Tag Archives: Microsoft emails Ireland

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

Data Security: Real Fear

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On its website, ProfitBricks touts what it calls “100 percent German data protection,” underneath the black, red, and gold colors of the German flag. “Having a German cloud helps tremendously,” says Markus Schaffrin, an IT security expert at Eco, a lobbying group for Internet companies. “Germany has some of the most stringent data-protection laws, and cloud-service providers with domestic data centers are of course highlighting that.”

The companies known as the Mittelstand—the small and midsize enterprises that form the backbone of the German economy—are rapidly embracing the idea of the networked factory. Yet they remain wary of entrusting intellectual property to a cloud controlled by global technology behemoths and possibly subject to government snooping. “Small and medium enterprises are afraid that those monsters we sometimes call Internet companies will suck out the brain of innovation,” says Joe Kaeser, chief executive officer of Siemens, which in March began offering cloud services using a network managed by German software powerhouse SAP.

In a case being closely watched in Germany, the U.S. Department of Justice has demanded that Microsoft hand over e-mails stored on a data server in Ireland. The software maker argues that the U.S. has no jurisdiction there; the U.S. government says it does, because Microsoft is an American company. …

U.S. companies aren’t ceding the market. Microsoft will offer its Azure public cloud infrastructure in German data centers, with T-Systems acting as a trustee of customer data. The companies say the arrangement will keep information away from non-German authorities. And IBM in December opened a research and sales hub for Watson, its cloud-based cognitive computing platform, in Munich—a move intended to reassure Mittelstand buyers about the security of their data. “If a customer wants data never to leave Bavaria, then it won’t,” says Harriet Green, IBM’s general manager for Watson. “I’m being invited in by many, many customers in Germany, because fear about security is very, very real.”

Excerpts from Building a National Fortress in the Cloud, Bloomberg, May 19, 2016