months ago
It's very easy to distinguish a children from a terrorist, children are no terrorists, also, children didn't vote anybody. However, the IDF is killing thousands of children in the most horrible ways.
JumpCrisscross · 9 months ago
> issue that people have with Israel's actions is the death of civilians, not the death of Hamas
Would note that this issue has sufficiently polarised that there are thoughtful people in e.g. New York who think it’s an atrocity for even Hamas fighters to be killed. (Same as there are folks who think every Palestinian is safely presumed a terrorist until proved innocent.)
stackedinserter · 9 months ago
Inconvenient truth is that anyone who remained in Gaza, in active IDF ops area, is not a civilian. Civilians left these areas, or at least asked to leave many, many times. Unless it's a little child that's not capable of lifting a firearm, this person is Hamas at this point.
If you have better way to differentiate, I will happily pass it to IDF. Don't forget to mention about the last time you risked your own life.
dunekid · 9 months ago
>Civilians left these areas, or at least asked to leave many, many times.
Where to?
Hind Rajab ,literally a child, was brutally killed when fleeing their home, after being asked of course. The ambulance which came to rescue was blown up by the ITF. The Whole world has seen it all, ITF proudly displays it. Maybe it is time to update the Hasbara points.
>Don't forget to mention about the last time you risked your own life.
Why? ITF certainly risks many children's life, just for sport often.
stackedinserter · 9 months ago
Kid, civilians die in war zones, that's sad truth about world that you was born into. It sucks that this child was killed. Nobody in IDF or in any other army wants to kill civilians and children, btw unlike Hamas pigs that openly bragged about it, and benefit from every single civilian death in this conflict.
> Why
Because there's no shortage of armchair operators that know better how to make split second decisions in combat. Also, they never do anything wrong because they never happen to be in situation where you have to decide between bad and worse.
Hikikomori · 9 months ago
You can easily find telegram channels that show what regular Israeli soldiers are up to, they post it themselves like they're proud of it. Take a look at it and see what you think then.
joe463369 · 9 months ago
> I believe it also to be true that the IDF do not want to kill civilians
They should probably stop shooting them then.
greenie_beans · 9 months ago
hasn't the death toll surpassed the number of hamas members?
hashim · 9 months ago
What part don't you understand? EVERYONE is Hamas, including the several kids that Western doctors have testified to being hit by snipers, and the little girl named Hind Rajab that they shot 300 bullets into. And the hospitals? Crawling with Hamas.
propagandist · 9 months ago
The state you are referring to literally calls Palestinians a demographic threat.
Sporktacular · 9 months ago
Reading the article you'll see that much of the surveillance is against the West Bank population, which has nothing to do with Hamas or Oct 7.
Israel has been very effective at blurring that distinction, using that attack from Gaza as the pretext to accelerate land theft in the West Bank.
oulipo2 · 9 months ago
Too little too late, but anything we can do to stop this genocide...
nicce · 9 months ago
I doubt it can be stopped anymore without physical intervetion.
hashim · 9 months ago
At least, not without the Palestinians being virtually wiped out, cause that's how long we'll be waiting for Israel to do the right thing. We don't even know for sure how many are dead, but the vast majority of deaths during genocides are counted after it's over, least of all when there's so much rubble and so many whole families have been wiped out.
eggy · 9 months ago
>"According to sources familiar with the huge data transfer outside of the EU country, it occurred in early August. Intelligence sources said Unit 8200 planned to transfer the data to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform. Neither the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) nor Amazon responded to a request for comment."
So was the data moved in August to Amazon (AWS)? I am sure the $3.8bn USD the US gives annually will pay for it anyway. Because it is given as a loan, no accountability is required if it were a grant to Israel, and then the US forgives the loan, so there's not payback or interest for borrowing.
myth_drannon · 9 months ago
I guess time to buy more Oracle or Google stocks? They can easily provide more than needed, especially Oracle which is very friendly to Israel and Ellison is a big supporter of IDF (large donations to "Friends of the IDF" non-profit).
Here is a link in case anyone wants to donate https://www.fidf.org to this amazing organization.
amdivia · 9 months ago
No? No one should service them
greenie_beans · 9 months ago
makes sense to do if you support genocide
hersko · 9 months ago
kmijyiyxfbklao · 9 months ago
>Is there famine? In some selected areas, yes, but for the ones with money, this reality never came.
Seems like what Israel is doing disproportionately affects poor people.
dunekid · 9 months ago
Wow nice, I wish i could donate, but US Taxpayers already cover for me. What do the donors get? Like souvenirs? Funding Genocidal ITF to kill more children and bomb more hospitals has to have its perks.
dark_mode · 9 months ago
> The decision brings to an abrupt end a three-year period in which the spy agency operated its surveillance programme using Microsoft’s technology.
Are we supposed to believe Microsoft was unaware of the contents but decided to terminate coincidentally when reports of what they're doing came out?
dmix · 9 months ago
Are you asking whether Microsoft engineers routinely poke around their customer’s private clouds (including ones used by foreign intelligence agencies) to make sure everything is kosher?
t_mahmood · 9 months ago
Well, MS reviewed previously, and said they've seen nothing wrong, now they are saying some employees (coincidentally, Israeli) might have not been all transparent ...
> 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.
You think, that is plausible?
To me, Nope, it's just that, the money was too good.
Only after Guardian's report, they realized:
"Oops, we got caught, now do the damage control dance"
And here we are ...
Also, are those employees going to get fired? I doubt. But the protestor, standing up for something, did. Who is more damaging?
Oh right, the protestor, because, they ruined the big cake.
Did the unit that breach the contract lose anything? Nope, they got enough time to move their data safely, and will continue doing the same thing.
