'Tracking Everyone, All the Time': What Americans Need To Know About Israel's Secret Eavesdropping Program

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6 days ago

Nowadays, it seems that the limit to government surveillance is neither the law nor technological capabilities; it's storage space. In the 1990s, the U.S. National Security Agency was "annually converting more than 22 million pounds of secret documents into cheap, soluble slurry" in order to make room for more, according to Body of Secrets by James Bamford. In 2014, the NSA spent $1.5 billion on a massive data center in Utah riddled with electrical problems.
But Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the NSA, seems to have figured out a simple workaround for the problem: Contract it out to private industry. A joint investigative report by The Guardian and the Israeli publications +972 Magazine and Local Call revealed on Wednesday that Unit 8200 has been storing massive amounts of intercepted phone audio on Microsoft's Azure cloud service.
Microsoft, which pleaded ignorance of what the Israeli government was using its servers for, is not the only American institution involved in setting up the program. Its architect, who trained under U.S. military instructors, may have created a blueprint for future mass surveillance in other countries.
The cloud-powered surveillance program was the brainchild of Brig. Gen. Yossi Sariel, the former commander of Unit 8200. Sariel spent 2019 at the National Defense University, a U.S. Department of Defense academy for American and foreign national security professionals, The Washington Post reported last year. In 2020, he "returned to Israel brimming with plans," according to the Post, and took command of Unit 8200 from 2021 until last year.
One of those plans, this week's reporting revealed, was to work with private cloud providers. Under Sariel's tenure, Unit 8200's ability to retain and process audio data massively increased. The unit has gone from wiretapping tens of thousands of subjects to recording millions of people's calls, according to the report.
Unit 8200 officers told The Guardian and +972 that the unofficial mantra of the project was "a million calls per hour." (The combined population of Israel and the Palestinian territories is 14 million.) Leaked files suggest that Unit 8200 had a goal of storing 70 percent of its data on Azure and that the Israeli military already had 11,500 terabytes of data in total stored on an Azure server in the Netherlands by July 2025.
That would be the equivalent of 200 million hours of audio, although it's not clear how much of those 11,500 terabytes comes from Unit 8200's phone intercepts.
Microsoft confirmed that Unit 8200 was a customer of its data security services but said that it had "no information" about the data stored on its servers. After the report was published, the Israeli military put out a statement claiming that "Microsoft is not and has not been working with the [Israel Defense Forces] on the storage or processing of data."
Even before the surveillance revelations, the relationship between Microsoft and the Israeli government was a subject of controversy. Several Microsoft employees have been fired for publicly protesting over the issue. Most recently, engineer Joe Lopez was fired in May 2025 after shouting "Microsoft is killing Palestinians" during CEO Satya Nadella's keynote speech.
Beyond the specifics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, the new reporting carries some lessons about the future of surveillance.
Monitoring begets more monitoring; governments set up dragnets in response to security threats, then realize how useful the data is for other goals. The cycle used to be limited by data storage capacity. Nowadays, private industry is increasingly willing and able to fulfill governments' appetite for surveillance capacity, though it's also afraid of bad press and legal liability.
Sariel became interested in mass surveillance data collection after a 2015 wave of lone-wolf Palestinian attacks that were impossible to predict by conventional investigative techniques.
Someone "decides to perpetrate an attack using a kitchen knife to stab a victim, or the family vehicle to run people over," Sariel wrote in 2021 under a pseudonym, which The Guardian exposed as his last year. "Sometimes the person doesn't even know a day before that he or she is going to commit such an attack. In these cases, traditional intelligence agencies are helpless. How can such an attack be predicted or prevented?"
Intelligence officers told +972 Magazine that Sariel became obsessed with "tracking everyone, all the time," and "suddenly, the public became our enemy."
While some officers insisted that the surveillance dragnet has saved lives, another portrayed it as a machine that constantly creates pretexts for more aggressive action.
"These people get entered into the system, and the data on them just keeps growing," an intelligence officer who recently served in the West Bank told +972. "When they need to arrest someone and there isn't a good enough reason to do so, [the surveillance repository] is where they find the excuse. We're now in a situation where almost no one in the [Palestinian] territories is 'clean,' in terms of what intelligence has on them."
For all its technical sophistication, Israeli intelligence failed to anticipate the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. (In fact, Israeli leaders' overconfidence in their high-tech defense may have led them to miss signs of an impending war.) Yet those attacks became another reason to expand the data collection, because the army was preparing to take "long-term control" of Gaza, an intelligence officer told +972.
Israeli officials were also uncomfortable with putting such sensitive data in the hands of a foreign third party. Documents from the Israeli justice ministry, obtained by +972, warned that cloud services based in other countries could be exposed to legal liability or even be forced to hand over intelligence data. After the war in Gaza began, Microsoft officials warned Israeli counterparts not to use its services for lethal military targeting, a source at Microsoft told The Guardian.
If recent history is any indication, U.S. officials will be watching these challenges closely. The Bush administration looked to Israeli precedents for justifying war-on-terror measures legally, and American police have often incorporated trips to Israel into their counterterrorism training. The "start-up nation" may soon become a model for public-private surveillance partnerships as well.
The post 'Tracking Everyone, All the Time': What Americans Need To Know About Israel's Secret Eavesdropping Program appeared first on Reason.com.
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