Emergency measure okayed unanimously in late night phone vote; PM says order to snoop on citizens with advanced technology will be in effect for 30 days
Israel’s caretaker government unanimously approved on Tuesday a measure allowing security services to deploy advanced digital monitoring tools in an effort track carriers of the coronavirus, despite widespread privacy concerns.
The approval of the emergency measure, which will be in place for 30 days, bypassed the Knesset, where a subcommittee on clandestine services on Monday stopped short of approving a government request to approve the surveillance.
Such tracking technologies, which in large part rely on data from cellphones, have principally been used by the Shin Bet security service in counterterrorism operations, and have raised major privacy concerns.
The ministers okayed the measure at via telephone late Monday night and early Tuesday morning. There were no dissenters.
The subcommittee on clandestine services had been asked to approve the measure before breaking up on Monday for the swearing in of a new Knesset, but chair Gabi Ashkenazi of the Blue and White Party declined, according to the Haaretz daily.
With the start of the 23rd Knesset on Monday, the committee will have to be restaffed before it can act to oversee or cancel the program, though it’s unclear if and when that will take place.
Critics have said Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s caretaker government, which does not have the backing of a Knesset majority, should not be able to okay such sweeping and controversial measures. Netanyahu’s rival Benny Gantz of the Blue and White party was handed the mandate Monday afternoon to form a new government, though its also unclear if he has support for a ruling coalition.
Netanyahu earlier said in a televised address Monday that the government would be approving the measure.
“These tools will help us very much in locating the virus, locating those sick and stopping the spread of the virus,” Netanyahu said as the number of infections in the country hit 298, including four people in serious condition.
Saying ministers debated the issue for six hours on Sunday, and stressing that it would only be in effect for a month, he said: “We asked for strict oversight on this so that it isn’t abused.”
“Israel is a democracy — we must uphold the balance between the rights of the individuals and the public needs. And we are doing this,” he added.
The measure has faced criticism from human rights and privacy experts as effectively it means any person in Israel could come under surveillance by the Shin Bet, an organization with no public transparency requirements.
In a statement Sunday, Attorney Avner Pinchuk, of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said the marginal benefit gained by tracking carriers of the disease and finding with whom they may have been in contact “does not justify the severe infringement of the right to privacy. The danger of COVID-19 is not only the virus itself, but the fear that as part of the efforts to overcome the danger, we will also lose our basic values as a free and democratic society.”
The phone surveillance proposal was one of the latest in a series of drastic steps taken by the government — including a major effort to keep people out of the public square — to combat the spread of the virus.
In recent weeks authorities in Taiwan and Singapore, among other countries, have used cellular phone data to ensure that citizens were abiding by required quarantine orders.
But the Shin Bet said it will not be using phoen data to enforce quarantines.
Instead, the measure allows the Shin Bet to use phone data — notably which cell towers the device is connected to — in order to retroactively track the movements of those found to be carriers of the coronavirus in order to see with whom they interacted in the days and weeks before they were tested in order to place those people in quarantine.
The Shin Bet will relay the information to the Health Ministry, which will send a message to those who were within two meters (6.6 feet) of the infected person for 10 minutes or more, telling them to go into quarantine.
“The information will be given only to the Health Ministry, to specific people with security clearances, and it will be erased immediately after it is used,” a senior Justice Ministry official told Channel 13 news on Sunday.
The underlying cellular data that the Shin Bet will use in the effort already exist, but are not generally accessible to the security agency. The proposal will allow the Shin Bet to use that information without requiring any additional approvals from courts or the government.
A spokesperson for the Justice Ministry, which played a major role in developing the program, said it appeared as though the coronavirus patients would not need to give permission for their data to be used, but that the issue had yet to be fully decided.
Until now, health authorities have relied primarily on interviews with patients in which they detail where they’d been and with whom they’d met in the weeks preceding their diagnosis.
The concern in the government that prompted the dramatic proposal is that as the number of people infected with the virus rises, it will eventually become impossible to interview everyone individually. By using an automated system, the issue is avoided.
Transportation Minister Betzalel Smotrich, generally seen as a critic of the Shin Bet, was one of four ministers who, along with a representative from the Justice Ministry, developed the protocols dictating the terms of what he admitted was as an extreme measure.
“I can assure you all unequivocally: There isn’t and won’t be a ‘Big Brother’ in the State of Israel, even in the framework of an extreme event like what we are dealing with now,” Smotrich wrote in a tweet on Sunday, referring to George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”
Smotrich, of the nationalist-right Yamina party, said he recognized it was an “extreme step” that he said was only justified as it would save “tens of thousands of lives.”
Tehila Altshuler Shwartz, a leading Israeli thinker on media and technology, told The Times of Israel that one of her main concerns stemmed from the fact that it would be the Shin Bet responsible for the program, rather than a more transparent organization.
The security service has limited oversight as it answers directly to the prime minister; unlike the police and other civil authorities, the Shin Bet does not have to request data from cellular service providers but instead has its own direct access to it; and the agency is not subject to Israel’s freedom of information laws, meaning that whatever actions are taken with the data could remain secret.
“It is shameful that the attorney general approved this,” she said.
Altshuler Shwartz, a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, noted that a number of other bodies — the police, the Health Ministry or the military — that are more transparent and have greater built-in oversight systems could have been made responsible for the effort instead of the Shin Bet.
She added that establishing such a draconian measure when there was not yet a fully active Knesset in place was also a deeply troubling decision.
Altshuler Shwartz warned that by using this form of surveillance, which is typically reserved for counterterrorism, in a health crisis, the government was making it more likely that it would be used in other non-security-related issues in the future.
“This argument could be used in the future for anything, an economic crisis, an educational crisis,” she said.
As reported by The Times of Israel