Knesset committee extends Shin Bet tracking of virus carriers till Tuesday
Deputy attorney general says Netanyahu hasn’t decided if he will advance legislation to continue controversial program; panel head Ashkenazi says government faces ‘tough decision’
The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Thursday approved the continued controversial digital tracking of coronavirus carriers by the Shin Bet security service until Tuesday at midnight, giving the government extra time to decide if it wants to legislate the program.
The High Court of Justice earlier this week ruled that the tracking must stop unless the law is changed to allow it, rather than continuing to operate under emergency regulations without Knesset oversight. But it granted the government the right to approve an extension of the tracking for the coming weeks, on condition that it begins the legislative process.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to lead a discussion Sunday on whether to begin the legislative process or give up digital tracking.
The tracking program retraces the movements of coronavirus patients by making use of phone location and credit card data to locate whom they may have infected, data it is generally only permitted to use for counterterrorism operations.
Deputy Attorney General Raz Nizri said Thursday that Netanyahu has not yet decided whether to advance legislation for the program to continue or shelve the initiative.
“As of this moment, no decision has been made on whether to promote legislation or not,” Nizri told the Knesset committee. “This Sunday we will see where we are headed when the politicians decide. If we do not pass legislation, [the program] will certainly be stopped immediately.”
Sigal Sadetsky, head of Public Health Services in the Health Ministry, told the committee the tracking program had proven to be an important tool in identifying and isolating virus cases.
Blue and White MK Gabi Ashkenazi, who chairs the committee, said at the conclusion of the meeting that the government faced a “tough decision.”
The High Court also said Sunday that any eventual law must allow journalists the right to protect their sources by preventing their cellphone data from being handed over to the Shin Bet, though the exception would be treated on a case-by-case basis.
The court ruling came in response to petitions filed by rights groups against the tracking, which has been temporarily authorized under emergency ordinances as part of the campaign to curb an outbreak of the virus that has already claimed over 200 lives in the country and infected thousands.
The tracking program “severely violates the constitutional right to privacy, and should not be taken lightly,” the court said.
“The choice to use the state’s preventive security organization to monitor those who do not seek to harm it, without the consent of the surveillance subjects, poses great difficulty and effort must be made to find another suitable alternative that fulfills the principles of privacy protection,” the justices added.
Petitions against the tracking program were filed by the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, the Adalah legal aid organization, right activist Attorney Shahar Ben-Meir, and the Union of Journalists in Israel. They claimed the tracking was harming basic rights of human dignity and freedom, while the state has argued that the measure is necessary to save human lives.
The Shin Bet has stressed that its powerful mass surveillance program is only being used for the purposes of fighting the pandemic.
Under the government’s emergency regulations, the security service is not permitted to continue using the data after the program ends, though the Health Ministry is allowed to use the information for an additional 60 days for research purposes, presumably to retrace the path of the outbreak.
The tracking, which uses cellphone location data, credit card purchase data and other digital information, aims to alert and order into quarantine people who were within two meters, for 10 minutes or more, of someone infected with the virus within the past two weeks.
The committee decided last week not to move forward with separate legislation allowing police to use phone tracking technology to enforce stay-at-home orders for quarantined individuals.
Ashkenazi said in a statement after the meeting that members of the panel had raised significant reservations about the wording of the bill that would have allowed the practice to continue, and that government representatives present agreed to “reexamine the wording of the [proposed] law.”
Police have since halted the program.