It's all evil entities feeding each other, for their own benefit.
fsckboy · 9 months ago
>It's all evil entities feeding each other, for their own benefit.
let's please hear your complete list of evil entities, just curious who else it includes. you can go out in concentric circles from israel, or just start with the most evil worldwide and go till you get to israel and microsoft.
t_mahmood · 9 months ago
Thanks, but no, thanks.
If you can give me a counter, why these actions are not evil, I'm all ear.
verteu · 9 months ago
"Routinely"? No.
When the customer is indicted by the Hague for crimes against humanity? Yes, it's difficult to imagine a more clear-cut case of professional ethics.
dark_mode · 9 months ago
> The decision has not affected Microsoft’s wider commercial relationship with the IDF, which is a longstanding client and will retain access to other services. The termination will raise questions within Israel about the policy of holding sensitive military data in a third-party cloud hosted overseas.
It's worth noting that even after finding out the "most moral" army is conducting mass surveillance, they're still happy to provide them services.
Capricorn2481 · 9 months ago
> It's worth noting that even after finding out the "most moral" army is conducting mass surveillance, they're still happy to provide them services.
Well, why wouldn't they? It's Microsoft, they're not exactly stewards of privacy.
tick_tock_tick · 9 months ago
Doesn't every army conduct "mass surveillance"? What do you think all those satellites with cameras are doing orbiting the planet?
Wouldn't the opposite be incredibly immoral? Attacking/bombing/etc without large scale surveillance would largely mean increased collateral damage.
dark_mode · 9 months ago
> Wouldn't the opposite be incredibly immoral? Attacking/bombing/etc without large scale surveillance would largely mean increased collateral damage.
The concern is who gets to decide what is or isn't a legitimate target? Today's heroes might be tomorrow's victims. I'd rather no one have that much power over others.
lordofgibbons · 9 months ago
Are you seriously equating observing an area using satellites with indiscriminately monitoring everyone's calls, messages, and possibly hacking their devices?
holmesworcester · 9 months ago
And not in a war zone, even. (West Bank is governed by Israel.)
dragonwriter · 9 months ago
The West Bank is occupied by Israel and Israel has overall control, but it is broken up into a whole bunch of tiny administrative regions, some of which are administered by the PA and some of which are administered directly by Israel.
babu657 · 9 months ago
Gee i wonder what happens if Israel just let the west bank be. Wait…i know what will happen
tguvot · 9 months ago
Rocket factories, like the one that was discovered week ago https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bjbqu9qolx
3form · 9 months ago
Given lackluster response to the recent attempts of the "democratic" governments to do very much the same to their own citizens, I daresay not many are particularly impressed.
pcthrowaway · 9 months ago
Additionally, there is observation AI face tracking of all movements of Palestinians in the West Bank, who live under occupation. While other governments may also conduct monitoring of their citizens to varying degrees, the distinction is that they are monitoring citizens, not using monitoring to enforce military apartheid.
Manuel_D · 9 months ago
Militaries do that too. Signals Intelligence has been thing since radios were used by the military. I bet you that in Ukraine the moment you fire up any RF emitter it's showing up on someone's spectrum analyzer. And if it's unencrypted or a broken encryption they'll probably be decoding and logging the transmission.
AlecSchueler · 9 months ago
> bet you that in Ukraine the moment you fire up any RF emitter
The assertion was that "every army" is doing it, not that it's happening in active warzones.
raxxorraxor · 9 months ago
I case of Hezbollah it was very much worth it.
samirillian · 9 months ago
Holy crap you’re totally right
Sporktacular · 9 months ago
Arguing that mass surveillance is not unethical but actually a way to save lives is pretty disingenuous, absurdly so considering how little the country wielding it cares about collateral damage.
ycombigators · 9 months ago
It would be pretty difficult for the IDF to increase their level of collateral damage.
sir0010010 · 9 months ago
In 1945, about ~90k people died over 2 days from the Tokyo Firebombing. Do you think it would be difficult for any modern millitary - that intentionally wanted to cause as much collateral damage as possible - to greatly exceed that number?
fjdjshsh · 9 months ago
Not sure what is your point. The Israeli military could throw a few atomic bombs and wipe out the entire population in Gaza. That they don't is a sign of restraint for you?
jlawson · 9 months ago
The point is that they could do similar attacks to the Tokyo firebombing (or much worse), but choose not to.
Yes, that is a sign of restraint, obviously.
tfourb · 9 months ago
80% of buildings in Gaza are destroyed. There are well documented cases of arbitrary killings of civilians and attacks on hospitals. IDF is routinely demanding entire cities to be evacuated, knowing that not all people can comply with such an order. Multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity investigations have been opened by national and international prosecutors.
It is very obvious that the only restraint that the IDF is showing is that they do not kill every single civilian on sight.
jlawson · 9 months ago
Demanding cities be evacuated is what you do when you have restraint. Otherwise you would just kill everyone inside. If they had not done this, you would also claim that it's evidence of lack of restraint.
Beyond that, everything you wrote is perfectly compatible with the IDF showing tremendous restraint. It is all more or less inevitable with any war in such an environment. All of it happened in Iraq with the Americans, for example.
- Buildings destroyed aren't people
- Documented cases are just that - cases. You need to demonstrate a pattern at scale. Bad cases are inevitable among millions of interactions.
- Investigations opened is a signal of political incentives as much as actions taken.
clanky · 9 months ago
The only thing it's a sign of is that the Israelis face restraints from political and PR pressures that did not apply to bombing Tokyo.
jlawson · 9 months ago
Goalpost moving.
Now you're saying, okay they do have restraint, but what I really meant was their restraint is driven by the PR concerns, not by their own moral hearts. Well, that's pretty different accusation now.
I'm glad you've conceded the original point that they do indeed have restraint. Thank you.
