What Do You Think Is The Chance These Surveillance Powers Will Be Wound Back When COVID19 Is Under Control?

This interesting article appeared last week:

Covid-19 is accelerating the surveillance state

17 Nov 2020

Kelsey Munro and Danielle Cave

The first global pandemic of the digital age has accelerated the international adoption of surveillance and public security technologies, normalising new forms of widespread, overt state surveillance.

These technologies have been layered on top of already pervasive forms of privatised data surveillance through smartphones and the ‘internet of things’ (IoT). The pandemic has also fuelled the normalisation of surveillance in previously private contexts.

The risk of this new era of surveillance is that it has the potential to permanently shift power from citizens to the state and, in doing so, entrench global trends towards a more illiberal world.

The far-reaching consequences of the pandemic have seen public health reframed as a safety and national security issue globally. That in itself isn’t necessarily bad, but in many countries the securitisation of public health has generated sudden momentum to cross privacy lines until recently thought unacceptable in democracies.

These include the use of tools that integrate public health and private telecommunications databases and governments’ use of personal location data from smartphones to peremptorily trace whole-of-population interactions or to enforce voluntary quarantine compliance.

Smartphone applications have been used to combat the spread of Covid-19, with varying success, in at least 98 countries around the world. For example, apps to record users’ Bluetooth interactions for contact tracing have been used in Singapore and Australia.

South Korea and Hong Kong have favoured apps that use location data in personally identifiable forms, while the EU and New South Wales have used aggregated anonymised data.

In China, a health code add-on to a popular payment app based on undisclosed, automated assessments of the Covid-19 risk the user might pose quickly became a quasi-passport to public life for hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens.

More broadly, e-health applications are explicitly viewed as a global growth market in a post-pandemic world for state-backed Chinese firms.

The pandemic has driven advances in facial-recognition technology, a particularly problematic and intrusive form of surveillance that enables rapid connection of an individual’s physical presence with deep online data profiles. For example, by March 2020 the large Chinese biometric surveillance company Hanwang claimed its technology could recognise people in masks with 95% accuracy, after Chinese hospitals began requesting the capability in January.

Facial-recognition technologies integrated with thermal-imaging cameras purporting to detect people with fevers have been marketed by at least 10 companies to police forces and governments around the world since the start of the pandemic.

Fever-screening systems are reportedly being trialled at airports in Australia, the UK and India, using deep learning algorithms to quickly detect body temperatures in crowds of up to 2,000 people per hour.

Governments seeking greater social and political control have an opportunity to use Covid-19 as cloud cover to make capital investments in surveillance technologies, including those that enable, store and process mass collections of data on people’s location, activity (both physical and digital) and biometrics (including DNA and genomics).

The data will be sourced from IoT sensors that are in use across a range of platforms, including surveillance cameras and medical devices—as well as from mobile applications, social media and other personal internet use.

The aggregation of this data, particularly when coupled with advances in machine learning, will lead to more highly accurate predictive and sentiment analysis, which is likely to be used far beyond public health applications.

Non-democratic partnerships on strategic and emerging technologies—for example, between China and Russia—are likely to deepen, especially as US and EU sanctions against Chinese technology companies steer them towards alternative partnerships (like Huawei and Russia).

And we should expect a global push from powerful private and state entities to normalise the use of spyware technologies in people’s homes to monitor their everyday activities, from tracking of work-from-home effectiveness to remote oversight of university exams.

As evidence continues to mount that some data surveillance applications have been effective in slowing the spread of the virus in some countries, it’s vital to ensure that public health surveillance tools—rushed into use for an extraordinary crisis with privacy trade-offs—don’t become business as usual.

The changes wrought by Covid-19 risk increasing complacency among policymakers about using controversial surveillance technologies.

But tools implemented in the emergency context of the pandemic should not automatically cross over from public health purposes to policing, national security or political applications, as reportedly happened in Minnesota where authorities used contact tracing applications to track Black Lives Matter protesters.

Arguments that ever more intrusive forms of surveillance are necessary or inevitable even in democracies serve a range of powerful agendas with fundamentally anti-democratic effects.

The proliferation of these technologies risks entrenching dangerous power imbalances all the way up from the private, domestic sphere through the relationship between national governments and their citizens, to international divisions between authoritarian and democratic states.

Lots more great reading here:

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/covid-19-is-accelerating-the-surveillance-state/

To me it seems clear that many of us have – in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic – given much too much latitude to those who would surveil us without a thought as to how all these mechanisms can be wound back when the danger has passed.

We should all make it clear we have only given the agencies a time-limited leave pass and have not given up on our rights “to be left alone” when things return to normal.

You can be sure a return to normal will be resisted by the watchers who can see a legion of ‘good’ reasons to keep the powers they have accumulated into the future.

With every emergency from the COLD WAR on our rights have been just incrementally eroded and it is time for a reset I reckon. What do others think or is the whole thing beyond retrieval?

David.