Spying on the virus: Israel secret service to track patients
JERUSALEM (AP) — The head of Israel's shadowy Shin Bet internal security service said Tuesday that his agency received Cabinet approval overnight to start deploying its counter-terrorism tech measures to help curb the spread of the new coronavirus in Israel.
While Nadav Argaman acknowledged that using the agency's capabilities on sick Israeli citizens deviates from Shin Bet's typical operations against Palestinian militants, he said the goal was still in line with its overall mission of “saving lives.”
He vowed there would be stringent oversight to maintain individual privacy and that operatives would only use their findings to warn those that may be exposed to the virus — rather than enforcing any government-mandated quarantine.
“The other state bodies don't have the necessary technological means to aid this effort,” Argaman said in a statement. “I am well aware of the sensitivity of this matter and therefore have instructed that only a very limited number of agents will be handling this and the information will not be saved in the Shin Bet database.”
The move was announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of a series of sweeping measures to step the outbreak and immediately raised concerns from civil-liberties advocates that the practice would raise serious privacy issues.
The final go-ahead also came the day a new Israeli legislature was sworn in following the country's third election in less than a year — meaning it bypassed the typically required oversight of a special parliamentary subcommittee that had already begun reviewing the measures.
Gabi Ashkenazi, a retired military chief who headed the subcommittee in the outgoing parliament, called the government approval a “heist in the dead of night.” His centrist Blue and White...