Jensson · 9 months ago
It shows the poster they responded to was wrong when they said "It would be pretty difficult for the IDF to increase their level of collateral damage.".
It wouldn't be difficult at all to increase collateral damage, just fight like they did during ww2 and collateral damage would skyrocket.
kennywinker · 9 months ago
Perhaps the actual moral choice isn’t attacking blindly or mass surveillance of an occupied nation - it’s peace?
Regardless, the death toll in gaza (somewhere between 45,000 and 600,000) suggests that this mass surveillance isn’t being used effectively to reduce the death toll. It also doesn’t take mass surveillance to know that bombing hospitals and schools is going to kill innocent people.
amscanne · 9 months ago
Even the Gaza Health Ministry claims only 68,000, so I presume that your 600,000 is a typo.
tkel · 9 months ago
Gaza Health Ministry only counts those that show up at hospitals. The first big Lancet study a year ago estimated 200k. I've seen more recent studies estimate higher, with an additional year of killings.
Also, Israel has attacked or destroyed most hospitals in Gaza. So the Health Ministry's counting is obviously hindered.
amscanne · 9 months ago
I don't believe that what you're saying is correct at all.
Only 34,344 of the GHM estimate are confirmed identities. The rest of either missing but presumed dead or gross adjustments. They are open about using "media reports to assess deaths in the north of Gaza".
The Lancet study published in January 2025 estimated 70,000 as of October, 2024. This is higher than the GHM estimate, but I can't find anything close to your 200k estimate.
So you may believe in your estimates, but they are many multiples larger than any other credible source that I can find... so it's odd to wave these figures around without any sources, links, etc.
anramon · 9 months ago
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/12/israeli-ex-com...
Or maybe that man is a hamas spy, right?
amscanne · 9 months ago
It’s literally the same numbers as the posted ones, and exactly aligned with what I’m saying.
> The current official toll is 64,718 Palestinians killed in Gaza and 163,859 injured, since the start of the war on 7 October 2023
You may have been misled by the headline “X killed or injured”.. those are two different things, and we’re talking about the number killed.
I don’t know if those numbers are accurate (the article about the IDF solider claims it is), but I’m not even questioning that. The GP is claiming that an order of magnitude more people have been killed than even GMH claims.
pcthrowaway · 9 months ago
Nice cherry-picking
> Halevi stepped down as chief of staff in March after leading the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for the first 17 months of the war, which is now approaching its second anniversary.
> The retired general told a community meeting in southern Israel earlier this week that more than 10% of Gaza’s 2.2 million population had been killed or injured – “more than 200,000 people”.
The point is that we know 64,000 is almost certainly an undercount. Notably it hasn't changed much in the last year since the Hamas ministry of health collapsed.
The commenter above is correct in saying the bound of deaths is very likely between 45,000 and 600,000. We have good reason to suspect it was over 100,000 late last year. We won't know the actual number until an independent assessment can occur.
amscanne · 9 months ago
You are using the "more than 200,000 people" quote to imply that the GHM estimate of 64,718 is wrong, but it is completely in line with it. There is nothing about this revelation that suggests the existing estimates are too low. I don't know what I'm supposedly cherry-picking.
More explicitly: 64,718 killed + 163,859 injured =~ "more than 200,000 people"
I don't understand what basis you (and other commenters) have to suggest that these estimates are all wrong, you merely say "we have good reason". What reason?
kennywinker · 9 months ago
GP here. The GMH number doesn’t include indirect deaths, i.e. all the deaths that happen because of war that aren’t bullets and bombs. Disease, famine, not getting cancer screenings or antibiotics because all the hospitals have been blown up… that stuff.
So while 680k (the current highest estimate) is probably higher than reality, god i hope it is, it’s also true that reality is probably much higher than the current GMH numbers.
nimih · 9 months ago
The Lancet article the GP is probably referencing is probably this one: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
kennywinker · 9 months ago
Unfortunately not a typo:
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/press-briefing-francesca...
“65,000 is the number of Palestinians are certain killed, including over, of which 75% are women and children.
In fact, we shall start the thinking of 680,000, because this is the number that some scholars and scientists claim being the real death toll in Gaza.
And it would be hard to be able to prove or disprove this number, especially if investigators and others remained banned from entering the occupied Palestinian territory, and particularly the Gaza Strip.”
The death toll could be that high. I hope to hell it isn’t. But we don’t know and won’t know until the killing stops. We do know that tens of thousands of innocent people have been killed, and at least 150,000 people injured.
amscanne · 9 months ago
I don’t think her statements aren’t even factual: the current estimates aren’t the confirmed identities, they include estimates for missing and presumed dead. You don’t think the GHM would publish larger estimates if 1/3 of every living person in Gaza was missing or dead? It’s hard to have an objective conversation when numbers are just made up.
kennywinker · 9 months ago
I am not asserting a specific number. There have been between 65,000 and 680,000 gazans murdered by the idf directly and indirectly. I think it’s unlikely the number is as high as 680k, but there is absolute chaos on the ground, doctors and hospitals and records destroyed. We won’t know until the slaughter stops what number is real.
If you want to let the lack of a specific number hold you up while the killing continues, that’s up to you.
amscanne · 9 months ago
I mean sure, you are just asserting a range. It is also true that there have been between 0 and 2,000,000 gazans killed by the IDF, but this fact does not do anything useful in discussing the issue. (And just like the 680,000 gazans "murdered by the IDF" it is nearly impossible to be accurate, fabrication because it defies reality.)
kennywinker · 9 months ago
Sure 0-2mil is possible, as is all the atoms in your body aligning and allowing you to step thru a wall.
