The Public Defender’s Office issued its annual report on Sunday slamming the state for abuse of power in hacking suspect’s cell phones and a variety of other areas.
At the same time, Public Defender Anat Meyassed Cnaan complimented the state for some level of improvement in reducing the volume of detainees per year in comparison to prior years.
Regarding violating privacy rights, the report noted several problems.
It emphasized that the police should not be hacking into the cell phones of suspects in any fashion before the Knesset passes new legislation to properly regulate the issue and balance security needs with privacy rights.
This issue grabbed headlines many times over the last year because it also played a role in the public corruption of incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as in Case 3000 the Submarine Affair, in which many of his senior former aides are on trial.
Broadly speaking the state has admitted that some of its cell phone hacking went beyond court approvals, but that in such cases, the data it seized was not used to prosecute the suspects in question.
However, even last week the state said it had not decided on principles for when such data should be deleted or stored for potential use in future cases.
What was the Public Defender’s point?
The Public Defender’s point was that all of this is backward and that the state should not be able to hack any data until the Knesset settles all of these issues.
Moreover, the report indicated that the volume of court-approved electronic searches has become concerning, already reaching 24,000 search warrant approvals in 2019. There is no data yet for the comparable number of searches in 2022 or more recent years, but the expectation is that the mix of electronic searches based on warrants as well as warrantless searches is only continuing to jump upward.
In addition, the report flagged a law enforcement technology that allows collecting data about nearby cell phones to one particular target suspect without proper Knesset regulation.
It also mentioned a technology the police use to track cars using photos of their license plate numbers which has not been regulated by the Knesset and could be abused.
Further, the report warned that the police routinely review suspects’ cell phones without a court order by manipulating suspects into thinking they must agree to give the police access.
Citing a recent Supreme Court decision that criticized this practice, the public defender said that the Knesset should pass a new law making this explicitly illegal.
Even as the law currently stands, the public defender said that courts should toss any evidence obtained in this way as it violates the fundamental protection of suspects to maintain their silence, and thus avoid self-incrimination.
The idea of that objection is that people maintain extremely personal items on their cell phones and they should be able to do so without exposure unless there is a court order.
The report even cited examples of cases, such as in the Lod District Court, where evidence obtained by an illegal search of a cell phone was disqualified, which led to a partial acquittal for a defendant accused of drug offenses.
Unusually, the report credited the police for reducing the trend of what it considers improper or unnecessary detentions.
In 2020, the number of detentions dropped to 46,501 which the report said was an 11% drop as compared to 2018.
In recent decades, often the lead item of public defender reports was the complaint that the police overly rely on detaining suspects for small crimes or where the evidence against them is weak in order to pressure them into plea deals.
Even with the smaller relative number of detainees, the public defender would still say that the numbers should reach a much smaller level.
In addition, the report said that the numbers do not show the full picture since temporary detentions in the field where detainees are not brought back to a police station are left out of the statistics.
The report also addressed a wide number of other issues, including over-policing in general of small crimes, such as shoplifting, especially where the defendant is poor.
Meyassed Cnaan said that the year 2021 was a year of transitions, from her taking over from prior public defender Yoav Sapir to her lawyers coping with coronavirus-era limits on defendants’ and detainees’ rights.
She said that “the resilience shown by the public defender’s office during this transition period showed the devotion of its lawyers which stem from the deep sense of commitment and values of the public defenders to their clients.”
