By: Yuval Shany
Welcome to the 11th newsletter of the Federmann Cyber Security Research Center – Cyber Law Program.
On April 9, 2019, Israelis will go to the polls to elect the 21st Knesset. Following reported attempts to influence recent elections through the use of online tools – in the US in 2016, the Brexit referendum (2016), the French elections (2017) and the German elections (2017) – it is not surprising that concerns have been raised regarding the integrity of the upcoming Israeli elections. Such concerns have been compounded by serious irregularities experienced in the transmittal by computer of voting records in the Likud primaries, which took place in late January 2019 (the ballots themselves were in paper form, but recording of the vote tally was computerized).
Researchers from the Cyber Law program have been active in this election season with a view to putting their theoretical knowledge into use to address normative gaps and practical problems. Ron Shamir, a program researcher with considerable practical experience in cyber security who formerly served as head of technology at the Israel Security Agency), published together with Adv. Eli Bahar, a researcher from the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), a detailed policy paper on the risk of foreign intervention in the Israeli elections through cyber operations. Their main findings were presented and discussed at a workshop organized jointly by the IDI and program and attended by senior officials, including the Chair of the Elections Commission – Justice Hanan Melcer, participated. Although the paper ballot system used in Israel makes it less vulnerable to attacks on the voting process, Shamir and Bahar identify a number of other avenues of attack (e.g. influencing campaigns and hacking party computers) and criticize the disorganized division of responsibilities for protecting against cyber operations.
Tehila Shwartz-Altshuler, whose main affiliation is with the IDI, has been a vocal advocate in Israeli public discourse for updating Israel’s election laws with a view to reducing the risk of influence campaign based on micro-targeting, the use of bots and trolls, fake news, and anonymous messaging. Shwartz-Altshuler has succeeded in signing up several major parties to a code of conduct she formulated as part of her work at the IDI, and has been working with another IDI/Cyber Law researcher – Rotem Medzini – on regulating hate speech, a topic that is particularly important during election times.
Finally, our clinical program has already been involved in addressing legal aspects relating to the election. For example, it has challenged Facebook regarding the blocking of posts by a party advocating the legalization of cannabis; successfully demanded that the Minister of Transportation unblock a critical follower on his Facebook page; and explored the legality of anonymous SMS political messages.
The upshot of all of this is that the election season underscores how far the law in Israel needs to adapt itself to the digital environment in which elections take place. The chronic gap between law and technology is further widened in this field due to differences in technological capacity across the political map: some parties have more sophisticated capacity to engage in questionable strategies in cyberspace and thus have more to lose from updating existing regulation. In any event, we at the Cyber Law program are well-placed to help close normative gaps in Israel and beyond, and to propose policy fixes for the political system to pick up.
I wish us all good choices in and outside the election booth.
Sincerely,
Yuval Shany
Program Director
