Shin Bet eases corona tracking
The Shin Bet’s (Israel Security Agency) coronavirus surveillance of infected citizens has shifted to a lower gear following a government decision on Sunday and an expected Knesset hearing on the issue on Wednesday.
According to the government decision, which some media reports misinterpreted as ending the program completely, the Shin Bet will no longer conduct broad surveillance.
Rather, it will only use its technological tool to determine the travels and interactions of corona-infected citizens who refuse to cooperate with the state’s epidemiological probes or who report zero interactions with others – at least until March 28.
Moreover, the government has set two barometers which could lead to the Shin Bet program completely freezing.
If new corona infection rates per day drop below 1,000 or if the spy agency is only locating 5% of new infections exclusively (the epidemiological probes missed certain interactions with infected citizens), then the program will halt as long as those parameters are met.
The government’s shift comes following a March 1 High Court ruling ordering such a shift as well as pressure from the Shin Bet itself to extricate the organization from the issue so that it can focus on its primary mission of counterterrorism.
An announcement on Tuesday by the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee (FADC) noting the government decision was the first official confirmation after a variety of contradictory reports about what the government had done.
The expected hearing on Wednesday will also fill an oversight gap which has existed since March 3, when the committee’s last endorsement of the program expired.
On February 15, the FADC held a hearing on the issue in which it extended authorization to the Shin Bet to maintain surveillance only until March 3.
In all past instances when the FADC has extended the program by three weeks, it has met again three weeks later to carry out its oversight and extend the program, often with certain conditions.
However, on March 3, a spokesperson for the FADC confirmed that no meeting was scheduled for that day or for the near future. Wednesday’s expected meeting will finally fill the oversight gap.
But the expected FADC hearing does not appear to signal any attempt to reign in the program beyond what the High Court has ordered.
In fact, at the last hearing on February 15, most of the FADC members failed to attend, with the Shin Bet surveillance extended by a 3-0 vote.
If in most past hearings there had been spirited debates to demand ending the surveillance or to replace it with the Magen 2 cell phone app or a new traffic light app, most of the February 15 hearing was chairman Zvi Hauser berating the Health Ministry for not using Shin Bet surveillance broadly enough.
He accused them of gross negligence for not using the surveillance or sending messages to corona exposed persons who were previously infected or have been vaccinated.
It is possible that the High Court’s limitation on the Shin Bet surveillance could be removed in the future as the justices appeared to make their ruling conditional on a continued drop in infection rates.
So while the government has shifted the program into low gear, if infection rates spike again at any point, there is no indication that either the High Court or the Knesset would step in to prevent the Shin Bet from returning to maximum surveillance levels.
As the IDF moves toward tightening cooperation between its different forces, the Gaza Regional Division completed a wide-scale drill earlier this week, exercising interoperability during an infiltration from the Gaza Strip.
As part of the drill, all the division’s units practiced going from routine operations to emergency mode.
The threats that the forces were facing were in multiple arenas – on the ground, underground, in the air, at sea, and near-ground (the drone threat).
The forces came from different army wings – infantry, tanks, missile batteries, navy vessels, and air force choppers. In addition, intelligence units played a major role in guiding the other units and alerting them about different threats.
OC Gaza Division Brig.Col. Nimrod Aloni said after the drill ended that his units managed to “attack, with tight cooperation with the air force, multiple targets in a short time.
“We were operating throughout the entire front, and it enabled us to examine and practice the entire might of the Gaza Division,” he said. “It is the second division drill we had in the past three months, and we keep going forward in this pace — being sharper and becoming more lethal.
The 75th Armored Battalion is now the tanks unit in charge of defending the Gaza border. Its commander, Lt.-Col. Itamar Michaeli, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday that his unit – which is deployed from the southern part of the border to the sea – played a major role in the different scenarios that were practiced.
“We worked on different infiltration options: from ones taking place in the area of the barrier, to raids on the communities and the valuable assets located inside [the border],” he said. “We were planning the most complicated scenarios, where the enemy can make the threat more difficult for us: [act] in a higher volume with multiple friction points – places where there will be a mix of civilians, army forces and enemy forces. We practiced inside the communities along the entire border.”
Michaeli noted that despite the intensity of the wide-scale drill, exercising large amounts of various threats is not uncommon for his battalion. “We
practice on a regular basis and [also] carry out drills on the company level. In this case, we did it at the division, brigade, and battalion levels.
“If you compare it to basketball practices,” he said,” if we usually practice layups, we now practice a full five-player team match.”
Regarding the interoperability of the forces, Michaeli said that this is a sign of the IDF trend to improve the cooperation of forces operating in different parts of the battlefield.
“There is a major advancement
in the way the IDF promotes partnerships,” he said. “There was a significant technological leap that raised the IDF’s power: whether it is in the ability to close fire-circles quickly or in improving the pace that intelligence is flowing between the units. There are many elements here that strengthened the army due to recent improvements and changes.
“Now we can see these changes in the IDF’s tactical ranks – in brigades and battalions – and we saw it in the drill,” the commander said.