Microsoft is busy cashing out hundreds of millions as bombs continue to fall on Gaza and Israel continues its indiscriminate surveillance of Palestine. The tech giant entered a multi-million-dollar deal with Israel’s Unit 8200. Microsoft’s role is to store and process a vast amount of intelligence gathered on Palestinians through intercepted calls and messages.
The International Court of Justice has called Israel’s army a plausible genocide, and Microsoft is powering this genocide. Why is an American tech company in cahoots with Israel?
Big Tech is the New Military-Industrial Complex
Wars used to be fought with missiles and tanks, but the new weapons of war are now on cloud servers and powered by artificial intelligence. And this is where Microsoft is cashing in.
According to Microsoft, partnering with Unit 8200 is regarded as a powerful brand moment for Azure, its cloud division. All of this took place after Israeli intelligence could no longer manage the volume of data it had gathered on Palestinians.
They called, and Microsoft readily answered to store a million calls an hour of Palestinian data. The tech company stores this data in servers in the Netherlands, Ireland, and Israel.
The worst part is that Microsoft was not just a passive partner; they were fully involved and integrated in creating the solution. For Microsoft, it’s all about the money, as the deal could give them a profit of hundreds of millions.
Genocide-as-a-Service?
Last year in a report, Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine, called out 60 companies, including Microsoft, for profiting from an economy of genocide.
Since October, Microsoft has actively given engineering support worth nothing less than $10 million to the Israeli military. This support includes AI tools used to select bombing targets. It’s obvious this is beyond complicity; it’s full-blown participation. It’s more or less similar to what the U.S. government is doing by supplying Israel with weapons. The only difference is that Silicon Valley employs metadata, cloud storage, and machine learning.
So, Lockheed builds the bombs, while Microsoft chooses where they land. With such an arrangement and profit, are we at all surprised that the genocide has not stopped?
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