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.
