How the surveillance state is piggybacking on COVID-19

‘It would be much more efficient if everyone had the same app,’ Sune Lehmann Jørgensen, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark who is advising the government on how best to track the coronavirus, told Politico. ‘But we shouldn’t just institute global surveillance.  9/11 showed us that in times of crisis, we can erode people’s rights.’

In China the CCP have been closely monitoring people’s smartphones since the beginning of the outbreak, making use of their hundreds of facial-recognition cameras, and mandating that citizens regularly check and report their body temperature.

Not to be outdone, at the beginning of March Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu shoehorned sweeping new ‘emergency’ surveillance powers through parliament that allow authorities to enforce quarantine orders and warn people about potentially infectious individuals in their area. Moreover, in France an amendment was recently tabled that would authorise telecoms operators to collect health and location data on all mobile phones for six months. It was defeated, but telecoms-to-government data transfers continue to happen around Europe on an ad hoc basis.

⚠️⚠️L'amendement, rejeté en commission, est réintroduit pr la séance : "[Il] vise à faciliter les procédures imposées aux opérateurs dans la collecte et le traitement des données de santé et de localisation." #COVID2019france #etatdurgencesanitaire https://t.co/Dn3jYKp2sV pic.twitter.com/aAt2tPlktj

— marc rees (@reesmarc) March 19, 2020

New interest in these tracking tools has led to a frenzy in the field of surveillance tech itself. Companies best known for providing digital monitoring tools for armies and defence forces are being given the chance to stick their fingers in the civilian pie. Some, like the Israeli NSO Group and facial recognition company Clearview AI, have barely emerged from public scandal regarding alleged unethical practices.

In his think piece Harari warns that the conditions created by a pandemic may herald a significant transition from ‘over the skin’ to ‘under the skin’ surveillance. Making biometric data part of the membership agreement to a sovereign nation means that in the future, unless legislation already in the works is overturned, governments won’t just know your fingerprint from your iPhone, but will be allowed to monitor your body temperature, your heartrate, and your blood pressure too.

The implications for this kind of surveillance are extremely uncomfortable. True data regarding your likes and dislikes won’t have to be postulated based on clicks but could be garnered directly from your pupil dilation. Governments could know what makes you laugh, what makes you cry, and what makes you angry, and sell this data to whichever corporations are willing to pay for it (at the same time as making it readily available for hackers).

‘Imagine North Korea in 2030, when every citizen has to wear a biometric bracelet 24 hours a day’ Harari states. ‘If you listen to a speech by the Great Leader and the bracelet picks up the tell-tale signs of anger, you are done for.’

We already live in a post-truth world, where technology has streamlined hatred and prejudice, and prevailing political narratives have intentionally made people sceptical of experts. What is reported as true has become more and more dependent on who’s speaking at the time: the last thing we need is to give those at the control panel more power to obfuscate facts and encourage purely reactive decision making.

There is an alternative to the slide into anatomical authoritarianism, but it requires governments to do something they’ve been historically resistant to: trust their citizens.

In South Korea, whilst tracking application have been used to help contain the virus, approaches have centred far more around extensive testing and honest reporting. Drive-in testing centres allowed even asymptomatic people to test themselves for the illness. People were trusted to log their test results and all continuing data regarding their health. As a result, South Korea has one of the lowest COVID deaths to infection ratios in the world.

There are plenty of important social roles entrusted to us by an invisible social contract that we pay little heed to because of how deeply socialised we are. Every day, governments around the world allow hundreds of millions of people to take to the roads in private vehicles on the understanding that they will obey road rules that were were written into law by pen and paper, and that very few of us have ever actually read fully. Yet, in our own mutual interest, we learn these laws and we obey them.

If our knee-jerk reaction to crises on a global scale was increased citizenry empowerment instead of increased regulation, we could perhaps choose both health and freedom. This might not have to be the absolute dichotomy it seems to us now.

One thing only is certain. Once the dust from coronavirus settles, we’ll be living in a world permanently transformed. We can only hope that when debating between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment, lawmakers give us the power to choose for ourselves.