One of the world’s largest IT companies. Provides tools and infrastructure used by the US government to surveil immigrant communities and to manage prisons. Divested AnyVision for surveilling Palestinians but keeps providing services to the Israeli police.
Microsoft Corp, headquartered in Redmond, Wash., is a multinational technology company that specializes in computer software, PC and gaming products, and cloud computing and operating systems. Its Azure platform is the world’s second-largest provider of cloud storage services, after Amazon, controlling a quarter of the global market.
Microsoft has been supporting the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) at least since 1980. Its DOD contracts account for the vast majority of its U.S. federal contracts. Microsoft participates alongside other companies in the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, the main cloud platform for all U.S. branches of the U.S. military. Previously, Microsoft was the sole provider of cloud services for the DOD, through the failed JEDI project.
Immigrant Surveillance
Microsoft provides the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its agencies Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) with products and services ranging from basic Microsoft 365 support services to cloud services and data visualization software.
Microsoft Azure Government provides DHS with cloud computing infrastructure. In 2018, ICE started hosting some of its “most sensitive unclassified data” on Azure. This includes “data that supports the core agency functions,” and Microsoft stated that it was “proud to support” ICE’s work. ICE relies on local and state databases such as this one to conduct deportation efforts.
ICE’s Cloud General Support System, which hosts many ICE “mission-oriented applications,” uses both Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). ICE stated in 2021 that it requires IT services to “continue to host existing ICE systems that are currently deployed in AWS and Microsoft Azure.” In addition to ICE, in 2022, CBP awarded Microsoft a contract worth a potential $19.1 million for Azure and other support services.
In addition to cloud services, DHS is increasingly relying on Microsoft and other corporations for artificial intelligence (AI) tools used to automate decision-making around the arrest, incarceration, and deportation of immigrants. As part of a $5 million 2024 pilot program involving the use of AI models in investigations, asylum interviews, and other immigration processes, DHS has reportedly been using Microsoft, Amazon, and Google cloud services in conjunction with OpenAi, Antropic, and Meta AI tools. DHS has provided little information about these AI tools, including what data is used and how, what the results are, and how it “identifies or manages errors or conducts oversight,” according to Mijente and Just Futures Law.
ICE’s Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment (RAVEn) platform—which helps ICE “analyze large datasets” to “more easily identify enforcement targets”—uses Microsoft-owned GitHub. GitHub is a code repository and coder collaboration site that, according to a leaked internal email from 2019, ICE has been using Github since 2016. Hosted on AWS, RAVEn draws on biometric data from various sources, including fingerprints and DNA, government data, social media, surveillance photos and videos, GPS, and financial data from private companies.
Microsoft also partners with companies whose technologies are used to power CBP and ICE surveillance systems . For example, Axon’s cloud-based digital evidence platform, Axon Evidence, which is built on Microsoft Azure, is used by CBP’s Incident-Driven Video Recording Systems (IDVRS). Through IDVRS, Border Patrol agents equipped with body-worn cameras record their “encounters with members of the public” in public areas, as well as in or near CBP facilities and ports of entry. These cameras are connected to Axon’s Microsoft-powered evidence platform, which stores recordings for analysis. In 2021, CBP stated that it would begin deploying IDVRS in “a targeted, multi-phased approach to areas of operation where the U.S. Border Patrol lacks adequate fixed camera surveillance technology,” including “immigration checkpoints.”
Microsoft employees have pushed back against the company’s relationships with U.S. immigration authorities. In 2020, in light of the Trump administration’s family separation and other “zero-tolerance” immigration policies, more than 100 Microsoft employees signed an open letter calling on the company to cancel its contracts with ICE and other clients directly enabling ICE. Company CEO Satya Nadella responded to employee concerns by stating that Microsoft was “not working with the US government on any projects related to separating children from their families at the border.”
Prison Surveillance and Prison Labor
Microsoft has several “offender management” and “offender data visualization” technologies used to surveil people in prison. Microsoft does not generally provide these products directly to prison authorities, but rather through third-party providers, making it difficult to identify the full extent of its involvement in the prison industry. Below are just some known examples.
Microsoft developed its Digital Prison Management Solution based on its policing platform Aware (see below). The system combines Aware’s data from outside the prison (see below) with “corrections operational knowledge” to support prisons “streamline” their operations. It is unclear which, or how many, U.S. prisons and jails use this technology.
In 2009, Microsoft partnered with technology company Tribridge to develop its first product for prisons: Offender 360, a searchable web-based platform used to track, identify, and run mass searches on incarcerated individuals. The product was subsequently adapted into Youth 360, a version for monitoring youth on probation. This version could link to other data systems, such as school and public health systems.
Microsoft has marketed and offered its prison surveillance technologies outside of the U.S. as well. For example, it has previously provided U.K. authorities with Azure-based electronic monitoring tools for “next generation offender tracking.” In 2016, the company published a blog post about the “prison of the future” in the U.K., in which it claimed that prison overcrowding, cost issues, and high recidivism levels could be overcome by the company’s “intelligent technologies” and a “big data” prison management system, and suggested that the increased use of digital technologies within prisons “makes it possible to consider prison as a business.”
In addition to surveillance and prison management systems, Microsoft provides prison authorities, including the U.S. government’s federal prison system, with technology support services, computers, computer software, and other products and services, either directly or through third-party vendors. In 2020, for example, the Department of Justice awarded Microsoft a contract worth a potential $75 million for software and support for various agencies, including the BOP and the U.S. government’s prison labor program, Federal Prison Industries (FPI)/UNICOR. In the 1990s, Microsoft used prison labor to package some of its products through another company; however, in 2018, it committed to prohibiting the use of prison labor.
