Microsoft cuts off Azure phone surveillance support for Israeli military The president of Microsoft has said it's cutting parts of the Israeli military off from Azure after reports that the army was using the platform in a mass surveillance operation against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Brad Smith issued a statement following reports in British newspaper The Guardian that Israel's Unit …
What's the best way to move that amount of data from MS to Amazon? Over the Internet at 100Gb/s, it would take over a week. Is that speed reasonably practical for that long, even between the two giants? I guess you could put the data on hundreds of hard drives and transport those.
I'm not sure there's much of a choice. They can wait a week, and if they're moving it from Azure's in NL to AWS in NL, they've got plenty of network capacity there and can probably transfer faster than that.
There is a hardware option, with Microsoft having a method to order big boxes with 525 TB of storage capacity. They could order sixteen of those. The problem is that, once those arrive, you still have to transfer it into something else and each of those boxes theoretically maxes out at 120 Gb/s bandwidth if you use three different cables and have something that can handle the other side, but Microsoft estimates that the 100 GbE link will have about 60 Gbps in practice. Theoretically, that does mean you can have 1920 Gbps transfer speed by parallelizing that, but that's going to use quite a lot of cables and upload capacity, and I've only looked at getting the data out of Azure, not what is involved to get it from those boxes into AWS. Once you add getting the boxes shipped to the datacenter where the data is, copying data onto those boxes, shipping them to where you can receive them, shipping those to where AWS will take them, copying the data into AWS, and any more administrative overhead required to get that much hardware in the right places, that speed difference might not be so noticeable.
Physically unplug and move the disks…
However, given the apparent speed of transfer of live operations, would not be surprised if they have been storing duplicates across various cloud providers.
I wonder what MS charged for that amount of storage…
Published price for north Europe is circa 18,000 USD for 1 PB/month.
[ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/storage/blobs/ ]
I had been wondering if El Reg would ever cover this. There have been reports on +972 Magazine and the graun since at least January. OpenAI is also involved, unsurprisingly. Perhaps usage of AI to commit war crimes might have been good to cover last year as welll. Better late than never, I suppose. Sadly, as per the graun article, all other business with Israeli military is unaffected and so Microsoft continues to be willingly complicit in the ongoing genocide.
Brad Smith issued a statement following reports in British newspaper The Guardian that Israel's Unit 8200 cyber unit was using Redmond's cloud network to harvest a "million phone calls an hour." The reports claim that Unit 8200 harvested phone details, sorted them using AI technology, and stored them on European servers, and then used the data for targeting military operations
Any detail of what was actually in those phone details?
Is it phone numbers (src,dst)
Content of the calls
Call meta data like sim details, networks, call locations, call duration?
We’ve been led to believe that phone conversations where encrypted so would be interesting to know if they are not.
A quick google mentions encryption to the mast only so it’s plausible call content has been siphoned & analysed too.
Phone calls are not end-to-end encrypted and have never been. There are encrypted voice services available which can work over mobile data. Someone with tower-level access can record call content. I don't know whether they have, though it seems likely that they might have, but they can.
The process described in the article is quite specific: "The president of Microsoft has said it's cutting parts of the Israeli military off from Azure...."
What about all the other snoops DOING EXACTLY THE SAME THING?
And targeting ANYONE ANYWHERE in the world?
Laughable isn't it? All the recent crap about "digital sovereignty".............when NO SUCH THING EXISTS!!!! ANYWHERE!!!!
Not for mass survellience, could have fooled me. Windows 11 is spyware. Also sliently turning on cloud sync for people's file and browsing with an update. We all know you'll had it over in heart beat when the feds come knocking. Lets not forget Recall, an AI powered screen logger.
These don't sound like actions of a company with objections to mass survellience.
as M$ also provides cloud services for Flock Safety. You know who they are? They are the ones who provide tracking and surveillance services for governments that track citizens without a warrant. All those cameras that use ALPR to look at license plates are Flock Safety, and is the biggest mass surveillance program for the state to track its citizens since, well I would say Stasi, but I think London has gone far, far beyond what Stasi ever did. If M$ does not support tracking citizens for governmenta, then they should also shut down this service.
