Comment on Microsoft employees occupy headquarters in protest of Israel contractsIt’s the biggest escalation yet of the protests at Microsoft.

yesman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  In a blog post published in May, the company said it had “found no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza.”

  But Microsoft said this month that it had enlisted the law firm Covington & Burling to conduct a further review after a report that Israel’s military surveillance agency intercepted millions of mobile phone calls made by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and stored them on Azure servers. That trove helped inform the selection of bombing targets in Gaza, according to reporting by the Guardian newspaper, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, and Local Call, a Hebrew-language news site.

  Who are you going to believe? The company profiting from collaborating with genocides, or the independent journalists calling them out for it? It’s a tough one.

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  • fluxion@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I’m not sure how you’d even know that was the case.

    However, now they know. So time to cancel those contracts, or…?

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• FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It’s one of those things that is literally true but misleading.

  They store, for example, all of the calls (content and metadata) that is captured from Gaza(which is all of it, since they control the cellular network). This use of Azure doesn’t target or harm people, it just stores a tremendous amount of data.

  The unsaid part is that this storage capability is later used by other data mining tools which analyze mass amounts of data in order to classify people as “Hamas” or “not-Hamas”.

  It is THAT tool that was/is used to make targeting decisions.

  So Azure wasn’t used to target people. It only provided the storage, which enabled the use of mass collection and data mining tools which was used to target people.

  Just like how IBM didn’t run concentration camps, they just provided the punch card system that allowed the processing of census data. The processed data which was later used to round up people for the camps.

  Microsoft is exactly that culpable for this genocide. They didn’t do anything illegal. However, in my opinion they are morally implicated in this. No matter how they want to try to distance themselves in press releases they are still, to this very hour, providing this capability.

  Because it’s a lot of money and it isn’t their children.

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  • Saleh@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Helping a genocide is very much illegal. If you sell precursor chemicals for poison gas to a death camp operator, you are also complicit.

    After Oct. 7 the usage by the IDF exploded. In early 2024 reports about the AI tools used to justify slaughtering Civilians en masse came out, employees have been raising alarms through the “proper” channels and then went to public protest as Microsoft ignored them and cracked down on any mention of it in Forums, Town Halls and the like.

    They absolutely know that they are complicit and would rot in prison the rest of their lifes if this goes to court properly.

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    • undeffeined@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Isn’t the big problem that the US government does not classify the ongoing genocide and genocide?

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      • Saleh@feddit.org ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        As an internationally active company there is many jurisdictions, where Microsoft can be held accountable.

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      • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Yes, and Microsoft lawyers have certainly gone over the contracts and communications to ensure that they’re always going to have plausible deniability as to what their client was doing.

        The best we could hope for is some engineers to become whistleblowers and share what was said during in-person meetings, unrecorded conversations and in side channels, like Signal chats.

        No Microsoft executives will ever see any legal consequences for this.

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  • MysteriousSophon21@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    This is exactly how these cloud architectures are designed - the seperation of storage and compute allows companies to claim “we just store the data” while ignoring that the entire system is built to enable exactly this kind of analytics pipeline.

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