Ireland sues Microsoft over alleged cover-up in Israeli surveillance of Palestinians.
The complaint, which was obtained by media outlets including Bloomberg, asks Ireland’s Data Protection Commission to investigate how Microsoft handles Israeli government and military data and to halt the practices if they are unlawful.
The complaint was filed in Ireland, where Microsoft has its European headquarters, and whose regulators are tasked with enforcing strict EU data protection rules.
The Irish Civil Liberties Council said the complaint, which is based on information received from the company’s employees, was filed with the support of Eco, a group that advocates for the social responsibility of technology companies.
The complaint alleges that the sudden transfer of data from Europe has weakened Ireland’s ability to monitor data that is considered highly sensitive under GDPR. This has raised questions about how Microsoft is circumventing European oversight.
In recent months, Microsoft has faced increasing criticism, including accusations that it is supporting Israel’s military machine in its attacks on Gaza and the West Bank by providing artificial intelligence and cloud computing services. Growing legal and ethical protests, along with employee criticism, have intensified pressure on the company.
In response to this pressure, Microsoft announced last September that it was cutting off access to some of its cloud services and artificial intelligence tools to the Israeli military’s “8200” military intelligence unit, an unprecedented move that followed the publication of a revealing report in the Guardian newspaper. The report showed that the intelligence unit used Azure cloud infrastructure to store and analyze vast amounts of phone calls and data collected from millions of Palestinians.
A joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 and Local Call found that Unit 8200 had created a massive surveillance system with an internal slogan of “one million conversations per hour.” According to internal documents, more than 8,000 terabytes of intercepted data were stored in a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands, but in early August the data was immediately moved out of the EU, most likely to Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.