TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) – In the early days of the pandemic, a panicked Israeli began using a massive surveillance tool on its citizens to track people’s cell phones in hopes of stopping the spread of the coronavirus.
The government hailed the technology, which is normally used to trap wanted Palestinian militants, as a breakthrough against the virus. But months later, the tool’s effectiveness is called into question, and critics say its use has incurred immense costs to the country’s democratic principles.
“The idea of a government watching its own citizens so closely should ring the bell,” said Maya Fried, a spokeswoman for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, who has repeatedly challenged the use of the tool. the court. “This goes against the foundations of democracy. You cannot just give up democracy during a crisis. “
Little is known about the technology. According to the daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Shin Bet’s internal security service has been using the tool for two decades, collecting metadata from everyone using telecom services in Israel. The information collected includes the location of the mobile device, browsing history on the web, and the calls and texts received and made, but not their content. That reportedly helped the agency track down militants and stop attacks, although it is unclear what is happening with all the data.
Israel first brought the Shin Bet to fight virus outbreaks in March. By following the movements of people infected with the coronavirus, it was able to identify who had come into contact with them and were at risk of infection, and quarantine them.
With the Israeli Ministry of Health’s contact tracking capabilities limited, the Shin Bet was seen as the best option to take 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 a critical tool to track the outbreak and insist that they have struck a balance between protecting individual rights and public health.
“We believe the costs are certainly reasonable,” Deputy Health Minister Yoav Kisch told a parliamentary committee last month. “We have not seen this tool used in an exploitative way. This tool saves lives. “
Initially, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used emergency regulations to authorize use of the tool. After the hasty commitment was challenged in court, the government was forced in July to enact restrictions on its use in legislation and subject it to some parliamentary scrutiny.
The law says that the Shin Bet must keep the information separate from other data it collects for other purposes and that it must be deleted after a certain period of time. The law also limits those who have access to the information and stipulates that Israel must present and popularize a civilian alternative to the surveillance, such as a telephone app. Israel has developed such an app, but it is not widely used.
Critics say there is not a good overview of how the Shin Bet data is collected, stored, used or disposed of.
Michal Cotler-Wunsh, a lawmaker in the parliamentary committee overseeing the tool, said Israel’s reliance on the Shin Bet prevented it from moving to more transparent civilian technology that could have done the job. “We really should have resisted the temptation,” she said.
Under their partnership, the Ministry of Health sends the Shin Bet the names, ID numbers, and contact details of those diagnosed with COVID-19. The security service can then go through two weeks of data to determine which cell phones were within two meters of the patient for more than 15 minutes. They are then alerted and have to quarantine themselves.
At the time, there was little protest against the inclusion of the Shin Bet from ordinary Israelis, who have great faith in their security forces.
But as the months passed, Israelis became trapped in what appeared to be a dragnet retrieving tens of thousands of contacts. Many claimed the data was inaccurate, forcing them into an unnecessary 14-day home quarantine. To make matters worse, it was difficult to rely on the overwhelmed Department of Health hotline operators.
The accuracy of the tool indoors would be problematic. If an infected person is in an apartment, the entire building can be quarantined.
The Ministry of Health says that as of July 950,000 people detected by the tool have been quarantined, 46,000 of which were found to be infected. According to the ministry, about 900,000 have been quarantined via traditional contact tracking and 63,000 of these have been found to be infected since July. As of August, the Israeli military took over contact tracing responsibilities for the Ministry of Health.
Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, a think tank, disputes the Ministry of Health’s figures. Based on her own analysis of official data, she believes the Shin Bet has detained far fewer infected than contact tracers. She also estimates that at least 100,000 people have been wrongly quarantined.
An October interim report from the state auditor, a government oversight body, backed up claims that the tool was not entirely effective, saying that contact tracing was significantly more. The report also found that the Shin Bet did not always adhere to the limits imposed by law, for example by not removing information collected in a number of cases.
A ministerial committee decided last month that Israel would start rolling back the tool and limiting its use. But the decision is not final and more recently Israel has indicated that it will try to continue its widespread use despite a Supreme Court challenge to the technology.
Now that the tool has been used on its citizens in a health crisis, critics say the door is open to reuse it in other matters unrelated to state security.
“What happened to the Shin Bet must be a wake-up call,” said Shwartz Altshuler. ‘Government agencies know everything about you about where you are all the time. And we will have to think about its long-term implications in the future. It’s not going away. They will use it again. “