Occupy at Fifteen: What the Tents Taught Us, and Why the Next Occupation Must Target Big Tech

Last Updated: September 1, 2026By

An open letter to my Occupy Wall Street comrades — on Tunisia and Tahrir, on infiltrators and circular arguments, on why American courts will never convict, and on the four countries that can.

By Vahid Razavi — Author of The Age of Nepotism and Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof, Founder of EthicsInTech.com and NoEthicsInBigTech.com, Producer of the Forever Peace Now documentary, ParentsPlea.com

Dear friends,

It has been a long and painful fifteen years for many of us. I want to say at the outset that I have not lost hope, and neither should you. But I am not writing this letter to be nostalgic with you. I am writing it because our collective global struggle is only fifteen years old, and a fifteen-year-old is old enough to be told the truth about itself.

We need to reinvent and reinvest in the shared humanity that brought us together in the first place. That work starts with an honest accounting.

First, we give credit where it is owed

Before anyone tells the story of September 17, 2011, they need to tell the story of what came before it — because Occupy did not invent anything. Occupy inherited.

It inherited from Tunisia, where a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid in December 2010, and where a people who had been told for twenty-three years that nothing could change removed Ben Ali in twenty-eight days.

It inherited from the Green Movement in Iran in 2009 — from the millions who filled Enghelab Street in silence, from the young people who learned to organize through proxy servers and rooftop chants while the state cut the lines, from the ones who did not come home.

It inherited from Tahrir Square, where Egyptians held ground through eighteen days and taught the world the logistics of an occupied plaza: the field clinics, the perimeter, the rotating shifts, the sanitation, the human chains around the museum.

And it inherited from the indignados of Spain’s 15-M, who filled Puerta del Sol four months before anyone pitched a tent in Zuccotti Park.

We owe them. Every one of them. They set the example we followed, and the historical record should say so plainly. Anyone who tells you Occupy began in Lower Manhattan is telling you a story that is comfortable for Americans and false for everyone else.

What actually happened in the camps

Having said that, I am not here to dwell on the past. I am here to reflect on how we make it better. So let me be direct about what did not work, because I was there for it.

Tactics matter. Organizing matters. Infiltration matters.

We could not organize millions of protesters at every location and hold ground every night. That was never realistic, and the moment we pretended it was, we started losing.

In San Francisco, the police solved one of their problems by making it ours. They pushed the city’s unhoused population toward the tents in front of the Federal Building. We could not turn people away — that would have made a mockery of everything we said we believed. But we were not equipped to be a shelter system for a city that had refused to build one. They sent people with violent histories into the camps from every corner of San Francisco, and we absorbed them, because absorbing them was the only thing consistent with our principles.

By the end, out of roughly forty occupants at our site, five or six were taking part in direct action. The rest were surviving. That is not a criticism of them. It is a criticism of us — of a movement that built an encampment without building the capacity to sustain one, and then handed the state a free instrument for exhausting us.

The circular argument as a weapon

Then there were the meetings.

Our discussions were hijacked, again and again, by people who came to hijack them. Paid infiltrators and aggregators who understood something about our process that we had not understood ourselves: a general assembly with no elected leadership and full consensus rules can be stalled indefinitely by anyone patient enough to keep talking. They did not need to defeat our arguments. They only needed to prevent us from ever finishing one.

Because Occupy refused to designate leaders, there was no one with the standing to say this person is not here in good faith, and we are moving on. Horizontalism was our answer to the corruption we saw in hierarchical institutions. It was also, in practice, an unlocked door.

I am sharing this from my own experience, not as an indictment. There was enormous love in those camps. Comradery. Empathy. Brilliant minds who gave up months of their lives for people they would never meet. What we lacked was not conviction. It was organizational discipline — and our enemies had studied ours long before we studied theirs.

Movements evolve or they become fossils

So: fifteen years later, what has been learned, and what can we teach the generation coming up behind us?

