Tag Archives: mass surveillance

Big Tech and Military: Microsoft – Israel Force

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Microsoft terminated in September 2025 the Israeli military’s access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls made each day in Gaza and the West Bank, according to Guardian. Microsoft told Israeli officials 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.

Equipped with Azure’s near-limitless storage capacity and computing power, Unit 8200 had built an indiscriminate new system allowing its intelligence officers to collect, play back and analyze the content of cellular calls of an entire population.

The project was so expansive that, according to sources from Unit 8200 – which is equivalent in its remit to the US National Security Agency – a mantra emerged internally that captured its scale and ambition: “A million calls an hour.”

The enormous repository of intercepted calls – which amounted to as much as 8,000 terabytes of data – was held in a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands. Within days of the Guardian publishing, Unit 8200 appears to have swiftly moved the surveillance data out of the country.

Excerpt from Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham, Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its technology in mass surveillance of Palestinians, Guardian, Sept. 25, 2025

How to Categorize Individuals: Surveillance Pricing

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The United States Federal Trade Commission issued orders to eight companies offering surveillance pricing products and services that incorporate data about consumers’ characteristics and behavior. The orders seek information about the potential impact these practices have on privacy, competition, and consumer protection.

The orders are aimed at helping the FTC better understand the opaque market for products by third-party intermediaries that claim to use advanced algorithms, artificial intelligence and other technologies, along with personal information about consumers—such as their location, demographics, credit history, and browsing or shopping history—to categorize individuals and set a targeted price for a product or service. The study is aimed at helping the FTC better understand how surveillance pricing is affecting consumers, especially when the pricing is based on surveillance of an individual’s personal characteristics and behavior.

“Firms that harvest Americans’ personal data can put people’s privacy at risk. Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC’s inquiry will shed light on this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen.”

The FTC is using its 6(b) authority, which authorizes the Commission to conduct wide-ranging studies that do not have a specific law enforcement purpose, to obtain information from eight firms that advertise their use of AI and other technologies along with historical and real-time customer information to target prices for individual consumers. The orders were sent to: Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture, and McKinsey & Co.

FTC Issues Orders to Eight Companies Seeking Information on Surveillance Pricing, Press Release, July 23, 2024

The Law of the Jungle for Personal Data: Who Benefits?

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The vast amount of Americans’ personal data available for sale has provided a rich stream of intelligence for the U.S. government but created significant threats to privacy, according to a newly released report by the U.S.’s top spy agency. Commercially available information, or CAI, has grown in such scale that it has begun to replicate the results of intrusive surveillance techniques once used on a more targeted and limited basis, the report found. “In a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, CAI includes information on nearly everyone that is of a type and level of sensitivity that historically could have been obtained” through targeted collection methods such as wiretaps, cyber espionage or physical surveillance, the report concluded. 

In recent years, data brokers’ offerings have grown from basic address history and demographic information to include the trail of information generated by smartphone devices and apps, social-media platforms, automobiles and location trackers such as fitness watches. Such detailed information can now “cause harm to an individual’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety,” said the report, which urged the intelligence community to develop better policies, procedures and safeguards around its acquisition of such information.  Virtually anyone can purchase the data, and the marketplace is loosely regulated in the U.S., which has no comprehensive national privacy law. 

Much of that data is sold to the government by vendors who claim it is “anonymized”—stripped of personal information such as names or addresses. But privacy advocates and researchers say that in the case of geolocation information on phones or cars, a name can often be inferred: Individuals typically park their cars at night and set down their phones at their homes. In the case of certain internet data, browsing behavior also can reveal personal information.

“If the government can buy its way around Fourth Amendment due-process, there will be few meaningful limits on government surveillance,” Wyden said in a statement, referring to the U.S. Constitution’s protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Excerpts from Byron Tau and Dustin Volz, U.S. Spy Agencies Buy Vast Quantities of Americans’ Personal Data, WSJ,, June 13, 2023

How to Track 1,000 People at the Same Time

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DARPA is striving to help the military keep track of up to 1,000 targets on earth through the development of new satellite software–a program called ‘Oversight.’

From the DARPA website: DARPA, the U.S. Space Force, and the Space Development Agency (SDA) are developing new satellite constellations to increase the tactical capabilities of U.S. space systems…’Oversight’ seeks software solutions to enable autonomous constant custody, or knowledge of target location within accuracies necessary for mission needs, of up to 1,000 targets from space assets through management of available satellite hardware resources. The project aims to support both peacetime and wartime monitoring of high value targets in contested environments where resources and targets may be highly dynamic.

Current practices require human operators for exquisite satellite solutions. This arrangement does not scale well for the numbers of targets that Oversight is considering. Reliance on individual ground station operators significantly increases latency and minimizes tactical utility of satellite sensor data. Oversight will develop the autonomy necessary to track targets with the operator overseeing at an aggregate level. It will also leverage existing and/or state-of-the-art networks to provide collaboration between satellite and ground resources.