The Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court sentenced Meir Lever to 18 months in prison and a fine of 100,000 shekels, who was convicted, based on his confession, of violations of privacy and obstruction of justice in the case of the theft of the State of Israel's population registry.
Lever admitted that he set up a website and distributed links through it that allowed broad access to download the Agron software, which contained data from the population registry in the form of a computerized database, including data on all Israeli citizens.
This is a violation of privacy, which has very serious consequences for the protection of the personal information of citizens of the State of Israel, as well as direct and indirect economic and security implications.
As part of the affair, six defendants were convicted of violations of privacy and other offenses, with four of them already being tried and sentenced to community service and prison sentences, each according to their part in the affair, and another defendant was convicted in court and is awaiting sentencing.
It was Lever who uploaded the links to the Agran software to the Internet in June 2007 and caused it to be widely distributed in Israel and around the world. He even attached a user guide to the links and urged the public to download the software and all the information about the country's citizens.
He did all this under false details (he called himself "Ari") and using technological means to disguise his identity. As part of the affair, the State of Israel's adoption database was also illegally removed from the Ministry of Social Affairs.
Judge Hadassah Naor accepted the position of the prosecution, according to which the prison sentences imposed on Lever for each of the two offenses – invasion of privacy and obstruction of justice – will run concurrently, because these are separate acts and involve different protected values.
The affair was investigated by the Law, Technology and Information Authority at the Ministry of Justice, which, after an intensive investigation, succeeded in revealing the identities of those involved in the affair.
The head of the Criminal Investigation Division, Attorney Alon Bachar, said in response to the verdict: "The defendant Lever was an accomplice in the theft of highly sensitive personal information on a large scale. The defendant distributed the information online, while operating in disguise and covering his tracks, and committing extremely serious offenses in the area of privacy of Israeli citizens. The intensive investigation conducted by the Criminal Investigation Division proved that sophisticated enforcement can also be carried out in the online space, even without a significant lead."
"Sending Lever behind bars reflects the seriousness of these types of acts and offenses. The court reiterated that privacy is a fundamental value, and categorically rejected the defense's argument that in the modern world, privacy protection is not as important as it was in the past, emphasizing that a person has the right to give up their privacy, but a third party is prohibited from violating their privacy without their consent."
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