Kenan Malik: Yes, expect more surveillance during a crisis, but beware it once the danger has passed

By Dilip -
A year ago, China’s social credit score system and mass surveillance programme were viewed in the west as “Orwellian”. Now they are seen as providing essential tools in the fight against coronavirus. Mass surveillance has allowed the Chinese authorities to track the movements of suspected corona-virus carriers and to identify with whom they have come into contact. As the lockdown is eased in cities such as Wuhan, phone apps have been introduced that classify everyone with a colour code - red, yellow or green - that indicates contagion risk and determines who can travel or access public space.

Other countries have begun to adopt similar techniques. South Korea has been lauded for its mass testing programme. But that programme rests upon an intrusive tracking system, using a combination of phone location data, CCTV footage and credit card records to trace people’s movements. The EU has the strictest privacy laws in the world. That hasn’t stopped the European commission from asking telecoms companies to hand over data to allow governments to track population movements. In Britain, the NHS is developing an app that traces close contacts of people carrying the coronavirus and advises them to self-isolate. It may also be used to provide “immunity passports” to those deemed no longer to be at risk. The system will be voluntary, but raises many questions about ethics and personal liberties.


These are not normal times and there is a good case for more intrusive policing and surveillance measures to stem a pandemic. But temporary responses to specific emergencies have a habit of becoming permanent, especially, as historian Yuval Noah Harari observes, “there is always a new emergency lurking on the horizon”. We only have to look at how 9/11 generated a host of surveillance policies that have since become the new normal....
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/12/yes-expect-more-surveillance-during-a-crisis-but-beware-it-once-the-danger-has-passed

 see also

SUBMARINE STATE
Dismantling democracy? Virus used as excuse to quell dissent...
Noam Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance)

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