But those who are well informed agree it the data supports a number above 45k, probably above 65k, and the highest estimate published is 680k. If we use a higher number we are just making shit up. If we use a lower number we are choosing to ignore a data point without a specific reason to write it off. “It defies reality” isn’t an actual reason - it’s just an assertion that it’s wrong. Neither is “wouldn’t the GMH cite higher numbers?” - how would you confirm that 1/3 of people in your city are still alive if people are scattered, communication is down, and an unknown number of people have fled?
but either way, the tens of thousands of innocents killed and the complete destruction of the infrastructure of gaza is appalling - and arguing about specific numbers is pretty pointless if we don’t agree on that.
amscanne · 9 months ago
You are missing my point. To me it seems like 680k is just making shit up. Why is this reasonable? I can't even find what this "data point" is based on, so I'm not sure what I am supposedly ignoring! Just say where it is coming from, that isn't a person throwing out a random number.
I would love to be "well-informed", but how can I get there with hearsay?
> Neither is “wouldn’t the GMH cite higher numbers?” - how would you confirm that 1/3 of people in your city are still alive if people are scattered, communication is down, and an unknown number of people have fled?
Once again, the 68k figure is not confirmed! This is already an estimate. The figure for confirmed identifies is much lower, around ~35k. So this is a totally false argument. I'm not saying the estimate is wrong, I'm just saying that if there was a reason for the estimate to be 1/3 of people in Gaza, that's what they would say.
dlubarov · 9 months ago
The 680k estimate is from [1], which essentially
- begins with the high estimate from [2], which uses some very questionable data (like WhatApp chats) to argue that most deaths were not counted by GHM
- extrapolates it to the present, as if the casualty rate were a constant
- multiplies it by 5, which was the multipler that was somewhat arbitrarily picked in that Lancet letter [3]
- forgets that this includes future deaths (attributable to past conflict events), and uses the past tense as if all these supposed indirect deaths already occurred
They also end up with an estimate of "about 380,000 under-five-year-old infant" deaths, which seems unlikely since there were never more than about ~340k children under five in the strip.
Overall, it's about as believable as that letter which claimed Hamas was under-reporting starvations by over three orders of magnitude [4].
[1] https://arena.org.au/politics-of-counting-gazas-dead/
[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[3] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
dlubarov · 9 months ago
If you're basing this on the Lancet letter about indirect deaths, that's an estimate that includes future deaths that could be linked to past events of the war. So "have been" isn't the right tense.
It's also non-peer-reviewed, and based on rather arbitrarily picking a multiplier of 15x from a range of past conflicts' multipliers. One author described the figure as "purely illustrative" in a now-deleted tweet.
robochat · 9 months ago
They took a multiplier of 5x (4 indirect deaths for every direct death) and stated that this was conservative given studies of previous conflicts.
fjdjshsh · 9 months ago
You're assuming the objective is to lower the civilian casualties. From the statements of prominent Israeli ministers and the actual behavior of the bombardment it's pretty clear that, for the Israeli government, killing civilians is a feature, not a bug
jameshilliard · 9 months ago
> Regardless, the death toll in gaza (somewhere between 45,000 and 600,000) suggests that this mass surveillance isn’t being used effectively to reduce the death toll.
Keep in mind deaths published by the Gaza(Hamas) ministry of health do not differentiate civilian vs combatant deaths at all.
kennywinker · 9 months ago
That’s true, but of the 65,063 deaths reported by the GHM, at least 18,500 of them are children, 217 journalists, 120 academics, and 224 humanitarian aid workers.
And that 65k number does not include indirect deaths - i.e. deaths by starvation, or death from something that could have been easily survived if there were still hospitals instead of rubble. Which is where the 680,000 number comes from - the largest estimate of how many may have been killed directly and indirectly by this genocidal war.
jameshilliard · 9 months ago
> at least 18,500 of them are children, 217 journalists, 120 academics, and 224 humanitarian aid workers
From my understanding GHM numbers don't break these figures for those that are combatants either, the population overall is quite young and Hamas is known to use child soldiers as well. Journalists(along with doctors) in Gaza have even been themselves involved in holding hostages for Hamas[0]. There are many issues like this which significantly complicate separating combatant deaths from non-combatant deaths.
> And that 65k number does not include indirect deaths - i.e. deaths by starvation, or death from something that could have been easily survived if there were still hospitals instead of rubble.
The 65k is AFAIU not even advertised by the GHM as confirmed deaths(i.e. deaths with confirmed identities), it's an estimate from an organization(Hamas) which is highly incentivized to report the highest figures that are believable internationally. There are not any incentives for them to underestimate casualties since they use casualties figures for propaganda purposes and will use the highest figures they can come up with while maintaining some level of credibility.
It's also unlikely there are many deaths that can be attributed directly to starvation, while there may be food insecurity issues there is still sufficient aid reaching Gaza to largely prevent deaths from starvation. There are countries in the world where there is actual famine and pictures/videos from those places(i.e. those taken out in the open on the streets) look nothing like those from Gaza. Even organizations like the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs have been known to put out(and subsequently walk back) blatantly false information[1] to make it appear the situation is worse than it actually is.
> Which is where the 680,000 number comes from - the largest estimate of how many may have been killed directly and indirectly by this genocidal war.
Numbers 10x those put out by the GHM(which is already highly incentivized to inflate casualty figures) are not remotely credible.
IMO the figures put out by the GHM are likely within the correct order of magnitude, keeping in mind that those figures include combatant deaths. For a conflict like this which involves urban warfare(where similar conflicts historically have had very high casualties) such casualty figures certainly don't appear to be unusually high.
Claims of genocide made against Israel simply do not stand up to scrutiny. Civilian deaths are largely in line with what would expect for a war like this, especially one where enemy combatants are not in uniform and intentionally hide amongst the civilian population and fight from civilian areas(which is of course a war crime). There are strong incentives both internationally and domestically for Israel to minimize civilian casualties as much as feasible.
