The Tel Aviv District Attorney has charged six people, including a computer programmer formerly employed as a Social Affairs Ministry contractor, in connection with a massive data theft that exposed the personal details of millions of Israelis.
The theft, which took place in 2006, included the publication of detailed personal information on nine million Israelis, among them minors, deceased persons and citizens living abroad.
According to the indictment, Shalom Bilik, who had access to the database during his work at the ministry, copied the data and took a copy of the database home.
After Bilik's contract with the ministry ended in 2006, he began to provide computing services to an ultra-Orthodox organization in Jerusalem, and allegedly installed the database on computers there.
Indicted alongside Bilik are Avraham Adam, Yosef Vitman, Haim Aharon, Moshe Moskovitz and Meir Leiver.
Adam, who worked at the ultra-Orthodox charity, allegedly used the stolen data after Bilik gave it him.
Allegedly, Adam passed the data on to Vitman, who volunteered at the charity.
Vitman then sold a copy of the stolen database to Aharon, an independent computer consultant, who combined it with a copy of the voter registration database and eleven other databases, the indictment said.
Aharon then sold the combined database to several people, and also gave it to Moskovitz, a computer programmer, to sell.
Moskovitz enhanced the database with a sophisticated search program he had written, and called the final database 'Agron' ('Glossary'). He then sold it on to various acquaintances.
At this stage, the indictment said, the database ended up in the hands of Leiver, who renamed it aRi and sold it to several overseas internet sites.
The indictment charges the six men with various offenses under the Privacy Protection Law, which attract a maximum five-year prison sentence.
In addition, Bilik is also charged under the Penal Code with removal of a document from custody and passing it to a third party, which attracts a maximum five year prison term.
Leiver is also charged with destroying evidence, after allegedly attempting to disrupt the investigation by deleting computer files.
Among the stolen information are full names, ID numbers, addresses, dates of birth, family status, and names of siblings. It also includes an extensive search engine allowing users to determine extended family relations of any Israeli in the database.
The Justice Ministry's Law, Information and Technology Authority began to probe the case in 2009, following a police investigation that yielded no results. Over the course of the investigation they compiled mountains of evidence from hard drives, hard discs and cloud-computing storage
JOANNA PARASZCZUK • Jerusalem Post
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