Israeli State Attorney’s Office’s ‘Cyber Unit’ collaborates with Facebook and Twitter to censor users’ posts, but has no legal authority. Israel’s state attorney’s office is running a “Cyber Unit” which, in collaboration with major social media outlets, is illegally censoring user content.
Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel sent a letter on 2 August 2017 to Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, State Attorney Shai Nitzan, and Cyber Unit director Haim Vismonsky demanding that they immediately cease the illegal operations of the state attorney’s Cyber Unit.
The unit began operation during the second half of 2015 and is responsible for “dealing with cyberspace enforcement challenges” via censorship of social media posts. This censorship – conducted in collaboration and coordination with social media outlets, including U.S.-based giants Facebook and Twitter – entails the removal of content added by users, restriction of access to certain websites, and outright blocking of users’ access to these sites.
Adalah Attorney Fady Khoury wrote in the letter that much of the unit’s censorship operations are conducted without any basis in Israeli law:
“Nothing in the law allows state authorities to censor content based solely on an administrative determination… that the content amounts to a criminal offense. Likewise, there is no explicit directive in [Israeli] law authorizing the removal of content determined to amount to a criminal offense, even by a court.”
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