Here is my argument. The generation organizing today is not primarily afraid of the bond trader. They are afraid of surveillance capitalism and of inhumane artificial intelligence. They are afraid of a phone that knows where they sleep, an algorithm that decides what they are worth, a facial recognition system at a protest, a hiring model that filters them out before a human reads their name, and a targeting system that decides which building gets hit.

If Occupy — or whatever succeeds it — wants to remain relevant, it cannot stay a movement about bankers and corrupt politicians alone. It has to name the infrastructure. The military-industrial complex of the twenty-first century is not only Lockheed and Raytheon and Boeing. It is Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Palantir. The weapons are cloud computing, targeting algorithms, biometric databases, and surveillance infrastructure. The ammunition is data. The battlefield includes the phone in your pocket.

We were right that the banks captured the government. We were fifteen years early in understanding who would capture everything else.

And I am not saying this alone. On June 30, 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, published a report titled From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide. It identified 48 corporate actors — among them Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Palantir — and it did not stop at naming them. It urged the International Criminal Court and national judiciaries to investigate and prosecute corporate executives and corporate entities for their part in the commission of international crimes. Then the United States sanctioned her for writing it.

That is the phrase I want you to hold onto: and national judiciaries. A UN mandate holder has already told the world where this goes next. It goes to national courts.

Why the American courts will not do this

I want to save the next generation some time, so let me say the hardest part.

Do not expect an American court to deliver this. Any charge, civil or criminal, brought in the United States against these executives for what their technology enables abroad will be met with two words: national security. And the case will be dismissed.

We have the receipts on this. Nobody was ever criminally convicted in the United States for the torture program authorized under George W. Bush — not for waterboarding, not for the black sites. The only CIA officer who went to prison in connection with that program was John Kiriakou, who talked about it.

Then there is Khaled El-Masri. A German citizen of Lebanese descent, seized at a border crossing in Macedonia at the end of 2003, flown to the CIA’s Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan, beaten, drugged, and held for months after American officials already knew they had the wrong man. He was dumped on a hillside in Albania at night. The ACLU sued CIA Director George Tenet on his behalf. In May 2006, a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia dismissed the case because the government invoked the state secrets privilege. The Fourth Circuit affirmed the dismissal on March 2, 2007. The Supreme Court declined to hear it on October 9, 2007. An innocent man was tortured, and the courthouse door was closed on him because the crime was classified.

But here is the part that matters for us. El-Masri did not stop. On December 13, 2012, the European Court of Human Rights found that his treatment amounted to torture and held North Macedonia responsible — the first ruling of its kind on the CIA rendition program. A Munich prosecutor issued arrest warrants for CIA agents. In 2018, the Macedonian government formally apologized to him.

The lesson is not that justice is impossible. The lesson is that justice has a return address, and it is not Washington.

So we seek it in other venues. Four of them.

The four countries that can bring these charges

At NoEthicsInTech.com I lay out the case for each in detail. Here is the compressed version — four countries, four different legal theories, four different pressure points. And I want to be straight with you about the weaknesses as well as the strengths, because a movement that only tells itself the flattering version of its own case gets destroyed the first time it meets a lawyer.

Start with the fact that ties all four together. In August 2025, a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call — built on leaked internal Microsoft documents and interviews with eleven sources inside Microsoft and Israeli military intelligence — revealed that Israel’s Unit 8200 had been using Microsoft’s Azure cloud since 2022 to store intercepted Palestinian phone calls. The internal mantra was “a million calls an hour.” By July 2025 the archive held roughly 11,500 terabytes — about 200 million hours of audio. Sources inside Unit 8200 said the system was used to guide airstrikes, detentions, and blackmail.

That data was not stored in Israel. The overwhelming majority of it sat in Microsoft data centres in the Netherlands, with roughly one percent in Ireland — a small share that still amounts to nearly two million hours of recorded Palestinian speech.

Read that again. The instrument was on European soil. Which means this is not a question of universal jurisdiction at all in two of these four countries. It is territorial jurisdiction. That is a far stronger footing and a far harder one to argue away.