If intelligence from surveillance increases combatant deaths then it could be expected that the death figures like those from the GHM(which include combatant deaths) may rise even if the actual civilian casualty rate decreases.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/19/middleeast/gaza-neighborhood-...
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/how-one-un-leaders-mistak...
AtlasBarfed · 9 months ago
While I agree the "who is more morally right" is owned to a higher degree by the Palestinians than the Israelis at the moment, I think people are missing a key shift in global politics.
Virtually all of the discourse on Israel-Palestine concerns moral righteousness or moral shame. I think the era of moral arguments in geopolitics is coming to an end, because the unipolar or Communist-Capitalist bipolar world combined with the Holocaust that enabled geopolitical moral arguments is basically dead.
It might just be my interest in global affairs spiking to avoid the constant bad news from the Trump administration, but I think we are entering a much more turbulent (and historically normal) period of realist/self-interest directed foreign policy. The US isn't around to be "good cop" (I can't emphasize the quotes around "good" enough).
I think this is why we are surrounded by the sense that authoritarianism is on the rise. The US won't care if you are democratic or authoritarian. The US won't care if you invade your neighbor if it doesn't disrupt them too much. Or the US just plain doesn't care at all.
So it's my general opinion that even if the Palestinians are more morally righteous in the great moral book-pounding, history-pointing, casualty-counting endless debate ... the era where that mattered has come to an end. Alas, I think we are entering a might-makes-right era of world politics, especially in the Middle East, and especially since the US has its own oil now from the Dakota shale fracking.
StanislavPetrov · 9 months ago
>Attacking/bombing/etc without large scale surveillance would largely mean increased collateral damage.
That would only be true if your goal was not to completely obliterate the population you are attacking and bombing, as Israel has demonstrated.
jlawson · 9 months ago
Since the Oct 7 attacks the Palestinian population has not shrunk. War deaths have roughly equalled births.
Are you claiming that the IDF is trying their hardest to kill all the Palestinians they can, and that this is the best they can do? Really?
swores · 9 months ago
You're spreading misinformation (quite likely unintentionally). No data has been released supporting the claim that the population has stayed the same, what was wrongly spread was a US intelligence assessment of expected population which was made before the October 7th attack predicting future population growth, and used by many people as if it had remained accurate despite all the killing,
swores · 9 months ago
I'm too late to edit my previous reply, but wanted to add a few sources so here we go -
Fact checking services debunking the claim of population not shrinking since October 2023:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/dec/06/instagram-...
https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/gaza-population-growth-proj...
Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics' population estimates, as of July 2025 - down 6% in one year since 2024, which is 10% below original forecasts for 2025:
https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/portals/_pcbs/PressRelease/Press_En_... (3rd section of page 2; though the whole document is worth reading)
jlawson · 9 months ago
You are confusing emigration with death. We are not concerned with who is physically in Gaza, we are concerned with births and deaths.
There are less people physically in Gaza now because a bunch of people emigrated. Not because of deaths.
The overall group of families who lived in Gaza on Oct 7 2023 is about the same number of humans now. A few hundred thousand have emigrated. About 40-60k were killed. About 50k were born.
swores · 9 months ago
Actually a few hundred thousand have been killed, the ~60k figure from the Gaza health ministry is just the deaths they've been able to actually confirm, which is just deaths at hospitals (which is why that number has grown so little this year, because the vast majority of hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed by the IDF).
See for example this July 2024 estimate of close to 200k deaths (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...) or this more recent estimate of over 600k (https://arena.org.au/politics-of-counting-gazas-dead/ )
Sure, they're estimates not proven statistics, but the situation on the ground means it's impossible for anyone to have an accurate count. What's important is that we don't look at the relatively small (yet still depressingly large) number of confirmed deaths of known named people, tracked by the Gaza health ministry, as if it's a count of the actual number of deaths. Hell, even the IDF recently claimed that there have been 90k deaths (when they were boasting that they had killed 30k Hamas fighters and that they had "only" killed 2 civilians to every 1 Hamas) - and, setting aside the IDF's track record of lying and their incentive to claim less civilian deaths than reality, even if they were telling the truth that would still be limited to deaths they were actually able to track and confirm, not the many other deaths that weren't officially recorded.
nashadelic · 9 months ago
Two things: 1. The death toll has shown that this is the most indiscriminate bombings (Biden's own words) and deaths of civilians in recent memory. So, you could argue the tech is aiding in killing key civil infra staff
2. Sure, they can surveil, let them do it on their own data centers. It's actually strange that they would put such data/tech on a 3rd party data center to begin with.
xg15 · 9 months ago
"Finding out" in the "shocked! shocked!" Casablanca sense.
The IDF's "Wolf" system have been well known for years.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/19/idf-facia...
AzzyHN · 9 months ago
Where does "most moral" come from?
reverius42 · 9 months ago
Per Wikipedia, the idea that the IDF is the "most moral army in the world" comes from Colonel Richard Kemp, a retired British army officer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_of_arms
thrance · 9 months ago
It's a throwaway line Israeli officials have been using for a long time. I heard Netanyahou himself use it to describe the IDF and explain it can't possibly do wrong.
wolvesechoes · 9 months ago
I mean, there are other reasons to not provide them services. Really, mass surveillance is quite low on the list.
alsetmusic · 9 months ago
Guess those protesting employees who lost their jobs weren’t fired for nothing, at the very least. Finally.
everdrive · 9 months ago
I'm confused what this really means. Countries don't store their really secret things in Azure. So what do we think the source of this surveillance was?
bhouston · 9 months ago
> I'm confused what this really means. Countries don't store their really secret things in Azure. So what do we think the source of this surveillance was?
