TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) – In the early days of the pandemic, a panicked Israel started using a mass surveillance tool on its citizens and watching people’s cell phones in hopes of stopping the spread of the coronavirus.
The government has touted the technology, which is commonly used to capture wanted Palestinian militants, as a breakthrough against the virus. But months later, the effectiveness of the instrument is called into question and critics believe its use has an immeasurable cost to the country’s democratic principles.
“The idea of a government closely monitoring its own citizens after this should be alarming,” said Maya Fried, a spokeswoman for the Israel Civil Rights Association, who has repeatedly challenged the use of the tool in court. ‘This is against the foundations of democracy. You can not just give up democracy during a crisis. ”
Little is known about the technology. According to the Yediot Ahronot daily, the Shin Bet’s internal security service has been using the tool for two decades, collecting metadata from everyone who uses telecommunications services in Israel. Information collected includes the location of the mobile device, browser history and calls and texts received and made, but not the contents. It apparently helped the agency track down militants and stop attacks, although it is unclear what happens to all the data.
Israel first brought the Shin Bet into its virus-breaking battle in March. By detecting the movements of people infected with the coronavirus, it was able to determine who came in contact with them and were at risk for infection, and ordered them quarantined.
With the Israeli Ministry of Health’s limited contact detection, the Shin Bet was considered the best option to pick up the slack, even though its own leaders were reluctant to use the tool. The Shin Bet declined to comment.
Officials say the technology has been an important tool in keeping up with the outbreak, insisting they have found a balance between protecting individual rights and public health.
“We believe the cost is definitely reasonable,” Deputy Health Minister Yoav Kisch told a parliamentary committee last month. ‘We have not yet seen this tool being used as an operator. This tool saves lives. ”
Initially, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used emergency regulations to approve the use of the instrument. After the hasty deployment in court was disputed, the government had to set limits on its use in July and subject it to parliamentary oversight.
By law, the Shin Bet must keep the information separate from other data it collects for other purposes, and that it must be removed after a certain period of time. The law also restricts those who have access to the information and stipulates that Israel must offer and popularize a civilian alternative to surveillance, such as a telephone program. Israel has developed such an app, but it is not widely used.
Critics say there is no proper oversight of how the Shin Bet data is collected, stored, used or deleted.
Michal Cotler-Wunsh, a lawmaker in the parliamentary committee overseeing the instrument, said Israel’s dependence on the Shin Bet prevented it from moving to more transparent civilian technology that could do the job. “We really had to resist the temptation,” she said.
Under their partnership, the Ministry of Health sends the names, ID numbers and contact details of those diagnosed with COVID-19. The security agency can then go back two weeks of data to determine which cell phones were longer than 15 meters from the sick person within a two-meter radius. They are then warned and ordered to do self-quarantine.
At the time, there was little shouting against the inclusion of the Shin Bet of ordinary Israelites, who had a lot of confidence in their security services.
But as the months passed, the Israelites were caught up in a tragedy that caught tens of thousands of contacts. Many claimed the information was inaccurate, forcing them to an unnecessary 14-day house quarantine. To make matters worse, it was difficult to appeal to the overwhelming hotline operators of the Ministry of Health.
The accuracy of the tools inside is claimed to be problematic. If an infected person is in one apartment, it can quarantine the entire building.
The Ministry of Health says that since July, 950,000 people detected by the instrument have been quarantined, including 46,000 infected. According to the ministry, about 900,000 have been quarantined by the traditional contact detection and it has been found that 63,000 have been infected since July. In early August, the Israeli army took over responsibility for contact detection for the Ministry of Health.
Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, a brainstormer, disputes the figures from the Ministry of Health. Based on her own analysis of official data, she believes the Shin Bet captured far fewer of the infected as contact detectives. She also estimates that at least 100,000 people were wrongly quarantined.
In an interim report by the State Comptroller, a government oversight body from October, the allegations that the instrument was not completely effective were supported, saying contact detection was significantly more. The report also found that the Shin Bet did not always meet the limits imposed by law, for example, not to remove information collected in a number of cases.
A ministerial committee decided last month that Israel would begin scaling down the instrument and restricting its use. But the ruling is not final, and more recently Israel has indicated that it will try to continue its widespread use, despite a Supreme Court challenge against the technology.
Since the instrument was used on a civilian health crisis, critics say the door is open for re-use in other non-state security matters.
“What happened to the Shin Bet must be a wake-up call,” Shwartz Altshuler said. ‘State authorities know everything about you, all the time, about where you are. And we will have to think about the long-term consequences of that in the future. It will not disappear. They will use it again. ”