Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked (New Right) on Monday slammed Israel Police and the Prosecutor's Office for confiscating the cellular phones of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's advisers.
"A cellular phone is a person's inner world," Shaked wrote on her Facebook page. "It's our entire personal world. All of our secrets. Our connections. Our family. Our friends."
"To take a person's cellular phone and confiscate it is like stripping a person naked. It needs to be done carefully. Was this incident with the Prime Minister's advisers' [phones] handled properly? I doubt it.
"This really isn't an issue of left or right. As Justice Minister, I said that suspects' rights are trampled under the wheels of the criminal justice system. In the case of a cellular phone, right now it is enough to acquire a suspect's agreement in order to gain access to his phone. You don't even need a court order.
"I advanced the Law for Suspects' Rights and the Search Law, so that these issues would be take care of and so that a court order would be definitely required for this. But the Knesset dissolved before we had finished the job."
Concluding her post, Shaked asked readers: "Take a moment to read your messages from the past week, and think about if someone took your phone and everything was revealed to dozens of people."