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After Anti-Genocide Protests, Microsoft Cuts Israeli Military Off From Cloud Services
"Though a step in the right direction," said one legal advocate, "this is not enough to end Microsoft's complicity in the genocide perpetrated by Israel."
Sep 25, 2025
After multiple exposés and international protests about Microsoft's "genocidal collaboration" with the Israel Defense Forces, the tech giant told employees on Thursday that it cut the IDF off from certain cloud storage and artificial intelligence technology.
Microsoft launched a review last month, after The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call reported that the IDF's Unit 8200 was using the cloud platform Azure to store data from "millions of mobile phone calls made each day by Palestinians" in the illegally occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces have killed at least tens of thousands of people over the past two years.
"We have reviewed The Guardian's allegations based on two principles, both grounded in Microsoft's longstanding protection of privacy as a fundamental right," Brad Smith, the company's vice chair and president, wrote to employees. "First, we do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians... Second, we respect and protect the privacy rights of our customers."
"While our review is ongoing, we have found evidence that supports elements of The Guardian's reporting," he continued. Thus, Microsoft has informed Israel's Ministry of Defense (IMOD) of its "decision to cease and disable specified IMOD subscriptions and their services, including their use of specific cloud storage and AI services and technologies."
"I want to note our appreciation for the reporting of The Guardian," he added. "I'll share more information in the coming days and weeks, when it's appropriate to do so, including lessons learned from this review and how we will apply those lessons as we go forward."
Shoutout to the Microsoft worker organizers who have been tirelessly (and often at the cost of their jobs) pushing Microsoft- not nearly enough but just another brick to crumble
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— Molly Shah (@mommunism.bsky.social) September 25, 2025 at 11:31 AM
The newspaper reported Thursday that, according to a document it obtained, a senior Microsoft executive similarly told IMOD late last week that the company "is not in the business of facilitating the mass surveillance of civilians" and "while our review is ongoing, we have at this juncture identified evidence that supports elements of The Guardian's reporting."
As The Guardian noted:
The termination is the first known case of a US technology company withdrawing services provided to the Israeli military since the beginning of its war on Gaza.
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 outlets involved in the August 6 reporting—and others, including The Associated Press and Drop Site News—have reported on Microsoft's relationship with the Israeli military throughout the year.
Drop Site's Ryan Grim highlighted that the company's decision is "a major victory for dissident Microsoft workers, who have been protesting intensely internally."
Microsoft employees have protested the company's ties to Israel since even before this year's reporting. For example, the "No Azure for Apartheid" petition was written by workers and shared internally in May 2024, to mark the 76th year of the Nakba—which means catastrophe in Arabic and is used to describe the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to establish the modern state of Israel.
No Azure for Apartheid on Thursday called the announcement "an unprecedented win" that "has only been possible because of the sustained pressure by our campaign," but also emphasized that "this action is insufficient."
"Today, on the 719th day of the genocide, the Israeli military, armed with Microsoft technology, is intensifying its genocidal campaign by invading Gaza City, forcibly starving more than 2 million Palestinians, and expanding ethnic cleansing in the West Bank," the campaign said. "By choosing to maintain this deep partnership with the Israeli military, Microsoft insists on continuing to serve as the technological backbone to the ongoing genocide and apartheid. At a time when countries around the globe are imposing arms embargoes on the Israeli military, our demand for a digital arms embargo has never been more critical."
Last month, seven current and former Microsoft workers were arrested after occupying Smith's office in Redmond, Washington, to protest the company's complicity in "the first AI-powered genocide." According to No Azure for Apartheid, the company has fired five employees following protests at its headquarters.
There have also been actions by critics outside Microsoft, including an August demonstration at a data center in the Netherlands.
Sabrene Odeh, community legal advocate at the Washington state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-WA), said in a Thursday statement that "though a step in the right direction, this is not enough to end Microsoft's complicity in the genocide perpetrated by Israel. Tech workers, across the board, have been sounding the alarm for two years with serious concerns over how technology is being used against civilians."
"If Microsoft is ready to end its complicity," Odeh continued, "it must listen to the brave tech workers in its base—who have been discriminated against, let go, and even quit their jobs because they no longer can be accomplices to the crimes Israel is committing—and end all ties with Israel."