Why wouldn't countries store secret data in Azure, Google Cloud and AWS services? I think that this is quite common.
everdrive · 9 months ago
I think you're misunderstanding my question. I'm not saying "this story is bogus," but rather I'm saying that this sort of data is probably not the kind of data which is acquired through really secret means. Perhaps it was purchased from providers, or some other less-secret method.
bhouston · 9 months ago
Israel actually had a bunch of rules where Palestinians are not allowed to have 5G or 4G networks to ensure that they can be monitored.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/israeli-restri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_Palestine
And yes it is recording pretty much all calls in Palestine:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
everdrive · 9 months ago
I really had no idea, thanks for the links.
derektank · 9 months ago
Yes, they do
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-government-top-...
everdrive · 9 months ago
I'm clearly not informed and equally surprised. Thanks for letting me know.
catigula · 9 months ago
It's okay if they mass surveil and kill other people using sweeping AI systems, surely it will never happen to me.
creatonez · 9 months ago
After 2 years of genocide, and massive dissent from their own employees repeatedly warning that this was happening...
Those who make holocaust tabulation machines belong in prison.
hashim · 9 months ago
Well, to their credit, they've also seen that IBM, Volkswagen and Ford were still allowed to do plenty of business with no repercussions whatsoever (that I know of).
nerdjon · 9 months ago
> The project began after a meeting in 2021 between Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, and the unit’s then commander, Yossi Sariel.
This seemed completely glossed over in the article (never revisited beyond this) but seems to imply that Satya must have at least known something about what was happening?
Or was he mislead, told partial truths, or something?
Very curious who within Microsoft knew anything about what was happening.
dijit · 9 months ago
I think people don't tend to realise how authoritarian the internal structures of companies are.
They're effectively miniature dictatorships. Normalising removing services because a tenant does something you personally find disagreeable is fine in the moment, but what happens when it's someone you support? Like when they removed Office365 access for a member of the EU parliament.[0]
For me, this is more proof (not less) that I shouldn't rely on US tech giants. Not because I will be collecting data on a population to do god-knows-what with, but because someone believes themselves to be the moral authority on what the compute I rent should be doing and that moral authority can be outraged for the whims of someone completely random, for any reason.
[0]: https://www.aurasalla.eu/en/2025/05/26/mep-aura-salla-micros...
shadowgovt · 9 months ago
I expect this to continue to be the conflict of responsibility and capability in the 21st century.
Alfred Nobel was known as a "merchant of death" for enabling the use of combat explosives that could do (by the standards of the time) preposterous damage to people, but his argument was that he just sold the dynamite; he wasn't responsible for the anarchists getting it and bombing something twice a week in New York. And even then, his conscience weighed on him enough that he endowed a Peace Prize when he died.
The story is different when the data conversion is being done on machines you own, in buildings you own, in a company you own (for practical reasons in addition to moral / theoretical; if someone wants to stop those computations, they're now going after your stuff, not trying to stop a supply-chain).
themafia · 9 months ago
> is fine in the moment, but what happens when it's someone you support?
That's why I never find it "fine." It's only a matter of time before corporate power finds it's way to your hobby horse. I thought part of the "hacker vibe" was being highly suspicious of any form of authority.
snickerbockers · 9 months ago
>They're effectively miniature dictatorships. Normalising removing services because a tenant does something you personally find disagreeable is fine in the moment, but what happens when it's someone you support? Like when they removed Office365 access for a member of the EU parliament.
Not that I necessarily agree with what they did here, but I would like to point out that one alternative which has been employed previously would be to silently forward her e-mails to the NSA or state department. Refusing to offer their services is probably the most ethical thing that MS has ever done on behalf of the US federal government.
soraminazuki · 9 months ago
> because a tenant does something you personally find disagreeable
You do realize that the said tenant is massacring an entire population as we speak, right? Framing that as just something that's "disagreeable" is one hell of a euphemism.
The absolute bare minimum one can do is to not actively provide the technical means to carry out this atrocity, yet you claim it's only moral to do the exact opposite. This neoliberal fantasy that it's moral and good for society to let powerful corporations do whatever it wants is an absurdity not even worth refuting. But it's downright cruel and tone-deaf when it's used to justify taking part in an officially approved genocide.
thrance · 9 months ago
Companies have a duty to ensure they don't provide services that would enable illegal behaviour. What the IDF is doing is illegal under international law and a crime against Humanity.
licebmi__at__ · 9 months ago
I'll be honest, these, like the equivalent "cancel culture" statements, can only come from the politically naive or from someone accessory to the oppressive systems. "Normalizing removing services because the tenant does something disagreeable"? What the hell do you mean?, that is already normal. The only difference is that is usually the disadvantaged side that gets hit; when it's the regularly protected entity, and then and only then, we get these statements about "What if it happens to someone you support?".
shadowgovt · 9 months ago
Impressive.
I often think of Microsoft as the new IBM, and it's startling to me to watch them buck that reputation.
hashim · 9 months ago
They could never be that while Amazon and Google still run Project Nimbus.
hashim · 9 months ago
As someone who's been boycotting Microsoft in line with the BDS movement, I welcome this (belated) move, but seeing Bill Gates on stage laughing (maybe nervously) at Ibtihal Aboussad's (now validated) protest still makes me uneasy about a guy who I previously followed and liked to a reasonable extent, and I'll still probably hold off on watching his most recent documentaries. It makes me wonder how comfortable you have to be (as a supposed philanthropist, no less) with the deaths of tens of thousands of brown kids to laugh in a situation like that. Hell, even Ballmer had the sense to keep a straight face.
JumpCrisscross · 9 months ago
> how comfortable you have to be (as a supposed philanthropist, no less) with the deaths of tens of thousands of brown kids to laugh in a situation like that
Laughing at someone yelling on stage can be entirely orthogonal to what they’re saying. (And it’s not like that outburst did anything.)
hashim · 9 months ago
The article you're commenting on quite literally mentions that employee pressure, of which Ibtihal Aboussad's was the most vocal and memorable in the media, played a significant role in the decision.
