The paper, Surveil and control? Monitoring of web activity in Israel, is accessible here:

🔗https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/29768640251383114

More data and analysis on these chilling effects is in the pipeline!

The commentary looks at state web monitoring in Israel (both of online activity as well as of passive viewing history).
These powers, governed by a lacking legal framework, appear to be mostly aimed at Israel's Arab citizens or alternatively, have intensified chilling effects within that minority.

4/ As a legal scholar, presenting to non-lawyers, but rather to an audience of intelligence studies researchers, is an opportunity to fine tune your argument and to challenge the commonly held views within your own discipline. The paper already benefited from this experience.

3/ Then, following pursuant to a theoretical analysis of SOCMINT privacy harms and a comparative review of existing mass surveillance law, the paper offers a generalized legal framework to address the unique challenges SOCMINT presents.

2/The paper argues that Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT) should be treated and regulated as mass surveillance. It examines how the shift from classic mass media OSINT to social media requires us to reassess the right to privacy.

I will also be there to present my paper 'Putting OSINT in Context: Regulating Privacy in Public' which deals with the transformation OSINT underwent with the advent of social media, its effects on the right to privacy, and the question of regulating it.

In both cases, the temptation to use LLMs - mostly not domain-specific, mostly, without sufficient resources or abilities to review its outputs - is too strong.

Whenever the occasional item about a case where lawyers were caught with AI hallucinations in their court submission, I return to think about contemporary self-representing plaintiffs, or lawyers who litigate in a language other than their native one.

4/ A follow up project measuring the disproportionate chilling effects of ISA surveillance in Israel is in the works.

3/ Those are not mitigated neither by the existing legal framework applying to Shin Bet’s surveillance practices nor by its proposed amendment bill (from 2023, see the oped in @lawfaremedia.org for more details).

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/expa...

2/ However, it appears that following the Gaza war these powers have more widely employed, targeting the Arab-Israeli minority. This raises concerns of disproportionate adverse chilling effects on that group.

nevertheless, having top level national security operations planned over a publicly available e2ee platform only emphasizes that the e2ee backdoor debate is gradually morphing from privacy vs. security to security vs. security.