Coronavirus: Israel uses massive technology surveillance to curb pandemic

Against the coronavirus, counterintelligence to the rescue. The Israeli Shin Beth can, since Thursday, March 19, use on the entire population a weapon of mass technological surveillance intended to fight against terrorism.

Intelligence has been authorized by the government to digitally track the phones of everyone in the country in order to "make the epidemiological investigation procedure [on the Covid-19] more efficient, and to more easily contact people exposed to people with the virus, "said the Israeli Ministry of Health.

"You must place yourself in quarantine"

"Dear Karina, according to our data, you were in close contact with a carrier of the coronavirus on March 6, 2020. You must be placed in quarantine until March 20, 2020 in order to protect your loved ones and the public". This standard message - posted on Twitter by Israeli public television - will be sent to all Israelis who have been within two meters of an infected person for two minutes or more. About 400 individuals have already been warned through the controversial device, the health ministry said on Thursday.

כך נראית הודעת משרד הבריאות שנשלחה לאנשים שהיו בסביבת חולי קורונה @ Itsik_zuarets pic.twitter.com/qyingqKark

To keep track of population movements, the Shin Beth accesses the telephone of people who tested positive for Covid-19 in Israel, or 677 cases to date. Intelligence officers can then consult the geolocation data of the telephone to trace the movements of these individuals. They will access the same data on the smartphones of all their contacts to try to identify who has been in the vicinity of carriers of the virus.

From address book to address book, the Shin Beth thus finds itself able to monitor in real time the movements of the entire Israeli population, stresses the daily The Times of Israel. These are methods comparable to those that Israeli spies use to track suspects of terrorist activities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, notes the daily Le Monde.

With one difference. Terrorist surveillance programs must be approved by the Israeli parliament and are subject to the control of the courts. Nothing like it this time. The use of these exceptional tools was taken "urgently", Tuesday, March 17, the day when a new Parliament was to take office, which allowed the government to bypass the obligation to consult the Intelligence Committee, who was not yet trained.

The very reserved Supreme Court

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that such measures had never been applied on such a scale on national soil and "implied a certain level of invasion of the citizens' privacy". But he justified them by the urgency of the health situation, saying that Israel did not have the luxury of waiting for all the institutions to be in place. The country is going through a serious political crisis and no party has been able to form a government with a majority in Parliament for a year.

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But the government's justifications have not convinced organizations defending individual freedoms and opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu. "We are going through an exceptional period which requires taking exceptional measures to save lives, but that does not justify passing in force without submitting to democratic control," said Benny Ganz, leader of the Blue centrist party. White and main opponent of the outgoing Prime Minister.

The Supreme Court was also very reserved with regard to this mass surveillance. Referred by associations defending human rights, the highest judicial authority recognized the advisability of using this type of technology, but criticized the lack of control by the Parliament. It gave the government five days to submit the measures to the Parliamentary Intelligence Committee, under penalty of prohibiting the Shin Beth from playing Big Brother on national soil.

China, South Korea, Israel and beyond?

Debates in Israel are symptomatic of the temptation of some states to put the defense of privacy on hold to better fight the Covid-19. China has shown the way by strengthening its population surveillance system - deploying drones in the skies of Wuhan, forcing the Chinese to use an application allowing the authorities to follow their movements - in order to better control the outbreaks of the epidemic.

Besides Israel, Taiwan is the only other state to openly monitor the phones of its population to fight the spread of the coronavirus. The small island territory has taken the logic even further, allowing the police to access this data to ensure that individuals placed in quarantine respect confinement. An extension of the powers of technological surveillance to the police which the Israeli Supreme Court has expressly prohibited.

Iran, for its part, has been accused of using a health app for smartphones in order to collect as much personal data as possible about its citizens. This service, presented as a tool to identify symptoms of contamination, transferred information to the Iranian authorities on geolocation and the identity of the owner of the telephone.

While examples of countries that have succumbed to all-round electronic surveillance are still rare, this is only the beginning, say the authors of a British study on policies to combat the coronavirus that inspired British and British governments. American. "These tools clearly make containment policies more effective and can be very useful, provided that the privacy issues are resolved," they write.

London and Washington have also announced, in recent days, to work on technological solutions similar to those used by Israel to alert by telephone people who have come into contact with infected individuals. But the two countries have promised that, in their case, the keys to surveillance will not be given to James Bond or Jack Bauer and that citizens will have the choice whether or not to allow the authorities to access their telephone data.

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