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Comment by slowin | Hacker News Reader

I was a 68 working on consumer products, but it was still too much for me. Especially the revelation that Satya worked with the IDF to capture all Palestinian phone conversations and host them on Azure. Every day I woke up to go to work after I found that out, I was sick to my stomach. I eventually couldn't take it any more. I took a pay cut and I'm still in the tech industry working for a startup, and still facing ethical dilemmas (with our investors) but at least I'm not on the front-lines of human rights abuse.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...

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> Especially the revelation that Satya worked with the IDF to capture all Palestinian phone conversations and host them on Azure.

man imagine when you learn about what MS did to all Americans phone conversations, emails, meta data, and basically all digital communications flowing in and out of the US for the NSA.

I think that the difference is that there was no ongoing genocide against Americans at the time.

TIL an intelligence agency spying on a foreign adversary is human rights abuse. I would be super upset if my country of residence did the same to a neighbor sending rockets my way, would make me sick to my stomach

He didn't work for Israel, unless he failed to mention that this was not a USA job.

take these theatrics somewhere else, please. you're changing the topic and you're not arguing in good faith.

Incorrect on both counts

Little slip of the mask here where we seamlessly transition from the perspective of an American working for an American tech company to someone living in a country neighbouring Palestine.

I would go so far as to call it a privileged perspective

I don't think the tens of thousands of innocent people, including a huge number of children, were "privileged". Same with the hundreds of thousands removed from their home during the Nakba ethnic cleansing.

a huge number of American children working for an American tech company? interesting

> TIL an intelligence agency spying on a foreign adversary is human rights abuse.

It is when it's an intelligence agency for a country that's actively committing genocide.

Answer a question for me: is the lesson you took from the Holocaust something like "if there are going to be holocausts anyway, I want to be the one committing them"?

Judaism != Israel

this conflation is extremely unhelpful

I don't see them conflating Zionism and Judaism. 100% of Zionists will reference the Holocaust as one of the justifications for committing genocide against the Palestinians. I think the parent is pointing that out.

I disagree, but you could be right. however, if so, then they should have pointed out this distinction themselves.

also, there was conflict between Jewish Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians long before the Holocaust. Zionists were trying to take over in the late days of the Ottoman Empire.

You want me to preemptively fix your basic reading comprehension and logical inference issues?

What is the obsession with equating the Holocaust with a war whose death toll is roughly 1/100th of the Holocaust (and that only if you include combatant deaths, which the Holocaust numbers do not?)

The point is not the body count. The point is the attempted perpetration of genocide, by people who have been the target of genocide in recent history.

As I said, it's mystifying that the conclusion from being targeted for genocide is "...therefore we must commit genocide against others." I suppose it is consistent with biblical commandments, though.

Citation needed that people are thinking "therefore we must commit genocide against others"

Attempted genocide better describes Hamas, who slaughtered a 1/4 of the civilians in the first villages they got their hands on, before being pushed back.

Israel is not the US and Palestinian civilians are not a "foreign adversary".

> a neighbor sending rockets my way, would make me sick to my stomach

Israel has been murdering Palestinians since Nakba. They literally eliminated whole cities in Gaza. I think that makes most people in the world sick to their stomach.

Yes, casualties of the war initiated by continuous Hamas terrorist attacks that culminated on October 7th. Sad

War is a massive racket.

I've always figured big tech workers were so compartmentalized that they wouldn't know their new analytic feature was also going to the defense skunks initiative, but that could be conspiratorial thinking.

Guess it doesn't matter now when they have full on defense orgs.

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