Digital Surveillance During Coronavirus Crisis – Amnesty Israel Calls for Civilian Control 

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

Amnesty Israel movement reacts to the State’s announcement in mid-March regarding the employment of advanced digital monitoring tools used for counterterrorism activities to track individuals diagnosed with the coronavirus.

Amnesty Israel has appealed to the Subcommittee for Intelligence, Secret Services of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, asking to attend the open discussions regarding the control of the use of the General Security Services’ digital tools for the surveillance of citizens in order to prevent the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. A position paper provided by the movement includes guidelines recommended for the appropriate control of surveillance.

The movement specified that “as urgent the surveillance practices – so is their control.” Amnesty sees the right for life and the right for health as among the basic human rights, and the authorities of states coping with the pandemic can consider infringement of other human rights in order to secure the lives and health of their citizens. Altogether, as in any emergency, such infringement should be proportional, limited in time, as minimized as possible, restricted, measured, controlled, transparent, detailed and clear, and should be terminated as soon as the emergency state is over.

The document was prepared by the Amnesty International Israel team especially for the discussions of the Knesset’s Subcommittee for Intelligence’s discussions after surveillance has already been activated.

According to the movement’s announcement, the guidelines and recommendations refer to various fields, including considering alternatives, preventing the use of surveillance systems or information for any other purpose, the immediate and widespread control including by opposition organizations, judicial control, and formal and informal civilian society organizations, transparency, minimizing privacy infringement through cybersecurity measures and the deletion of all aggregated data, stopping the surveillance in case of lack in medical benefit, efforts by the authorities to terminate the surveillance even before the emergency state comes to an end, preventing concrete attacks against the gatekeepers, etc.