CAIR-WA executive director Imraan Siddiqi stressed that it's not just Microsoft, arguing that "all tech companies must completely divest from their activities supporting the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and ensure that their employees who speak up against human rights abuses are protected."
This article has been updated with comment from No Azure for Apartheid.
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Steve Ballmer, Monopoly, Greenwashing, and the Media’s Favorite Fairy Tale
The former Microsoft CEO and Clippers owner’s scandal shows how media culture hails billionaires as visionaries while their fortunes rest on monopoly, exploitation, and illusion.
Sep 10, 2025
Los Angeles Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is at the center of an NBA investigation into whether a bankrupt “green finance” startup secretly funneled tens of millions of dollars to Kawhi Leonard in a scheme to dodge the salary cap. Ballmer insists he was duped, not complicit. But even if he escapes punishment, this scandal is less about basketball than about a larger truth: Ballmer’s rise, like that of so many billionaires, rests not on genius but on monopoly, exploitation, and a media culture eager to turn raw power into the illusion of “superhuman brilliance.”
Steve Ballmer’s story is not just about one executive’s choices. It is about the deeper rot in a system that rewards monopoly, celebrates exploitation, and dresses up greed as genius. If we want to build a just and sustainable world, the first step is to stop believing the fairy tale.
How Ballmer Perfected the Monopoly Playbook
Ballmer’s career at Microsoft is often painted as the story of a bold leader guiding a tech giant through the new millennium. In reality, it was a case study in how to crush rivals and protect a monopoly. Under his watch, Microsoft racked up record fines from regulators; perfected its notorious strategy of “embrace, extend, extinguish;” and enforced a cutthroat internal culture that stifled collaboration. This wasn’t innovation. It was domination dressed up as genius.
When Ballmer became Microsoft’s CEO in 2000, the company was already facing a bruising US antitrust case over its efforts to crush competitors like Netscape and RealNetworks. European regulators soon followed, hitting Microsoft with record fines for abusing its monopoly. The Commission found that Microsoft had deliberately abused its dominant position by tying Windows Media Player to its operating system and undermining competition in server software.
At the center of these cases was a clear pattern: Microsoft used its dominance not to compete fairly but to block competitors, extend its monopoly, and extract rents from consumers and developers.
If journalism is to serve the public, it must puncture the myths of genius and demand accountability from those who profit most from monopoly and exploitation.
Ballmer did not invent these practices, but he perfected and defended them. The company’s infamous “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy thrived during his reign: Adopt an open standard, add proprietary extensions, then use those extensions to break competitors’ products or force users into Microsoft’s ecosystem. A series of leaked internal memos known as the “Halloween Documents” revealed how Microsoft viewed open source software as a threat and laid out strategies to undermine it. Far from being a story of daring innovation, Microsoft under Ballmer became a story of protecting monopoly turf at any cost.
Internally, Ballmer presided over the now-notorious “stack ranking” system, in which managers were forced to rank employees against each other, ensuring that some were always labeled failures regardless of performance. Vanity Fair reported that this system was described by employees as “the most destructive process inside of Microsoft.” It encouraged backstabbing, punished collaboration, and destroyed morale.
Yet Ballmer’s reputation in the business press was rarely tarnished. Microsoft’s aggressive tactics and toxic culture were downplayed as part of the “rough and tumble” of the tech industry. Instead of being recognized as symptoms of a deeply flawed corporate ethos, they were cast as evidence of toughness, discipline, or even strategic brilliance.
Genius by Headline, Not by Record
This discrepancy points to a larger cultural problem: the way American media routinely turns billionaires into celebrities and treats monopolists as “innovators.” Stories often described Ballmer as a “visionary,” even while acknowledging that he missed entire waves of innovation—from mobile phones and search engines to social media. For example, he later admitted that Microsoft “missed mobile by clinging to Windows.” In interviews, he reflected that the early 2000s were defined by “missed opportunities,” and critics pointed out that he “missed every major trend in technology”
But this is not just about Ballmer. Consider how the press has lionized figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, and the Silicon Valley founders of Google, Facebook, and Uber. Musk is often portrayed as a world-changing genius, yet his real talent lies in projecting an aura of promise rather than delivering consistent transformation. Bezos is hailed as the visionary who built Amazon into a global empire, but the company’s rise is grounded in widespread worker exploitation, aggressive union busting, and what Jacobin bluntly calls a legacy of exploitation. These examples show how easily media culture crowns billionaires as “visionaries” while overlooking the systemic harms that make their fortunes possible.
