Justice Minister Backs Investigation of Domestic Hacking

YERUSHALAYIM
Gideon Sa’ar, Israeli Justice Minister. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Wednesday came out in support of investigations into allegations that the police used NSO Group’s Pegasus hacking technology against Israeli citizens.

“There is an unbridgeable gap between the claims in the Calcalist article and the official statements of the police,” Sa’ar said. “It is good that the state comptroller, as an independent authority, took upon himself to probe it, and according to what I have been told, the attorney-general will also probe this. Within his office, no one knows of a case where an action that was taken without court approval.”

According to the report, police had conducted surveillance on political activists or local officials without the required authorization from a court.

Police denials on Tuesday were nuanced. Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai maintained that they did not use the technology against the cell phones of mayors suspected of corruption, or anti-Netanyahu protesters.

“Everything is done with the necessary legal authorization,” said Shabtai.

But later on, both he and Public Security Minister Omer Bar Lev agreed that the allegations need to be looked into.

The Calcalist report accused the police of using cell phone hacking technology since 2013, taking advantage of a loophole, because the specific technology was not discussed by prior laws, which were written before it existed.

Still, legal precedents indicate that if the police made use of the technology even in regular criminal cases, it would have been illegal without a court order.

The report suggested that the police have gotten around the restriction by “packaging” evidence they collected from hacking cell phones illegally as “intelligence,” but without revealing the source.

Some officials in the state prosecution and Attorney-General’s Office were also implicated in the expose, which asserted that they gave some of the approvals, which they lacked authority to do.

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