1. The Netherlands — the evidence was in North Holland

The bulk of the archive sat on a fourteen-hectare Microsoft campus near Middenmeer, in the province of North Holland.

The Dutch did not shrug. Within days of the Guardian report, the direct action group Geef Tegengas (Push Back) scaled the roof of the data centre, lit flares, and blocked the entrance, calling on every employee to stop work until Israeli intelligence data was removed from the servers. In the Staten-Generaal, MP Christine Teunissen of the Party for the Animals asked the government how it would prevent data held in the Netherlands from “being used to commit genocide” in Gaza.

Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp’s answer is the single most important sentence any European official has said on this subject. He said he would request further investigation, and added: if there are serious indications of criminal offences in that information, legal proceedings can of course be initiated — and that is then up to the public prosecution service.

That is a government minister, on the record, telling you the door is unlocked.

The Netherlands prosecutes genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes under its International Crimes Act of 2003, through a dedicated national police war crimes team and one of the most experienced specialist prosecution units in Europe. And The Hague is not merely symbolic — the ICC and ICJ sit there, which means a Dutch prosecutorial decision echoes far beyond a country of eighteen million people.

The honest limitation: Dutch prosecutors decide independently, and ministers cannot order them to act. The public prosecution service moves when the file is strong and the political weather permits. Our job is the weather.

2. Ireland — Microsoft’s European establishment is in Dublin

Ireland’s share of the archive was small. Ireland’s legal exposure is not.

Under the GDPR, the entity responsible for Azure services in the European Union is Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited, headquartered in Dublin. That is what lawyers call the “establishment,” and it means personal data processed by Azure in the Union — including processing connected to the Israeli military — falls within the territorial scope of European law and the jurisdiction of the Irish Data Protection Commission.

This is no longer theoretical. On December 4, 2025, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties filed a formal complaint with the DPC against Microsoft Ireland, on behalf of named Palestinian data subjects in Gaza and the West Bank. The complaint alleges that Microsoft’s processing facilitated war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. It alleges that Azure hosts critical components of Israel’s “Al Minasseq” permit system, which governs Palestinian movement. And it makes an allegation that should stop you cold: that beginning one day after the Guardian’s August 6 report was published, the intercepted call data was moved off EU servers to Israel — obscuring the evidence before any investigation could begin. ICCL says Microsoft whistleblowers are available to speak to the regulator.

ICCL’s executive director Joe O’Brien — himself a former Irish government minister of state — put it plainly: these are not abstract data-protection failures, they are violations that have enabled real-world violence.

Ireland also has the standing. It recognized the State of Palestine in May 2024. It filed a declaration of intervention in South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice on January 6, 2025, explicitly asking the Court to broaden its interpretation of what constitutes genocide by a State. And it domesticated the Rome Statute crimes through its International Criminal Court Act 2006.

The honest limitation: Microsoft is one of the largest and longest-established American employers in Ireland, with more than 6,000 staff, and its Irish subsidiaries paid $41 billion in dividends to the parent company across the 2024 financial year and the first months of 2025. The Irish Data Protection Commission has been criticized for years as the slowest lead regulator in Europe. Dublin is where the legal authority is clearest and the political will is thinnest. Which is exactly why public pressure on Dublin is not optional. It is the whole game.

3. France — because in France, they already went to prison

If you only read one section of this letter, read this one. France is the country where the theory stopped being a theory.

Between 2012 and 2014, the French cement multinational Lafarge kept a plant running in Syria by paying armed groups, including ISIS. The NGOs Sherpa and ECCHR, together with eleven former Syrian employees, filed a complaint in 2016. What happened next rewrote the law.

On September 7, 2021, the Cour de cassation — France’s highest court — overturned a lower court’s cancellation of the charge and clarified the framework under which a company can be charged with complicity in crimes against humanity. On May 18, 2022, the Investigating Chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal confirmed those charges. It was the first time anywhere in the world that a company, as a legal entity, faced that charge. On January 16, 2024, the Cour de cassation confirmed it again — and confirmed the jurisdiction of French courts over international crimes committed abroad by economic actors.

