A group of current and former Microsoft employees have staged a sit-in protest in the office of company president Brad Smith over the use of Azure and generative AI technologies by the Israeli military during their on-going bombardment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
As reported by The Verge, the protestors belonged to the No Azure for Apartheid activist group, which continues to petition Microsoft to terminate all of their contracts with the Israeli government and military. Microsoft president Brad Smith claimed in a subsequent press briefing that the group of protestors consisted of seven people, with two being current Microsoft staff, and were removed from the office by Redmond police.
No Azure for Apartheid organizer and former Microsoft employee Abdo Mohamed confirmed to The Verge that Microsoft staffers Riki Fameli and Anna Hattle were part of the protest, alongside former staff Vaniya Agrawal, Hossam Nasr, and Joe Lopez.
Following the protest, Smith staged a press briefing in his office, declaring that Microsoft are “committed to ensuring [their] human rights principles and contractual terms of service are upheld in the Middle East.” “When seven folks do as they did today, storm a building, occupy an office, lock other people out of the office, plant listening devices — even in crude form, in the form of telephones, cellphones hidden under couches and behind books — that’s not ok. When they’re asked to leave and they refused, that’s not ok,” the exec said. Smith complaining about the planting of listening devices seems rather ironic, given that Microsoft stand accused of collaborating with Israeli military efforts to keep Palestinians under surveillance.
When asked whether the two current Microsoft workers who were part of the sit-in, which was livestreamed on Twitch, will face any internal disciplinary measures for doing so, Smith said the following:
We’ll take a look. I think one or two of them may have also been arrested last week. So, if somebody’s been arrested twice, that’s a situation that is not standard employee conduct I think it’s fair to say. I don’t think it would be regarded as standard employee conduct by any of the places where you [gestures to media present] work, [or] frankly any of the places where anybody works.
Earlier in the briefing, Smith addressed The Guardian’s recent report about Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform being used in the surveillance of Palestinians by Israel, saying that Microsoft are investigating the report’s allegations. “We are working every day to get to the bottom of what’s going on, and we will,” he said.
He also touched on Microsoft having contacted the FBI in April this year, with Bloomberg (paywalled) reporting that the company had asked the body to provide information on pro-Palestinian protests that might target Microsoft. The exec said he’d first heard about this last week, and subsequently cited “one of our security folks” as having sent the email to the “local FBI office”, claiming that it was a more general inquiry about “disruptions” the FBI could see potentially being planned in the Seattle area.
This latest protest comes as groups like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement continue to call for people to boycott Microsoft and Xbox products over the company’s relationship with the Israeli miliary, with unionised staff at Dishonored developers Arkane Studios recently having voiced their support for both the BDS boycott and No Azure for Apartheid’s efforts.
