Comment by dark_mode
1 month ago
> The decision has not affected Microsoft’s wider commercial relationship with the IDF, which is a longstanding client and will retain access to other services. The termination will raise questions within Israel about the policy of holding sensitive military data in a third-party cloud hosted overseas.
It's worth noting that even after finding out the "most moral" army is conducting mass surveillance, they're still happy to provide them services.
Doesn't every army conduct "mass surveillance"? What do you think all those satellites with cameras are doing orbiting the planet?
Wouldn't the opposite be incredibly immoral? Attacking/bombing/etc without large scale surveillance would largely mean increased collateral damage.
Are you seriously equating observing an area using satellites with indiscriminately monitoring everyone's calls, messages, and possibly hacking their devices?
Militaries do that too. Signals Intelligence has been thing since radios were used by the military. I bet you that in Ukraine the moment you fire up any RF emitter it's showing up on someone's spectrum analyzer. And if it's unencrypted or a broken encryption they'll probably be decoding and logging the transmission.
1 reply →
Given lackluster response to the recent attempts of the "democratic" governments to do very much the same to their own citizens, I daresay not many are particularly impressed.
Additionally, there is observation AI face tracking of all movements of Palestinians in the West Bank, who live under occupation. While other governments may also conduct monitoring of their citizens to varying degrees, the distinction is that they are monitoring citizens, not using monitoring to enforce military apartheid.
1 reply →
And not in a war zone, even. (West Bank is governed by Israel.)
4 replies →
I case of Hezbollah it was very much worth it.
Perhaps the actual moral choice isn’t attacking blindly or mass surveillance of an occupied nation - it’s peace?
Regardless, the death toll in gaza (somewhere between 45,000 and 600,000) suggests that this mass surveillance isn’t being used effectively to reduce the death toll. It also doesn’t take mass surveillance to know that bombing hospitals and schools is going to kill innocent people.
You're assuming the objective is to lower the civilian casualties. From the statements of prominent Israeli ministers and the actual behavior of the bombardment it's pretty clear that, for the Israeli government, killing civilians is a feature, not a bug
> Regardless, the death toll in gaza (somewhere between 45,000 and 600,000) suggests that this mass surveillance isn’t being used effectively to reduce the death toll.
Keep in mind deaths published by the Gaza(Hamas) ministry of health do not differentiate civilian vs combatant deaths at all.
6 replies →
Even the Gaza Health Ministry claims only 68,000, so I presume that your 600,000 is a typo.
18 replies →
While I agree the "who is more morally right" is owned to a higher degree by the Palestinians than the Israelis at the moment, I think people are missing a key shift in global politics.
Virtually all of the discourse on Israel-Palestine concerns moral righteousness or moral shame. I think the era of moral arguments in geopolitics is coming to an end, because the unipolar or Communist-Capitalist bipolar world combined with the Holocaust that enabled geopolitical moral arguments is basically dead.
It might just be my interest in global affairs spiking to avoid the constant bad news from the Trump administration, but I think we are entering a much more turbulent (and historically normal) period of realist/self-interest directed foreign policy. The US isn't around to be "good cop" (I can't emphasize the quotes around "good" enough).
I think this is why we are surrounded by the sense that authoritarianism is on the rise. The US won't care if you are democratic or authoritarian. The US won't care if you invade your neighbor if it doesn't disrupt them too much. Or the US just plain doesn't care at all.
So it's my general opinion that even if the Palestinians are more morally righteous in the great moral book-pounding, history-pointing, casualty-counting endless debate ... the era where that mattered has come to an end. Alas, I think we are entering a might-makes-right era of world politics, especially in the Middle East, and especially since the US has its own oil now from the Dakota shale fracking.
> Wouldn't the opposite be incredibly immoral? Attacking/bombing/etc without large scale surveillance would largely mean increased collateral damage.
The concern is who gets to decide what is or isn't a legitimate target? Today's heroes might be tomorrow's victims. I'd rather no one have that much power over others.
Arguing that mass surveillance is not unethical but actually a way to save lives is pretty disingenuous, absurdly so considering how little the country wielding it cares about collateral damage.
It would be pretty difficult for the IDF to increase their level of collateral damage.
In 1945, about ~90k people died over 2 days from the Tokyo Firebombing. Do you think it would be difficult for any modern millitary - that intentionally wanted to cause as much collateral damage as possible - to greatly exceed that number?
9 replies →
Holy crap you’re totally right
Two things: 1. The death toll has shown that this is the most indiscriminate bombings (Biden's own words) and deaths of civilians in recent memory. So, you could argue the tech is aiding in killing key civil infra staff
2. Sure, they can surveil, let them do it on their own data centers. It's actually strange that they would put such data/tech on a 3rd party data center to begin with.
>Attacking/bombing/etc without large scale surveillance would largely mean increased collateral damage.
That would only be true if your goal was not to completely obliterate the population you are attacking and bombing, as Israel has demonstrated.
Since the Oct 7 attacks the Palestinian population has not shrunk. War deaths have roughly equalled births.
Are you claiming that the IDF is trying their hardest to kill all the Palestinians they can, and that this is the best they can do? Really?
4 replies →
> It's worth noting that even after finding out the "most moral" army is conducting mass surveillance, they're still happy to provide them services.
Well, why wouldn't they? It's Microsoft, they're not exactly stewards of privacy.
Where does "most moral" come from?
Per Wikipedia, the idea that the IDF is the "most moral army in the world" comes from Colonel Richard Kemp, a retired British army officer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_of_arms
It's a throwaway line Israeli officials have been using for a long time. I heard Netanyahou himself use it to describe the IDF and explain it can't possibly do wrong.
https://x.com/IsraeliPM/status/1745501858611786029?lang=en
"Finding out" in the "shocked! shocked!" Casablanca sense.
The IDF's "Wolf" system have been well known for years.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/19/idf-facia...
I mean, there are other reasons to not provide them services. Really, mass surveillance is quite low on the list.
[flagged]
How so? The Patriot Act was arguably the kick-off of the state of constant mass surveillance that is ubiquitous today.
Arguably? I think its confirmed. The re-approval of the act under multiple administrations is horrifying.
The problem with the Patriot Act was mass surveillance of people who didn't need to be surveilled. In this situation we are talking about a group of people with support for genocide in the double digit percentages.
2 replies →