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Microsoft President Brad Smith had a blunt message for employees who joined Gaza-related protests inside his office: you don’t get to keep your job.
At an internal meeting on Thursday, Smith defended the firings and said the company hired law firm Covington & Burling to review allegations that its technology has been misused for surveillance of Palestinians.
The company has faced repeated and escalating protests calling for the company to cut ties with the Israeli military amid its offensive in Gaza. In late August, several protesters broke into and occupied Smith’s office for a sit-in. Microsoft then fired four employees who participated in protests occupying Smith’s office and at the company’s campus.
“Let me say this, anybody who is smart enough to get a job at Microsoft is smart enough to know that you don’t get to storm in and break into buildings and occupy other people’s offices and keep your job at Microsoft,” Smith said, referring to employees the company fired following those protests.
The protesters “didn’t just protest,” Smith said, as they trespassed on private property and barricaded themselves with furniture that belonged to Microsoft.
Riki Fameli, a Microsoft software engineer who worked on Azure Storage, was one of the employees fired after participating in the protest at Smith’s office.
Fameli told Business Insider that Smith’s comments seemed to define protest narrowly as something company leadership can easily ignore.
“They always try to direct us to using the proper channels,” Fameli said, “What we’ve found over the past year is that the proper channels are dead ends.”
During the meeting, Smith tried to reassure employees that the company is focused on upholding human rights and contract terms in Gaza while also protecting employee safety, according to comments reviewed by Business Insider.
Smith told employees that the company is reviewing allegations about its services being used for mass surveillance of Palestinians and working on new processes for employees to report if they believe customers are misusing Microsoft technology.
Smith referred to an Aug. 6 story in The Guardian alleging that a unit in the Israeli Defense Forces relied on Microsoft’s Azure cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians.
“That story provided new information to those of us at Microsoft, information that we did not have before,” Smith said. He also said that the company doesn’t allow its customers to use its service for mass surveillance of civilians.
The new reporting processes on which Microsoft is working, Smith said, are intended to make it easier for “a Microsoft employee to report concerns about the misuse of our technology by a customer if they believe that may be happening, to report internally about misconduct in the workplace or potential violation of our standards of business conduct.”
Smith also said the company is “doubling down on internal dialogue” with employee groups like Jews at Microsoft, and Palestinians and Allies at Microsoft.
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