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AFP
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Mobile data allows authorities to know where users are at any time
Hirsh Kotkovsky thrusts his phone towards me but I can’t read the screen from 2m (6.6ft) away due to social distancing rules.
We’re in the bomb shelter below his Jerusalem apartment block – the only place the photographer has been able to work since his studio closed in the lockdown.
“I was shocked,” he says as he reads out the message from the Israeli government. “It’s telling me that I was next to someone that has corona… and that I must go into quarantine.”
He obeyed the order that came in late March, cancelling lucrative wedding shoots and shutting himself away from his wife and four small children, even though he had no symptoms.
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Media caption‘I’m Israel’s coronavirus patient number 74’
Mr Kotkovsky is one of thousands of Israelis who have been alerted by similar messages. In the fight to contain the coronavirus, Israel’s internal security agency – the Shin Bet – was empowered to use covert systems to track people’s movements.
The Middle East’s cyber-superpower has made extensive use of surveillance technology to try tackle Covid-19, as countries around the world grapple with the trade-off between privacy and monitoring infection.
The Shin Bet can access the location data of millions of mobile phone users to trace those who have been in proximity to confirmed patients. Israel credits the system, among other measures, with reducing the rate of infection.
The number of new cases reported each day is now down to double digits. Its death toll has also remained relatively low, currently standing at 252.
Many shops have reopened and some school classes have started up again. It has felt like the first wave of infection is passing.
“It is precisely now when we need this tool… to break the chain of contagion and permit the people to go on with their lives,” said National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat at a parliamentary oversight committee last week.
But the unprecedented expansion of the Shin Bet’s powers has been the subject of controversy, including a Supreme Court challenge, questions over its accuracy, and accusations from doctors that it creates a distraction from testing for the coronavirus.
The agency, now acting as a tool of public health enforcement, is usually tasked with preventing attacks against Israelis and routinely monitors Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Counter-terror methods
Arik Brabbing slips his surgical mask under his chin and breathes in Tel Aviv’s warm air. He was better known during his three decades in the Shin Bet by his cover name “Harris”.
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EPA
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Surveillance is more often used to detect security threats
We sit at either end of a park bench as the former agent-handler describes how he rose to become chief of the spy agency’s cyber unit.
Now retired, he says counter-terrorism technology is hunting down people exposed to Covid-19.
“It’s the same system, the same methods,” he explains. “We know that someone was here in the park. We can get from the [phone] company all the details about the hour, the place, exactly the place… and we can understand who else was around.”
I ask him a series of questions – some get a response, others don’t.
Can people be monitored in real-time? “I cannot answer your question.”
How acc