Irish data centres are facilitating surveillance and targeting of Palestinians, reports The Guardian

Some incredible new investigative reporting from The Guardian revealed today that Irish based Microsoft data centres are likely involved in a population scale Israeli military effort to surveil and plan airstrikes on Palestinians.

The reporting is here - it is by Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham.

They found that the Israeli spy agency partnered with Microsoft's Azure to build "a sweeping and intrusive system that collects and stores recordings of millions of mobile phone calls made each day by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank."

According to the journalists' sources, "the cloud-based storage platform has facilitated the preparation of deadly airstrikes and has shaped military operations in Gaza and the West Bank." And those platforms are storing at least some of the data in Ireland.

The data is informing airstrikes

Here is how the data is used: to identify bombing targets..

"Intelligence drawn from the enormous repositories of phone calls held in Azure had been used to research and identify bombing targets in Gaza."

And blackmail, detain or justify killing people

"The initial focus of the system was the West Bank... sources said the information stored in Azure amounted to a rich repository of intelligence about its population that some in the unit claimed had been used to blackmail people, place them in detention, or even justify their killing after the fact."

And Irish data centres are being used

Leaked Microsoft files that the Guardian journalists got their hands on "suggest that a large proportion of the unit’s sensitive data may now be sitting in the company’s datacentres in the Netherlands and Ireland."

The scale of the data is almost unfathomable - as they write, "by July this year, 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data – equivalent to approximately 200 million hours of audio – was held in Microsoft’s Azure servers in the Netherlands" (emphasis mine).

While the report finds that "a smaller proportion was stored in Ireland", I doubt that will provide much comfort to many here.

I think we can expect to be hearing more about this over the coming days.