According to the appellant, this conclusion ignores the special proprietary nature of the reconstruction cores.
Discussion and Decision
- After reviewing the thorough, in-depth and well-reasoned decision of the honorable trial court, I have reached the conclusion that the appeal should be dismissed. As to the reasons that led to this conclusion, I agree with parts of the way the trial court operated, in particular in the first and last part of the decision, but in the middle section, I carved out a detour for myself, after which I connected back to the reasoning of the trial court. The result is the same - that the request for the return of the seized persons should be rejected, but, in part, my reasons differ from those of the trial court. I will explain:
It is not clear that the material that was transferred to the US authorities was what led to the seizure of the Bitcoin coins, using the recovery kernels that were transferred as part of the computer materials produced in Israel and transferred.
The question is whether the "recovery cores" constitute an asset or property whose transfer required a proceeding defined in sections 39-42 of the Legal Aid Law, which deals with the handling of a temporary seizure (in Israel) of property for the purpose of future forfeiture at the request of a foreign country, or whether it is merely computer material that was transferred as a component within the overall evidence material, in accordance with section 29 of the same law (this is in accordance with the interpretation of the sections in various criminal applications 2529/15 Alexander Mazar et al. v. The Legal Aid Unit (2015) (hereinafter: "Mazar Case"), which deals with the transfer of investigative materials and evidence as part of cooperation between the investigative authorities between different countries.
The trial court accepted the state's argument that it is important to distinguish between the transfer of the original object itself, which requires a hearing proceeding for the claimant, and the transfer of the material substitute or a copy thereof, in which case it is a regular transfer that does not require a special procedure. Indeed, the case law held that the transfer of copied computer material does not confer a right on the owners of the original computer material to request its return as seized, based on recent case law (Miscellaneous Criminal Applications 2235/24 Peled v. the State of Israel (2024)).