The government should set up a special entity charged with collecting information about corona patients in Israel, rather than charging the Shin Bet security agency with tracking cases using electronic means, a special panel of experts from the Israel Homeland Security portal said Wednesday, after the Knesset approved a law granting the Shin Bet limited authority to use phone surveillance.
The cabinet had authorized the Shin Bet to use the technology in March during the peak of the country's coronavirus outbreak, despite public outcry over privacy concerns. But the Supreme Court ordered the surveillance halted until the security agency's permission was granted by law.
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The Knesset voted 51-38 in favor of granting the Shin Bet power to use phone surveillance to retrace the steps of people infected with COVID-19 and identify others who came in contact with them in the previous two weeks. Those determined to have been in close proximity with an infected person will be ordered to self-quarantine for two weeks from the date of contact.
The law grants the Shin Bet permission to track cell phones for a three-week period on a case-by-case basis and only in instances in which other epidemiological tracking methods are insufficient in determining contact between a patient and other potentially infected persons.
Wednesday's panel was headed by Brig. Gen. (res.) Sharon Nir, who formerly commanded the IDF's Cyber Defense Directorate. Nir emphasized the need to strike a balance between maintaining Israelis' right to privacy and the need to save lives through epidemiological research to track the movements of corona patients.
Cyber expert Avi Yariv noted that "collecting this data creates a large, living, breathing database that any intelligence organization, criminal organization, or private investigator would want to access – where everyone is, what they're doing, and whom they're meeting."
According to Yariv, this information is powerful and even dangerous.
"Even if everything works correctly, we've created a database of all the movements of Israeli citizens. If, god forbid, a hacker accessed it – we've created a strategic Achilles heel for Israel," he said.
Guy Mizrahi of RayZone Groupo told the panel that he "didn't trust the system."
"Israel has proven in the past that it doesn't know how to protect our information. The database of an organization that includes all the Interior Ministry's information about us, has already been leaked 15 times.
"It wasn't even a hack. The state hands out information to every [political] party that is founded," Mizrahi said.
In addition, Mizrahi warned, the tracking technology employed by the Shin Bet is "outdated" and only provides locations within a few hundred meters [yards].
"Someone sitting in an office three stories down could get a text message saying he had been around a confirmed corona case … this has caused tens of thousands of citizens to be quarantined for no reason," he noted.
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