Experts Warn Increased Surveillance to Track the Outbreak Could Become Permanent
Defenders of civil liberties fear that the erosion of privacy will become a long-term consequence of the pandemic.
As countries around the world combat the coronavirus outbreak, governments that already operated sophisticated surveillance programs are ramping up the tracking of their citizens.
"The potential for invasions of privacy, abuse, and stigmatization is enormous."
Countries like China, South Korea, Israel, Singapore and others are closely monitoring citizens to track the spread of the virus and prevent further infections, and policymakers in the United States have proposed similar steps. These shifts in policy have civil liberties defenders alarmed, as history has shown increases in surveillance tend to stick around after an emergency is over.
In China, where the virus originated and surveillance is already ubiquitous, the government has taken measures like having people scan a QR code and answer questions about their health and travel history to enter their apartment building. The country has also increased the tracking of cell phones, encouraged citizens to report people who appear to be sick, utilized surveillance drones, and developed facial recognition that can identify someone even if they're wearing a mask.
In Israel, the government has begun tracking people's cell phones without a court order under a program that was initially meant to counter terrorism. Singapore has also been closely tracking people's movements using cell phone data. In South Korea, the government has been monitoring citizens' credit card and cell phone data and has heavily utilized facial recognition to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
Here at home, the United States government and state governments have been using cell phone data to determine where people are congregating. White House senior adviser Jared Kushner's task force to combat the coronavirus outbreak has proposed using cell phone data to track coronavirus patients. Cities around the nation are also using surveillance drones to maintain social distancing orders. Companies like Apple and Google that work closely with the federal government are currently developing systems to track Americans' cell phones.
All of this might sound acceptable if you're worried about containing the outbreak and getting back to normal life, but as we saw when the Patriot Act was passed in 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, expansions of the surveillance state can persist long after the emergency that seemed to justify them.
Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, says that this public health emergency requires bold action, but he worries that actions may be taken that will infringe on our privacy rights.
"This is an extraordinary crisis that justifies things that would not be justified in ordinary times, but we, of course, worry that any such things would be made permanent," Stanley says.
Stanley notes that the 9/11 situation was different from this current situation because we still face the threat of terrorism today, and we always will. The Patriot Act was a response to that threat, even if it was an extreme response. With this pandemic, it's quite possible we won't face something like this again for some time.
"We know that for the last seven or eight decades, we haven't seen a microbe this dangerous become a pandemic, and it's reasonable to expect it's not going to be happening for a while afterward," Stanley says. "We do know that when a vaccine is produced and is produced widely enough, the COVID crisis will be over. This does, unlike 9/11, have a definitive ending."
The ACLU released a white paper last week outlining the problems with using location data from cell phones and how policymakers should proceed when they discuss the usage of surveillance to combat the outbreak.
"Location data contains an enormously invasive and personal set of information about each of us, with the potential to reveal such things as people's social, sexual, religious, and political associations," they wrote. "The potential for invasions of privacy, abuse, and stigmatization is enormous. Any uses of such data should be temporary, restricted to public health agencies and purposes, and should make the greatest possible use of available techniques that allow for privacy and anonymity to be protected, even as the data is used."
"The first thing you need to combat pervasive surveillance is to know that it's occurring."
Sara Collins, policy counsel at the digital rights organization Public Knowledge, says that one of the problems with the current administration is that there's not much transparency, so she worries surveillance could be increased without the public realizing it.
"You'll often see the White House come out with something—that they're going to take this action or an agency just says they're going to take this action—and there's no congressional authorization," Collins says. "There's no regulation. There's nothing there for the public discourse."
Collins says it's almost impossible to protect against infringements on people's privacy rights if you don't actually know what kind of surveillance is being done and at what scale.
"I think that's very concerning when there's no accountability and no way to understand what's actually happening," Collins says. "The first thing you need to combat pervasive surveillance is to know that it's occurring."
We should also be worried about corporate surveillance, Collins says, because the tech companies that keep track of our data work closely with the government and do not have a good track record when it comes to protecting people's privacy. She suspects these companies could use the coronavirus outbreak to defend the kind of data collection they've been engaging in for years.
Collins stresses that any increase in surveillance should be transparent and short-lived, and that there should be a limit on how long people's data can be kept. