‘Tracking Everyone, All the Time’: What Americans Need To Know About Israel’s Secret Eavesdropping Program
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 foreign officers, 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.
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