Ben Gvir wiretap law proposal said to shield politicians from police spyware

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir is reportedly seeking regulations that will bar police from using wiretapping powers to investigate allegations of bribery and other forms of graft among public figures.

The plan, which would effectively shield elected officials from being investigated for alleged abuses of power, has sparked the latest in a series of rows between the national security minister and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, Channel 12 news reported Monday.

The law being drafted by Ben Gvir is designed to allow the police, under specific circumstances, to employ wiretapping using cellphone spyware and to conduct covert searches of data stored on computers and cellphones, according to the channel.

The proposed language is said to include a long list of offenses that the National Security Ministry says justify police use of the extraordinary measures. But excluded from the list were offenses regarding public integrity, including bribery, theft by a public figure and aid to a criminal organization by a public figure, Channel 12 said.

The report did not detail what crimes were included in the bill.

The report comes as a state commission is examining how police and the State Attorney’s Office procurement and use of phone-hacking tools, such as the Pegasus software, following a report that police had spied on high-profile figures without judicial oversight.

In the meantime, the use of spyware by police has been largely frozen, except in certain cases and with the approval of the attorney general.

According to Channel 12, Deputy Attorney General Sharon Afek told the National Security Ministry that the state found it unacceptable to exclude integrity-related offenses.

Ben Gvir reportedly responded by insisting that allowing such tools to be used against politicians would pave the way for the police and prosecution to maximize allegations for political purposes.

“Unfortunately, the Attorney General’s Office has often used tools that are supposed to be used to investigate serious crimes against politicians under various pretexts,” Ben Gvir’s office said in a statement quoted by Channel 12. “Therefore, the minister intends to give the police the tools to deal with serious crime and not to include in the law sections that were previously used to tailor cases against politicians.”

Police have faced much scrutiny but few repercussions for overstepping court-issued warrants while deploying spyware technology to hack Israelis’ phones. The full extent of police use of the NSO Group’s Pegasus software and similar technology still remains unclear.

In 2022, the Calcalist newspaper reported that the police used spyware tools to sneak into the phones dozens of high-profile Israeli figures, including family members and associates of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, without any judicial oversight. But an investigation by the police and a report by then-deputy attorney general Amit Marari found the report to have been largely incorrect.