Activists have staged a protest on the roof of a Microsoft datacentre in the Netherlands after revelations the Israeli military is storing large volumes of data in the country.
Images posted on social media showed some of the activists blocking access to the large Microsoft facility in the north-west of the country on Sunday, while others scaled the building’s roof and lit flares.
The group, Geef Tegengas (Push Back), said its protest was in response to a recent Guardian investigation that revealed how the Israeli military surveillance agency Unit 8200 has used Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to store a vast collection of intercepted Palestinian phone calls.
The joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call found that Microsoft’s Azure servers in the Netherlands have held large volumes of Israeli military data.
Leaked Microsoft documents suggest that by July this year 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data, equivalent to approximately 200m hours of audio files, was stored in Azure’s servers in the Netherlands.
In a statement, the activists said they were “calling on all employees of the datacentre to lay down their work until all Israeli intelligence has been removed from the servers”.
The Microsoft facility, a 14-hectare campus located near Middenmeer in the North Holland province, is part of a global network of datacentres used to store Azure customers’ data.
Disclosures about the Israeli military’s reliance on the Netherlands-based datacentres prompted questions in the Dutch parliament this week at an emergency parliamentary debate about Israel’s war on Gaza.
During the debate, Christine Teunissen, an MP for the leftwing Party for the Animals, asked the government how it would prevent data held in the country from “being used to commit genocide” in the besieged Palestinian territory.
Caspar Veldkamp, the Dutch foreign minister, said in response he does not know exactly what information is available, but he would “request further investigation”, adding: “If there are serious indications of criminal offences in that information, legal proceedings can of course be initiated, and that is then up to the public prosecution service.”
Responding to the investigation this week, Microsoft said it had “no information” about the kind of data stored by Unit 8200 in Azure. “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,” a spokesperson said.
On Saturday, the Guardian reported that senior Microsoft executives are scrambling to assess what data Unit 8200 holds in Azure and are concerned that its staff in Israel may have concealed key details about its work with the unit.
A spokesperson for the Israeli military previously said its work with Microsoft is based on “legally supervised agreements” and the military “operates in accordance with international law, with the aim of countering terrorism and ensuring the security of the state and its citizens”.
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