Understand what that means. Under French law, corporate complicity turns on knowledge and facilitation. It does not require proof that the company shared the criminal purpose. That is a materially lower bar than the “purpose” test used at the International Criminal Court. A company does not have to want the atrocity. It only has to know and enable.

Now hold that standard up against a cloud provider that built a custom, segregated environment for a foreign military intelligence unit after a briefing from its commander, and kept operating it while the world watched what that intelligence was used for.

And the Lafarge story does not end with an indictment. The trial ran at the Paris Criminal Court from November 4 to December 16, 2025. On April 13, 2026, the court convicted Lafarge and four former senior executives of financing terrorism and violating international sanctions. The company received the maximum fine, €1.125 million. The former executives received prison sentences of three to six years — the former chief executive, Bruno Lafont, got six. Four more individuals were convicted alongside them. The court found that it was the joint decisions of senior executives at the Paris headquarters and the Syrian subsidiary that made the system possible. The defendants filed appeals on April 28, 2026, and the separate investigation into complicity in crimes against humanity remains open and could produce a second trial.

Executives. Headquarters. Prison sentences. In Europe. In 2026.

France also already has the machinery pointed in the right direction. The National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office and the Crimes Against Humanity Division of the Paris Judicial Court have opened Gaza-related investigations since June 2025, including summonses issued in August 2025 for complicity in genocide. And in April 2026, a complaint was filed with the anti-terrorism prosecutor against FedEx — an American multinational, reached through its French subsidiary — alleging complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide over 117 shipments that transited Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, twenty-two of which went straight on to Israel. FedEx denies the allegations. Belgian federal prosecutors confirmed they opened a probe into one delivery that transited Liège.

The template is built: an American corporation, reached through its French subsidiary, for facilitation.

All five of the companies I have named operate French subsidiaries and French infrastructure. Palantir has held a contract with the DGSI, France’s domestic intelligence agency, since 2016, and renewed it for three more years on December 15, 2025.

The honest limitation: France is simultaneously prosecuting corporate complicity and buying the software. Its own president and ministers were the subject of an ICC communication in July 2025 by 114 French lawyers over alleged complicity in Gaza. France is not a clean actor. It is a capable one. Those are different things, and only one of them is required.

4. Spain — the tradition, and the political will

In 1998, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón issued an international arrest warrant for Augusto Pinochet under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Pinochet was arrested in London. The case shook the world and established that no one is beyond reach simply because his own government protects him.

I want to be honest about what has happened since, because the petition deserves supporters who know the terrain. Spain narrowed that statute twice — first by Organic Law 1/2009, then decisively by Organic Law 1/2014. For genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, Spanish courts now generally require a connection: the accused is Spanish, or habitually resident in Spain, or physically present on Spanish territory. Spain also made its jurisdiction subsidiary to other competent courts. That is a real constraint, and anyone who tells you Spain is a blank cheque has not read Article 23 of the Organic Law of the Judicial Power.

But presence is a live hook, not a dead one. These executives travel. They come to Barcelona and Madrid for conferences, for keynotes, for boards, for holidays on the Mediterranean. The Pinochet precedent exists precisely because a man got on a plane.

And no European government has moved further politically. Spain recognized the State of Palestine in May 2024. On September 23, 2025, the Council of Ministers approved Royal Decree-Law 10/2025 — the first national arms embargo Spain has ever imposed on a foreign state — banning defence and dual-use exports and imports, barring ships carrying military fuel from Spanish ports, denying airspace to aircraft carrying defence material, prohibiting imports from illegal settlements, and barring entry to individuals directly involved in genocide, human rights violations, and war crimes in Gaza. The preamble states outright that Israel’s conduct has become an indiscriminate attack on the Palestinian population that the majority of experts have called genocide. Parliament ratified it on October 8, 2025, by 178 votes to 169.

A government that writes the word genocide into the preamble of its own statute has made a finding. The question is whether its prosecutors will act on it.

