From Social Security numbers to booth scanners, the government’s ability to track or monitor us will outweigh its supposedly benign or useful initial intent.
As Freedom House predicted in 2020, and as The Associated Press (A. P. ) detailed this week, tracking technologies designed to save lives from COVID-19 are being used for many government purposes.
A. P. tested what they correctly call the “fire hose of people’s fitness details, photographs that captured their facial measurements, and non-public addresses” that governments have gobbled up through supposedly important COVID tracking strategies (which they usually haven’t done much intelligently). anyway).
The news service uncovers cases where “authorities have used such technologies and knowledge to disrupt the movements of activists and ordinary citizens, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s fitness data with other surveillance and law enforcement tools. In some cases, knowledge was shared with spy agencies. “
China, in particular, asks citizens to “install cell phone apps to move freely in most cities. “Based on telecommunications knowledge and PCR test results, apps produce individual QR codes that change from green to yellow or red, depending on the person’s physical condition. These have been key to China’s attempts to oppress its citizens in the failed pursuit of ‘zero COVID’. reports that the Chinese appear to have used illegitimate claims of COVID infection through apps to detain other people to check the illegitimate blocking of their online bank accounts.
The incomplete use of COVID tracking generation extends far beyond the tyrannical control of the Chinese Communist Party. Israel’s Shin Bet is a COVID tracking team that flags other people who have been near the Arab riots to send sinister text messages telling others that they “will be responsible” just for having their phones marked as having been near Al-Aqsa Mosque where the violence took place.
As AP reports:
Gil Gan-Mor, a lawyer with the nonprofit Israel Civil Rights Association, believes many Arabs in Jerusalem won the threatening message of the riots and said the huge explosion of text messages was unprecedented.
COVID has also been used as an excuse to abuse pre-COVID surveillance technology: India has more aggressively used legacy facial popularity software, ostensibly to crack down on mask order violations.
In Australia, this nation
intelligence agencies got caught “incidentally” collecting information from the national COVIDSafe app. . . The national app cancelled in August through a new administration like a tee of money: it had known only two positive cases of COVID-19 that would not have been discovered otherwise.
In the US, COVID tracking has served as an excuse for the federal government to “expand its surveillance toolkit, adding two contracts in 2020 worth $24. 9 million with knowledge mining and surveillance company Palantir Technologies Inc. to the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. “U. S. ” Pandemic response. For its part, the Centers for Disease Control “purchased detailed information on the location of mobile phones that reveals the daily whereabouts of people across the country. “It would have been without prohibitions,” such as home orders and business closures.
U. S. News and World Report earlier this year also reported that Germany is employing COVID tracking knowledge in general investigations of criminals. Motivate governments to use them for all intents and purposes, a real-time search panopticon whose abuse has been predicted.
Brian Doherty is editor of Reason and Ron Paul’s Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired (Broadside Books).