The mythology of the “genius CEO” is not harmless flattery. It is an ideological weapon. It convinces us that billionaires deserve their fortunes because they are smarter, bolder, and more visionary than everyone else. It hides the truth that their wealth comes from structural advantages, monopolies, and an economy rigged to socialize risk while privatizing reward.
Ballmer’s career is a perfect case in point. Few in the press asked whether Microsoft’s dominance strangled innovation or whether his leadership undermined workers and consumers. Instead, the coverage painted him as a colorful eccentric, a lovable billionaire, and above all a success story—as if his rise were earned brilliance rather than brute monopoly power.
Pablo Torre’s remarkable reporting on the Aspiration scandal is a reminder of what real journalism can do when it asks hard questions instead of recycling corporate talking points. His work not only exposes the hidden machinery of sports business but also shows why we need the same relentless scrutiny of CEOs and executives across industries. If journalism is to serve the public, it must puncture the myths of genius and demand accountability from those who profit most from monopoly and exploitation.
The Aspiration Illusion
The irony of Ballmer’s current predicament is almost too sharp. The company at the center of the scandal, Aspiration, branded itself as an “ethical financial” startup, promising consumers the ability to save the planet while banking. Its pitch was slick and appealing: Open an account, round up your debit-card purchases, and the company would plant trees or invest in clean energy The company even raised $135 million to expand its “conscious consumerism” model, promoting debit cards that supposedly planted a tree with every swipe. But investigations later showed that the green promises were exaggerated, with ProPublica revealing that the company counted trees not yet planted and diverted some consumer funds toward administrative costs rather than reforestation.
Indeed, Despite the glossy promises, testimony from former employees and bankruptcy filings exposed a starkly different reality. It was less an environmental company than a marketing engine, spending lavishly on celebrity endorsements such as the $28 million Kawhi Leonard deal now under scrutiny, while delivering little measurable benefit to the climate. The startup positioned itself as a sustainable alternative to traditional banks, promoting tree-planting debit cards. Behind the branding, however, its financial practices were shaky. Aspiration relied on questionable deals to inflate its revenue and set up a high-profile IPO, even as its business model was already beginning to unravel.
Why do we continue to celebrate executives who built their fortunes on monopolistic practices, even as those practices hollow out innovation and concentrate wealth?
If Ballmer was indeed duped by Aspiration, as he claims, it only highlights how easily billionaires buy into glossy branding that flatters their image as progressive leaders. After the scandal broke, Ballmer admitted he felt “embarrassed and kind of silly” for not seeing through the company’s flaws. Yet Aspiration’s collapse alongside a multimillion-dollar “no-show” endorsement deal is not an outlier. It is a symptom of how much of today’s tech and finance sector manufactures a fraudulent sense of progress and value, dressing up speculation and extraction as innovation. In this world of legalized scams and corporate greenwashing, Ballmer’s embarrassment is less an excuse than a reminder of how disconnected billionaire investors are from the human and ecological costs of their money.
Aspiration’s story also echoes a broader pattern. Theranos promised a revolution in blood testing, WeWork styled itself as the future of work, and FTX declared it would reinvent finance. Each was celebrated as visionary until the façade collapsed, leaving behind fraud, debt, and disillusionment. These high-profile failures reveal how the mythology of innovation is repeatedly weaponized to disguise little more than hype, speculation, and exploitation. The media and investors continue to fall for it, again and again.
A Deeper Reckoning
The NBA investigation may or may not conclude that Ballmer violated the rules. But the larger scandal here is not limited to basketball. It is about how our culture treats men like Ballmer as role models—how we conflate wealth with competence, market share with innovation, and ruthless opportunism with genius.
It is also about how the very firms that claim to be solving our most urgent crises, from the climate emergency to economic inequality, are often vehicles for speculation and greenwashing, not solutions. They promise progress but deliver only shareholder returns and a deeper entrenchment of the same unequal and unsustainable order.