Police Surveillance
Microsoft’s police surveillance platform Domain Awareness System (DAS)—also called Microsoft Aware—integrates disparate sources of information to assist police investigations in real time. Developed with the New York Police Department in 2012, DAS allows police officers to track and watch people’s movements throughout a city by ingesting data from closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras and automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), and cross-referencing these data against arrest records, 911 calls, complaints, warrants, and other police sources. DAS also performs video analytics, automatic pattern recognition, and predictive policing. Racial justice and civil liberties organizations have expressed significant concerns that this technology “could amplify the deep-rooted tendency by law enforcement to perceive BIPOC—in particular Black men—as criminal threats.” The technology has also been adopted by police in Brazil and Singapore.
In addition, Microsoft’s HoloLens 2, an augmented reality headset, has been used by police officers to capture evidence at crime scenes and store it for later review. The technology allows officers to map and record entire scenes, including the exact location of individuals and pieces of evidence, and enables officers to later walk through virtual renderings of crime scenes. It is unclear which or how many U.S. police departments have adopted this technology, but it has been used in Australia, the Netherlands, and the U.K.. It has also been touted for its military applications, including its ability to control unmanned ground vehicles.
Through Azure Government, Microsoft’s Coptivity software, an AI-enabled “conversation mobile app” developed by the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department in 2018, uses “intelligent voice assist” technology to deliver immediate assistance to officers on patrol without a dispatch operator on the other side of the call. The app includes instant access to vehicles’ registration status and drivers’ “criminal and mental health background.”
In 2018, Microsoft boasted that its Azure platform has helped the State of Georgia fight gangs. The company worked with Georgia-based company Formulytics to provide the state with the technical backbone for its Anti-Gang Network. As with DAS, this technology has been used to store and analyze vast amounts of data, helping state law enforcement agencies “create over 25,000 investigative profiles of gang members and identify tens of thousands of connections across the State.”
Following calls from company employees to drop its contracts with U.S. police departments in June 2020, Microsoft stated that it will not sell its facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies until there is a national law, “grounded in human rights,” that governs its use. This announcement followed in the wake of public pressure influencing mass surveillance technology providers Amazon and IBM to issue public statements on police use of their facial recognition services. In 2024, Microsoft reaffirmed this ban, stating that its Azure AI system is prohibited for use “by or for” police departments in the U.S. and that no “law enforcement globally” can use the system on mobile cameras, like body-worn cameras or dashcams, for “real-time facial recognition.”
Divesting AnyVision and Other Involvement in the Israeli Occupation of Palestine
Microsoft is deeply invested in the Israeli high-tech industry, which has close ties to the Israeli military. The company’s first-ever R&D center outside the U.S. opened in Israel in 1991. Over the years, Microsoft Israel has collaborated with the Israeli military on multiple occasions, for example in converting Microsoft’s commercial technologies for military use and designing applications specifically for military operations.
In 2002, the Israeli Ministry of Defense signed a $35 million contract with Microsoft for software licensing and cybersecurity products for the Israeli military and other security forces. The purchase, which was described as “strategic” and was the largest software licensing contract in Israel at the time, was mostly funded by U.S. taxpayers through the Foreign Military Sales program.
In addition, the Israeli police is using Microsoft Azure cloud computing for all its databases and systems. The Israeli police attested in 2020 contracting documents, that working with Microsoft “is necessary for the continued function of [its] operational systems, some of which are classified.” Microsoft reportedly claimed that its software “helps Israeli police intelligence officers complete data searches in seconds.” This contract is set to expire when the Israeli government switches to a unified cloud service for all government sectors. Microsoft also bid on this project, dubbed Nimbus, but lost to Amazon and Google.
At least since 2014, Microsoft has been acquiring Israeli high-tech startup companies such as Adallom, Aorato, CyberX, and Hexadite, all of which reportedly use technologies originally developed for the Israeli military. Adallom, for example, uses Israeli military-developed “technologies that were used to combat terrorism using machine intelligence and anomaly detection.”
In 2020, Microsoft divested its shares in AnyVision, an Israeli company whose technology is powering a mass surveillance apparatus on the Palestinian civilian population in the occupied West Bank. Microsoft’s venture capital fund M12 made the multimillion-dollar investment in AnyVision a year earlier. The divestment was prompted by a multi-stakeholder campaign demanding that Microsoft live up to its own principles on facial recognition technologies and an official Microsoft investigation into AnyVision’s involvement in mass surveillance of the occupied Palestinian population.
AnyVision’s main surveillance product, Better Tomorrow, uses facial biometrics and artificial intelligence to identify specific people within large crowds. This technology has been integrated during 2018-2019 into Israel’s illegal military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank. AnyVision reportedly has another, more secretive project, using a network of thousands of cameras deployed “deep inside the West Bank” that places the Palestinian civilian population under persistent surveillance. The project reportedly includes vehicle tracking using license plate readers and has led to the arrest of hundreds of Palestinians in 2018 alone.
AnyVision’s technology is used by governments and private actors in at least 44 other countries. Among others, the company sells its technology to state actors in Russia and was expanding its operations in Hong Kong in the summer of 2019, as facial recognition technologies were documented being used to repress protests there. The U.S. Navy also bought “AnyVision equipment” in 2019, and the company’s CEO said it employs lobbyists in the U.S. Congress to “explain why artificial intelligence is a good thing.”
In 2020, following Microsoft's divestment, AnyVision split its activities into two companies, a military and a commercial one. Some of AnyVision's shareholders formed a joint venture with Israeli state-owned military contractor Rafael to create SightX, a company that focuses on the military applications of AnyVision's technology. AnyVision itself reportedly pivoted to focus "solely on the commercial market." In 2021, an AnyVision top executive stated that despite Microsoft's divestment, the two companies continued to have "a viable commercial relationship," adding, "we're still working with them on Azure. It's all good."