COVID-19 And The Pandemic Of Surveillance
COVID-19 And The Pandemic Of
Surveillance
by Tyler Durden Thu,
07/23/2020 - 19:50 Authored by
J.D.Tuccille via Reason.com,
Americans are increasingly
monitored, and COVID-19 health concerns aren’t improving the situation...
Pandemic maps are all the
rage, these days, but the latest one from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF) is a little different; instead of viral hotspots, it displays a plague of
official snoopiness, arranged by location and sortable by technology. While
it documents intrusions that predate the current crisis, the Atlas of Surveillance is all
too relevant to the age of coronavirus. Concerns about curtailing contagion
help to normalize detailed scrutiny of people's lives and drive us toward a
pervasive surveillance state.
"The Atlas of
Surveillance database, containing several thousand data points on over 3,000
city and local police departments and sheriffs' offices nationwide, allows
citizens, journalists, and academics to review details about the technologies
police are deploying, and provides a resource to check what devices and systems
have been purchased locally," EFF announced on
July 13.
Users can click on the map to
see what surveillance technologies are used in specified localities. If you
want to see what's going on in your area, the map is searchable by the name of
a city, county, or state. The map can also be filtered according to
technologies such as body-worn cameras, drones, and automated license plate
readers.
The nearest entry to me is in
Prescott Valley, Arizona, where the police department is among
the hundreds that have partnered with Ring, the Amazon-owned
doorbell-camera company.
The Ring partnerships don't
give police live feeds, but they can request video recordings regarding a
specific time and area. While participation by Ring customers is
voluntary, the partnerships are "a clever workaround for the development
of a wholly new surveillance network, without the kind of scrutiny that would
happen if it was coming from the police or government," warns Andrew
Guthrie Ferguson, a professor at the University of the District of Columbia's
David A. Clarke School of Law and author of The Rise of Big Data Policing.
Researchers find
few crimes solved by the voluntary surveillance partnerships, but the
home-security marketing of the Ring arrangement nudges the culture toward an
easier acceptance of a panopticon that operates outside of the full range of
civil liberties protections.
Also easing America's slide
toward a full surveillance state is fear of the COVID-19 pandemic. Public
health officials who, just months ago, fretted about overcoming
privacy concerns with regard to contact-tracing schemes have turned to
governments' usual solution: threatening harsh penalties for noncompliance.
"Travelers from certain
states landing at New York airports starting Tuesday could face a $2,000 fine
for failing to fill out a form that state officials will use to track travelers
and ensure they're following quarantine restrictions," AP reported this
week.
Mandatory tracking forms for
travelers to New York follow on Rockland
County's earlier efforts to compel cooperation with contact tracers.
"Commissioner of Health
Dr. Patricia Schnabel Ruppert urged residents to comply with the Department of
Health's contact tracing efforts and threatened those who do not comply with
subpoenas and $2,000 per day fines," the county announced on
July 1.
We can hope that
health-related snooping into people's movements and activities will come to an
end when the pandemic passes, but these things have a way of getting embedded
in the culture as people become accustomed to them. In the name of controlling
infection, many private companies are now closely
monitoring employees, including their proximity to one another in the
workplace.
"Privacy advocates warn
the tracing apps are a slippery slope toward 'normalizing' an unprecedented new
level of employer surveillance," notes Politico.
"Aggressive expansion of
surveillance programs without adequate checks could normalize privacy
intrusions and create systems that may later be used for various forms of
political and social repression," frets Freedom
House.
That novel invasions of
privacy which might once have set off alarms can become the new normal is clear
from public-private surveillance partnerships of the sort that Ring developed
with police departments. After the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant
to access cellphone location data in Carpenter
v. United States (2018), law enforcement quickly started purchasing data
from private marketing firms.
"The Trump
administration has bought access to a commercial database that maps the
movements of millions of cellphones in America and is using it for immigration
and border enforcement," the Wall Street Journal reported earlier
this year.
"Experts say the
information amounts to one of the largest known troves of bulk data being
deployed by law enforcement in the U.S.—and that the use appears to be on firm
legal footing because the government buys access to it from a commercial
vendor."
In a growing trend, other
agencies, including the FBI and
the IRS,
have also turned to private sources to monitor social media posts and track
cellphone movements. The new surveillance technique is quickly becoming widely
established.
Likewise, even after COVID-19
fades to an unpleasant memory, we may find that it has left a legacy of
intrusive monitoring of our whereabouts and social connections—all for our own
good, we'll be told.
For now, the growing
incidence of public health surveillance is too new and low-tech to be included
in the Atlas of Surveillance, which is plenty full as it is.
Selecting "automated
license plate readers" reveals dense clusters in California, and in urban
areas and along major highways elsewhere.
Clicking on
"drones" reveals that they monitor much of the country—especially
east of the Mississippi River and along the West Coast—from the sky.
A look at "face
recognition technology" shows that it is especially popular in Florida and
around Washington, D.C.
As thoroughly monitored as
the atlas reveals the country to be, it's far from complete and EFF invites
volunteers to assist
in collecting data. As new information trickles in, that map will
undoubtedly fill in with new jurisdictions and surveillance efforts as time
goes on.
The Atlas of Surveillance
will probably fill in with new monitoring technologies, too, including some
driven by public health concerns. For officials looking for reasons to
poke their noses into other people's business, the pandemic is as good an
excuse as any.
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