The main story today was the news that according to a report in Calcalist, the Israeli police is using NSO’s Pegasus spyware against Israeli citizens. Apparently it takes advantage of a very large loophole in the legal system: while there are very strict regulations regarding “wire-tapping” there is no specific law that makes it illegal to break into a citizen’s phone to harvest information or, at least, the Israeli police made their own interpretation of the laws in determining what was permitted. In the case that a surveilled person was charged, the information they gathered through Pegasus was not used directly as evidence. Etc. According to the article, Pegasus is being used in a very similar way to that discovered in many non-democratic regimes around the world. Haaretz, in its own analysis, concludes that NSO is an arm of the state.
בשירות משטרת ישראל: פריצות לטלפון של אזרחים ללא פיקוח או בקרה | כלכליסט https://www.calcalist.co.il/local_news/article/s1b1xwx6y
Israel’s COVID count seemed to be a bit optimistic during the last couple of days – thirty-some thousand per day – but it turned out that its computer system had simply collapsed under the flood of testing results and the actual number is at least double that appearing on the health ministry’s website. Not the 465,000 cases that France reported today, but still the highest ever total for this country.