The honest limitation: the 2014 reform means the Spanish route is narrower than it was in Garzón’s day, and Spain’s jurisdiction yields to a court that is genuinely investigating. That is why the petition matters. A prosecutor needs political cover to test a narrow door. Signatures are that cover.

Four countries. Four legal theories. One target.

What the petition actually asks for

Which brings me to the one thing I am asking you to do today.

ForeverPeaceNow.com/petition is addressed to the Government of Spain, its Attorney General, and the Central Courts of Instruction of the Audiencia Nacional. It is hosted on Action Network, available in English and Spanish, and it makes three plain demands:

  • Investigate — open independent investigations into corporate and state complicity in violence against civilians.
  • Prosecute — hold companies and their executives legally accountable wherever complicity is found.
  • Protect — enact protections so civilians are never again targeted with impunity.

In the underlying filing, those break down into four specifics: open a formal investigation into Amazon, Oracle, Palantir, Microsoft, and Google for providing technology and services that substantially aid the commission of international crimes; investigate the named CEOs, chairs, and board members under the doctrine of command responsibility; subpoena internal documents and communications to establish what these companies knew and when; and pursue charges of complicity in genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, seeking arrest warrants where the evidence warrants it.

I understand why signing a petition feels small. You have all signed things. But a petition delivered to a government whose own parliament has already used the word genocide in law, backed by signatories across dozens of countries, with documented contracts and named executives attached, is not a gesture. It is an evidentiary record. It is the beginning of a dossier. It is political cover handed to the one office that has the authority to act.

Sign it. Share it. Ask three people to sign it. Then read the detailed jurisdictional arguments at NoEthicsInTech.com.

What I would tell the next generation

If you take nothing else from fifteen years of my mistakes, take these five things.

Elect rotating, recallable spokespeople. Not permanent leaders — rotating ones, with defined mandates and a mechanism to remove them. Horizontalism without any designated authority is not the absence of power. It is power handed to whoever is most willing to abuse the process.

Build security culture before you need it. Assume infiltration from day one, because it is coming. Assume the circular argument is a tactic and name it out loud when it starts.

Pick targets that have jurisdictions, not just symbolism. A park is a symbol. A fourteen-hectare data centre campus in North Holland is evidence sitting inside a legal system. Occupying a plaza announces a grievance; a complaint filed in a country with the right statute creates a docket number.

Do not let the state outsource its failures to you. We could not be a housing system and a movement at the same time. Solidarity with the unhoused means fighting for housing policy — not becoming an unfunded, unstaffed, defenceless shelter with no exit plan.

Document everything, and mirror it somewhere the platforms cannot reach. They allegedly started moving that call data off European servers one day after the story broke. Assume everything you rely on will be moved, deleted, or reclassified the moment it becomes inconvenient. Everything I have preserved, I preserved because I assumed exactly that.

The arc is long

We were right about the banks. We were right about inequality. We were right that a system which privatizes the gains and socializes the losses is not a democracy in any sense that matters. We were early, we were unorganized, and we were infiltrated, and all three of those can be true at once.

Now the same architecture has moved from the trading floor into the operating system of daily life, and the people who built it are betting that no court on earth will ever say their names out loud in an indictment.

On April 13, 2026, a Paris court sentenced a former chief executive to six years in prison for what his company enabled in a war zone. That bet is no longer safe.

Imagine a world where Silicon Valley billionaires are effectively grounded — unable to fly a private jet or sail a yacht into any country that honours the rule of law. That is not a fantasy. It is a legal mechanism, a signed petition, and one courageous prosecutor away.

Evil men and their machines do not prevail. History is long, and it is littered with their kind. But history does not bend on its own. It bends because people push it.

Fifteen years ago we pushed and we learned. Let us push better this time.

Live in peace. ForeverPeaceNow.

Sources

The petition and this network

The UN finding

The Azure surveillance archive

Netherlands

Ireland

France

Spain

El-Masri and the American courts

We Want to Hear From You!