The Ballmer story forces us to ask harder questions. Why do we accept that billionaires should own sports teams at all, turning civic institutions into vanity projects for the ultra rich? Why do we continue to celebrate executives who built their fortunes on monopolistic practices, even as those practices hollow out innovation and concentrate wealth? Why do we allow financial startups to market themselves as saviors of the planet while continuing to accelerate ecological collapse?
Breaking the Billionaire Spell
The real lesson of this scandal is that we must break the spell of billionaire mythology. Ballmer is not a singular villain; he is an emblem of an age in which billionaires are lauded as saviors while their empires rest on monopoly, exploitation, and illusion. The media has played a crucial role in maintaining this façade, selling the public a narrative of “genius” to justify inequality.
A more honest narrative would recognize that the wealth of men like Ballmer was built on systems of exclusion, not innovation. It would expose the ways that corporate culture, whether in Big Tech or in the world of “ethical finance,” uses the language of progress to mask exploitation. And it would challenge the very legitimacy of an economy in which billionaires can fail upward, celebrated as geniuses even as their companies and investments leave wreckage behind.
What we need are not more billionaire idols but real accountability. It is long past time to stop confusing power with brilliance and to recognize that genuine progress will never come from self-styled saviors at the top. It will come from democratic action, collective struggle, and the hard work of reshaping our economy around justice rather than monopoly and the myth of capitalist progress.
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Top Human Rights Group Makes Case for Countries to 'Break Up' Big Tech
Amnesty International says Big Tech's consolidation of power "has profound implications for human rights, particularly the rights to privacy, nondiscrimination, and access to information."
Aug 28, 2025
One of the world's leading human rights groups, Amnesty International, is calling on governments worldwide to "break up with Big Tech" by reining in the growing influence of tech and social media giants.
A report published Thursday by Amnesty highlights five tech companies: Alphabet (Google), Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, which Hannah Storey, an advocacy and policy adviser on technology and human rights at Amnesty, describes as "digital landlords who determine the shape and form of our online interaction."
These five companies collectively have billions of active users, which the report says makes them akin to "utility providers."
"This concentration of power," the report says, "has profound implications for human rights, particularly the rights to privacy, nondiscrimination, and access to information."
The report emphasizes the "pervasive surveillance" by Google and Meta, which profit from "harvesting and monetizing vast quantities of our personal data."
"The more data they collect, the more dominant they become, and the harder it is for competitors to challenge their position," the report says. "The result is a digital ecosystem where users have little meaningful choice or control over how their data is used."
Meanwhile, Google's YouTube, as well as Facebook and Instagram—two Meta products—function using algorithms "optimized for engagement and profit," which emphasize content meant to provoke strong emotions and outrage from users.
"In an increasingly polarized context, the report says, "this can contribute to the rapid spread of discriminatory speech and even incitement to violence, which has had devastating consequences in several crisis and conflict-affected areas."
The report notes several areas around the globe where social media algorithms amplified ethnic hatred. It cites past research showing how Facebook's algorithm helped to "supercharge" dehumanizing rhetoric that fueled the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar and the violence in Ethiopia's Tigray War.
More broadly, it says, the ubiquity of these tech companies in users' lives gives them outsized influence over access to information.
"Social media platforms shape what millions of people see online, often through opaque algorithms that prioritize engagement over accuracy or diversity," it says. "Documented cases of content removal, inconsistent moderation, and algorithmic bias highlight the dangers of allowing a handful of companies to act as gatekeepers of the digital public sphere."
Amnesty argues that international human rights law requires governments worldwide to intervene to protect their people from abuses by tech companies.
"States and competition authorities should use competition laws as part of their human rights toolbox," it says. "States should investigate and sanction anti-competitive behaviours that harm human rights, prevent regulatory capture, and prevent harmful monopolies from forming."
Amnesty also calls on these states to consider the possible human rights impacts of artificial intelligence, which it describes as the "next phase" of Big Tech's growing dominance, with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google alone controlling 60% of the global cloud computing market.
"Addressing this dominance is critical, not only as a matter of market fairness but as a pressing human rights issue," Storey said. "Breaking up these tech oligarchies will help create an online environment that is fair and just."
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