Rami Levy Communications Monitored calls from employees and was fined NIS 895,000

Rami Levy Communications and company executives extracted information in violation of the law and while violating the privacy of dozens of employees, journalists and customers, and took advantage of their status as owners of a cellular company, and still received only fines as part of a plea agreement. It was determined that the executives took out call and location outputs from the Pelephone network, in order to allegedly find out who journalists, customers and employees were talking to and where they were.
The Jerusalem Magistrate's Court fined the company only NIS 600,000. The company will compensate the victims on whom information is extracted from the company's database for NIS 200,000. Ophir Atias, the company's CEO, was fined NIS 75,000 and given a suspended sentence. Shlomo Aderet Julian, the company's security officer, was sentenced to five months of community service, and fined NIS 20,000. That is, none of the senior officers who conducted the illegal surveillance received a prison sentence.
The company was convicted of using databases against its purpose, Atias was convicted of breaches of confidentiality and using the database in violation of the law and Julian was convicted of numerous offenses of invasion of privacy as well as breaches of confidentiality and offenses of using the database illegally.
The Jerusalem District Attorney's Office stated: "The amended indictment in which the defendants were convicted according to their confession, describes the illegal use they made of the database of the company's customers. In an amended indictment and sentenced. "
In 2011, the company received a mobile operator license with which it has access to a database that documents communication data of the company's customers and allows call output to be generated, as well as an indication of the phone owner's location during the call. This database is intended to be used by communications companies to prevent fraud and therefore any other use of it is against the law and constitutes an offense under the Privacy Protection Act. Between the years 2011-2016, the company conducted hundreds of searches in the database, some of them on the company's employees for the personal and business needs of the defendants.
It was further stated that "the use of the information was done on many occasions and in a way that became a recurring pattern of action to clarify various matters, which the company management or the defendants sought to find out through the database. "In the other case, defendant Julian conducted a check on the number of a person who filed a lawsuit against the company and also checked the database on the number of journalists who published a negative article about the company."
The Privacy Protection Authority stated that "the affair embodies one of the most serious incidents investigated by the Authority due to the deliberate and ongoing use by senior officials of a public company of its database. "The severity of the harm as a result of the illegal use of sensitive information."