JumpCrisscross · 9 months ago
> article you're commenting on quite literally mentions that employee pressure
Fair enough. I’m not buying it—the timeline doesn’t work, and the broader literature on disruptive protest is mixed, leaning towards negative.
What clearly swung the odds was the Guardian reporting on the frankly brazen meetings Microsoft executives decided to take. Without that reporting, this wouldn't have happened. With that reporting and absent the employee protests, this would have still likely happened.
hashim · 9 months ago
Does that "literature" include history itself? I can't think of a single movement for good in history that accomplished its goals without pissing people off. Resisting any form of power tends to result in that power - and the many supporting it - getting quite upset by definition.
JumpCrisscross · 9 months ago
> Does that "literature" include history itself?
Literally how these things are studied.
> can't think of a single movement for good in history that accomplished its goals without pissing people off
Disruptive protest takes the form of interrupting ordinary peoples' lives. (In contrast with targeted protest, which seeks to directly disrupt the problematic conduct.)
They are effective at raising awareness of an issue and rallying the base. Among those who are already aware and have not yet committed to a side, however, they tend (broadly) to decrease sympathy.
> Resisting any form of power tends to result in that power - and the many supporting it - getting quite upset by definition
Of course. I'm talking about broader views.
Sympathy for Israel went up after the Columbia protests because (a) nobody was surprised that there was a war in Gaza and (b) folks breaking into a building and disrupting public spaces doesn't naturally elicit sympathy from undecideds. (It also crowds out coverage of the actual war.)
zhengiszen · 9 months ago
Nice
efitz · 9 months ago
I think Cloud providers should be common carriers. I don’t think that it is a good thing when a company can make an arbitrary decision and disable functionality that you have put millions of dollars and thousands or tens of thousands of person hours into.
I think that the only reasons that a cloud provider should be permitted to use to justify termination of service, are illegal activity (in the country of service), non-payment, or attempting to harm or disrupt the service.
I am in no way condoning anything that Israel is doing, just like I wasn’t condoning what people on Parler were saying when AWS axed them in 2021.
No matter how much you like what the people in charge are doing today or who they’re doing it to, sooner or later someone will take the reins who decides that you are the target.
Same with banks, credit card companies, etc. if you are incorporated and your business is to support commerce, you should keep your thumb off the scale.
taco_emoji · 9 months ago
MS is saying they violated terms of service. Are you saying common carriers shouldn't have terms of service?
khnov · 9 months ago
So you think making a genocide is not illegal ?
baobabKoodaa · 9 months ago
Look how carefully they worded that to make a carve-out for this very case: "in the country of service". As in, Gaza is now part of Israel, and according to Israeli laws, Israel is not doing any genocide on Palestinians.
mlinsey · 9 months ago
I agree with you in most contexts, but "illegal activity (in the country of service)" is a tough one in the context of an invasion, a territorial dispute, or international espionage.
Before the current war, Hamas was the governing authority in Gaza, despite the Palestinian Authority being the internationally recognized one. Regardless, whether the surveillance was legal under Israeli law doesn't seem like the correct standard.
efitz · 9 months ago
I think that if Azure offers their service in Israel it has to comply with Israeli law; I don’t see why that would not govern in this case.
If Azure were providing service to the US Government then that service would be governed by US law even if the employees using the service traveled abroad; the only exception would be if service was initiated by an employee in another country under the terms for the service provider in that country, but even then likely government has contracts with the provider that would shift jurisdiction back to the US.
freeopinion · 9 months ago
The concept of common carriers in not a wartime concept. Should occupied Ukranians keep providing service to their occupiers on principle?
Aside from the common carrier concept, operating a significant war-supporting facility makes you a significant target. And I don't just mean a target for criticism. Datacenters risk a security threat on a whole new level if taking them out is important to war operations.
Would you criticize a commercial port in the Black Sea if it turned away Russian warships? Harboring Russian warships makes it extremely likely that your port could become the target of missile strikes. If you want to remain an innocent bystander, don't harbor combatants.
This is not a statement in support of any side of any war.
joe463369 · 9 months ago
> I think Cloud providers should be common carriers. I don’t think that it is a good thing when a company can make an arbitrary decision and disable functionality that you have put millions of dollars and thousands or tens of thousands of person hours into.
Exactly! The IDF have put a lot of effort in to this genocide.
kmeisthax · 9 months ago
Just to be clear: "illegal under international law" isn't good enough? It has to be sovereign entities' own laws? As in, a cloud provider should have no power to refuse service to any government?
danbruc · 9 months ago
What would happen in a hypothetical scenario where Microsoft cut off everything [1] they can for all of Israel - no Azure, no Office, no Outlook, no Exchange, no SQL Server, no Windows, no Xbox, no ...? Depending on how many things they can make unusable, I would imagine that this would be pretty bad, probably even causing some deaths because of affected infrastructure.
[1] Not sure what they could actually make unusable by revoking licenses, blocking logins, and whatnot. It probably also matters how quickly the effects are felt, Azure would be gone immediately but I am not sure how often Office checks whether its license has been revoked, if at all. If license checks make things stop working over weeks and months, it would still not be pretty, but it would provide at least some time to prepare and avoid the worst.
CommanderData · 9 months ago
That would never happen.
Israel has too much influence over the US.
danbruc · 9 months ago
That is why the comment says hypothetical scenario. ;-)
snickerbockers · 9 months ago
IDK but Mossad is quite possibly the world's most effective spy agency and SV software corporations rarely have effective safeguards to protect against rogue employees so we must conclude that there are many sleeper agents planted throughout major corporations on behalf of just about every intelligence agency in the world including but not limited to mossad.
