Time to tell about the secret pact with Israel

THREE MONTHS ago, not for the first time, we urged the Holness administration to come clean with the Jamaican people on its cybersecurity arrangements with Israel. The matter has grown in importance and urgency in the face of last week’s confirmation by a United States law-enforcement official that Jamaica’s criminal intelligence pact with the Americans has all but collapsed in favour of deals with Tel Aviv.

“Jamaica has pretty much left the agreement and we are not pleased,” the source from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) told The Gleaner. “…You should ask your Government about arrangements with Israel.”

When we last raised this issue in July, it was against the backdrop of growing rumours of deepening unease by traditional Western partners, especially the United States, Britain and Canada, that a 2004 electronic eavesdropping agreement that targeted organised criminal, which helped to bring down the west Kingston crime lord, Christopher Coke, was under stress.

At the time, Prime Minister Andrew Holness insisted that the existing partnership remained in place, although Jamaica was not opposed to establishing “a framework for cooperation” with Israel on cybersecurity.

But precisely what such a framework would look like and how, or if, it has been advanced is not clear. Jamaicans haven’t been told.

What is known is that cybersecurity was on the agenda of the talks between Mr Holness and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when the Jamaican leader visited Israel in 2017, as Kingston expanded its political relationship with Tel Aviv. That embrace included Jamaica either being absent for, or abstaining from, key votes at UNESCO on Israel actions regarding the disputed city of Jerusalem.

There was also last year’s abstention at the UN on a resolution criticising America’s decision to transfer its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which badly undermined America’s role as the honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its settlement of the basis of a two-state solution.

Jamaica’s tapping into Israeli know-how on security isn’t, of itself, a bad thing – if there is a clear sense of the scope of the arrangement, the technologies involved and the protocols by which the partnership is governed. For, there are global concerns over the use of Israeli-developed technologies, such as those produced by the firm NSO Group Technologies, to undermine human rights.

PEGASUS AT WORK

For instance, an NSO spyware, called Pegasus, when directed to the mobile phone of a target, is capable of scooping up information and data even from encrypted devices. Pegasus can also turn phones into listening devices, even when their power is not apparently on.

Like other cyberwarfare technologies developed by other firms, Pegasus, ostensibly, is subject to arms sales licensing when being exported. However, it was deployed to the phone of the dissident Saudi Arabian journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who, a year ago, was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was murdered by the kingdom’s security agents.

Pegasus has also found its way to the other Middle Eastern states with which Israel, supposedly, has no relations, as well as countries in Europe and the Americas. Indeed, this past May a number of Israeli civil society groups, supported by Amnesty International and New York University’s Law School’s Bernstein Institute of Human Rights, petitioned the Israeli courts to bar the export of Pegasus.

It is not only the possibility of acquiring NSO’s cyber technologies that is of concern. Israel Aerospace Industries, the firm with which Jamaica plans to partner on a cybersecurity training institute, is itself an arms/technology security company that is close to the Israeli government.

While we accept the need for Jamaica, like other countries, to protect itself against bad actors, it is critical that it be balanced against citizens’ rights to privacy, from undue intrusion by the State, and that any encroachment on constitutional freedoms be no more than what is ‘reasonably justified’ for the functioning of liberal democracy.

In that regard, there ought to be laws that acknowledge these principles, legislated after robust debate.

A Nicodemus approach to the application of invasive technologies, and partnerships with those who supply them, will not do.