Celebrated attorney Ronel Fisher was remanded for the second time in late April in connection with an alleged bribery case involving police officers. The latter are suspected of leaking inside information on cases under investigation in exchange for a payoff. Fisher had first been detained in July 2014, but was subsequently released to house arrest, and the investigation has been stalled until recently. This time, the investigation that led to his arrest was far more dramatic. The police managed to decode encrypted information stored on his cell phone. It turned out that Fisher and retired police officer Eran Malka allegedly used to exchange encoded information using an application developed especially for this purpose. Cracking it, the investigators discovered the two's methods: Malka seems to have passed on to Fisher highly classified information from police investigations, while the lawyer collected bribe money on his behalf from the suspects under interrogation.

The exposure has brought to light one of the most serious public corruption cases in Israel, allegedly involving former Tel Aviv District Prosecutor Ruth David, senior police officers and a top lawyer. That is to say, top-ranking law enforcement officials have been implicated in alleged systematic corruption, and the evidence pointing to their involvement is steadily accumulating.

In addition to the David-Fisher case, other serious government corruption scandals were uncovered in Israel over the last year. The most prominent was the Yisrael Beitenu affair involving former Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Faina Kirshenbaum. Kirshenbaum is suspected of heading a fraudulent public funds-transfer system. Other senior party figures have been detained for alleged involvement in the case, which is still under investigation. The exposure of the case has caused huge political damage to the party of former Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, who emerged from the recent March 17 parliamentary elections with a mere six Knesset seats — about half the number his party had in the previous Knesset. In this case, too, the police figured out the method allegedly employed by Kirshenbaum from recordings and information obtained through advanced technological means.

In the same way, it was tape recordings that implicated former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in a series of other scandals. In July 2012, Olmert was acquitted in what has come to be known as the Talansky cash envelopes affair. At the time, the Jerusalem District Court cleared Olmert of charges of unlawfully accepting cash-filled envelopes from US supporter and businessman Morris "Moshe" Talansky, arguing that it had not been established that the funds were used for personal purposes. However, about a year ago, following the signing of a state's evidence agreement with Olmert's former confidante Shula Zaken, who handed in incriminating recordings that led to the reopening of the case, a guilty verdict and an eight-month prison sentence was imposed May 25 on the former prime minister.