"Government okays mass surveillance of Israelis’ phones to curb coronavirus"

The government on Sunday approved a proposal to allow the Shin Bet security service to perform mass surveillance on Israelis’ phones without requiring a court order in an effort to curb the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, prompting major concerns of privacy and civil liberty violations.

The measure will require final approval from the Knesset’s subcommittee on clandestine services before it can be put into action.

The Prime Minister’s Office said the Shin Bet will be limited in what data it collects and who within the government will have access to it. In addition, under the proposal, the agency will only be able to use the information in the fight against the coronavirus, and the power is scheduled to end 30 days after it is granted by the Knesset subcommittee.

Government officials stressed that the use of these tools, usually reserved for counterterrorism operations, was meant to save lives.

Yet 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... 

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... the Shin Bet was permitted 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 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...

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...

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.”...

In a statement, 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 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.

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.