They have countered that the police accessed their cellphones improperly without obtaining a court-issued warrant.
By YONAH JEREMY BOBTwitter CEO Jack Dorsey reads a statement from his phone while testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on Twitter's algorithms and content monitoring(photo credit: REUTERS/CHRIS WATTIE)
Supreme Court Justice Yosef Elron heard a fiery legal debate with potential electoral consequences on whether the police can hack the cellphones of two senior public relations advisers to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.The debate on Sunday before the Supreme Court comes after the police already won battles in the lower district and magistrate’s courts.Netanyahu advisers Ofer Golan and Yonatan Orich stand accused of orchestrating an intimidation campaign against a key state’s witness in the indictment against the prime minister.They have countered that the police accessed their cellphones improperly without obtaining a court-issued warrant.In addition, the case implicates the broader debate about police interrogation tactics, and the ongoing verbal war between Netanyahu and the legal establishment.Last month, the Tel Aviv District Court endorsed allowing the police to hack the Netanyahu advisers’ cellphones to probe for evidence that they tried to intimidate state witness Shlomo Filber, hoping he would retract his finger-pointing at the prime minister.Representing Netanyahu and his advisers, Amit Hadad told Elron that the police must not get away with having abused Netanyahu’s advisers’ rights.He said that the court should penalize the police for slowly accessing four separate cellphones in the investigation over several days.Hadad said that since there is a clear pattern of the police ignoring procedure, and since the police had enough evidence to conclude their probe, they should not be allowed to more fully search the cellphones in question.Previous lower courts approved the police request to review the cellphones more fully, despite the court having criticized the police conduct of initially reviewing the cellphones without advising Netanyahu’s advisers that they had the right to refuse the police request.Effectively, both the district and magistrate’s courts have already said that the police had violated standard procedures, but that substantively they still had a right to review the cellphone’s content due to the charges against Golan and Orich.The state lawyer told Elron that the cases would fall apart without a full search of the cellphones in question.Moreover, the state lawyer told the Supreme Court that the legal issues involved were complex, and that even if the police conduct was not ideal, it was far from a serious violation.Allegedly, Netanyahu’s top public relations people sent staff members with a megaphone to drive past Filber’s house broadcasting intimidating messages. It was designed to get him to recant his accusations that Netanyahu perpetrated bribery in Case 4000, the Bezeq-Walla Affair.The Supreme Court gave no date by which it would rule, but the ruling is expected in the coming days, or at most weeks, since the police investigation is on hold pending the decision.
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