Israeli parliament approves bill to grant police unchecked surveillance powers
A committee in Israel’s Knesset (parliament) on Sunday approved a bill granting police unchecked power to use powerful surveillance tools on taxpayers.
What the legislation says
The bill, introduced by Knesset Member Tzvika Vogel, allows police to erect AI surveillance cameras in public spaces without court orders. The cameras, which have facial recognition and license plate recognition capabilities, will also contain microphones to pick up sounds and conversations. According to Calcalist, the legislation also enables law enforcement to remotely tap into the phones of private citizens, extract files, and install spyware.
Police may store and access these data anytime, without time constraints and absent any oversight. In opposition to the bill, civil rights organizations have noted that police can easily use this new legislatoin to take advantage of Israel’s existing vague laws to spy on citizens. One law, for example, allows police to conduct covert surveillance on protesters if they have caused damage or if they may cause damage during a demonstration. The new bill could allow police to tap into the phones of demonstrators who so much as scratch the wall of a building.
The surveillance is not new, but its legality is
Israel’s government has been conducting surveillance on its citizens for years, but only now has it become legal.
In 2022, for example, it was revealed that Israel Police employed a powerful surveillance tool called Pegasus to spy on non-criminal private citizens. The law enforcement agency hacked into the personal phones of CEOs, politicians, the families of politicians, witnesses, and protesters. Some of the demonstrators, ironically, were protesting mistreatment by police.
The police have also been using a program called Hawk Eye which uses license plate recognition (LPR) cameras to track vehicles “just in case their vehicle is involved in a crime in the future.” Police maintain a massive database containing data on the movements of vehicles belonging to taxpayers across Israel. The newly approved bill retroactively legalizes the Hawk Eye program.
In May 2023, Israel Police purchased a surveillance tool without the required approval of the country’s attorney general. Echo, a spy software sold by Rayzone, can track the location of mobile phone users within one meter (3.3 feet). It accomplishes this by accessing an individual’s digital footprint left behind by anyone who uses the internet on their mobile phone. Locations can be pinpointed both in real time and in retrospect.
In 2022, the country’s top judges slammed the police for using yet another surveillance tool to spy on airport travelers. When the police were ordered by a court to disclose the software for investigation, they simply refused.
The software uses a secret AI algorithm to profile and detain passengers at the airport who have no criminal history and provide no cause for suspicion. It gathers private information about citizens from government ministries, including databases from the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Welfare, the Tax Authority, and others. The algorithm then compiles the data, which may include socioeconomic status, marital status, relatives, etc. and matches them against a predetermined criminal profile. It is unclear what significance the algorithm assigns to certain data.
If there is a match, even if there is no criminal history, the passenger is detained at the airport by police before passing through border control. The reason for the detention is known only to police officers, who then conduct a search of the passenger’s luggage and may also conduct an invasive body search.