I have not seen any hard evidence of this nor have i ever suspected a fellow employee at any of my employers of being a double-agent loyal to a state intelligence agency but it's easy enough to do that there must be hundreds, maybe even thousands of sleeper agents all over santa clara and redmond.
trhway · 9 months ago
>Unit 8200, the military’s elite spy agency, had violated the company’s terms of service by storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform
reliance of everything/everybody on cloud platforms already mind-boggling.
One can extrapolate it further - in a near future conflicts both sides may have their data, weapons control systems, etc. running inside the same Big Cloud Provider ... in this case would they need actual physical weapons systems? or may be it would be easier to just let those weapons control systems duke each other out in the virtual battle space provided as a service by the same Big Cloud Provider.
MomsAVoxell · 9 months ago
Too little, too late. The whole world knows that Microsoft has blood on its hands.
not_a_bot_4sho · 9 months ago
Yeah, not really. Kind of the opposite: they took action after investigation.
The assertion that Microsoft knew what it's customers were doing, that it was inspecting customer data and workloads, comes from ignorance of how cloud providers work.
aa-jv · 9 months ago
False. Microsoft knew very well they had contracts with the IDF, it was announced in flowery PR all over the place, and at the beginning of the genocide there were protests against Microsofts' overt involvement.
This is just CYA. That it took Microsoft this long is incorrigible.
insane_dreamer · 9 months ago
My first reaction was "good on Microsoft". Then I read how it was only after a Guardian report exposed this was happening that MSFT took action. They were perfectly content to provide the services so long as it wasn't widely known.
myth_drannon · 9 months ago
Looks like the contracts are not going to AWS or Google but to Nebius (founded by Volozhin, who founded of Yandex).
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nebius-to-build-a...
"Google and Amazon, both of which already hold the $1.2 billion Nimbus contract with the Israeli government, originally received a preliminary tender for the supercomputer but ultimately withdrew from contention."
EchoReflection · 9 months ago
"Microsoft condones Hamas attack on Oct 7th."
"Microsoft changes company slogan to 'Allah Akbar Surveillance for the Future of Glorious Jihad"
"Microsoft Pledges Billions of Dollars to Help Hamas Rebuild Tunnels That Were Used to Invade Israel".
I wonder how the Jewish employees at Micro$oft don't quit en masse...I guess people need income/have families to think about, but still... Preventing Israel from using MS tech to protect itself from terrorist attacks is pretty disgusting. Highly recommend Douglas Murray's (extremely disturbing and sad) book "On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Western Civilization" (warning: includes horrific accounts of extreme violence against Israeli civilians)
https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/on-democraci...
https://www.audible.com/pd/On-Democracies-and-Death-Cults-Au...
phatfish · 9 months ago
> I wonder how the Jewish employees at Micro$oft don't quit en masse...
I suspect the sensible ones are keeping a low profile and praying for it all to be over, much like the Palestinians (except they are starving in a wasteland not working for Microsoft).
Sporktacular · 9 months ago
Cue the victimhood - how unfair it is that the IDF gets singled out for doing what every military does - how Israel is the real victim here.
doubleorseven · 9 months ago
it's a jing jang thing. soon there will be some one else who will be a tastier roast. but as an Israeli im really impressed they were able to use so much compute before someone checked their activity report. I mean this was not just parking space they were using, stakes were high! it's 2025 and (still) money talks.
zawaideh · 9 months ago
Every single one of these companies that have enabled the genocide should be help accountable. Maybe some are trying to claim plausible deniability.
--
For those looking for direct sources on the findings of genocide in Gaza, here are several key reports and legal conclusions from human rights organizations, international courts, and genocide scholars:
1. UN Commission of Inquiry: Concluded that Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip. * Report: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c... * Press Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trUcK8hHaIA
2. Amnesty International: Concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. * Statement: https://www.amnesty.org/en/petition/end-israels-genocide-aga...
3. B'Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories): Published their conclusion that Israel is committing genocide. * Report ("Our Genocide"): https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide
4. International Court of Justice (ICJ): Ruled in January 2024 that it is plausible Israel's acts could violate the Genocide Convention. * Case Details: https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192
5. Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention: Issued an "Active Genocide Alert" in October 2023, warning of the high risk of genocide. * Alert: https://www.lemkininstitute.com/active-genocide-alert-1/acti...
Beyond these formal reports, it's crucial to acknowledge that this has been one of the most documented atrocities in history, often livestreamed by Palestinians on the ground. Their testimonies have been consistent from the beginning, yet they are frequently dismissed until a non-Palestinian, "human" source validates their lived experience.
DaveZale · 9 months ago
it doesn't matter. What is happening is demolition and genocide. Simple as that
r00fus · 9 months ago
Israel is now damaged goods. You interact with them at a reputational cost. It's only going to get worse as they don't seem to want to stop the genocide.
aussieguy1234 · 9 months ago
These journalists have saved lives and will almost certainly face repucussions and backlash for their work, so kudos to them.
aussieguy1234 · 9 months ago
"Unit 8200 had built an indiscriminate new system allowing its intelligence officers to collect, play back and analyse the content of cellular calls of an entire population"
During the troubles in Northern Ireland all the phones were tapped. IRA supporters knew this, so would frequently discuss fake bombing plans over the phone, sending the authorities on a wild goose chase.
PeterStuer · 9 months ago
Not really my backwaters, but suppose Israel would block US companies from using their tech, wouldn't cybersecurity collapse?
botanical · 9 months ago
Are they going to rehire the employees they fired for being against this and Microsoft's support of the genocide now? It's more than just mass surveillance, and their leaders need to be held accountable.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/microsoft-azure-israel-top-cu...