LONDON: Activists in the Netherlands have taken over the roof of a Microsoft data center after it was revealed that the tech giant stores data for the Israeli military in the country.
The Geef Tegengas (Push Back) group said the Microsoft Azure platform, which uses servers in the Netherlands, was being used to store intercepted phone data from Palestinians by Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200.
It came after a joint investigation by The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language media platform Local Call.
The investigation found 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data, or around 200 million hours of audio, on the Netherlands’ Azure servers.
Geef Tegengas members lit flairs on the roof of the data center, with others blocking access to the site near Middenmeer in the northwest of the country.
They said they are “calling on all employees of the data center to lay down their work until all Israeli intelligence has been removed from the servers,” The Guardian reported.
Last week, Dutch politicians raised the issue of the use of servers by the Israeli military in the country’s parliament in The Hague.
MP Christine Teunissen asked the government for information on how it could prevent data stored in the Netherlands from “being used to commit genocide” in Gaza.
Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp responded that he was unaware of the nature of the data kept on the Azure servers, but that he would request more information.
“If there are serious indications of criminal offenses in that information, legal proceedings can of course be initiated, and that is then up to the public prosecution service,” he said.
Microsoft last week said it had “no information” about Unit 8200 data stored on Azure. The Guardian reported on Saturday that senior figures at the tech giant were concerned that staff based in Israel may have hidden aspects of the unit’s work.
A spokesperson for the US company said: “At no time during this engagement (with Unit 8200) has Microsoft been aware of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cellphone conversations using Microsoft’s services.”
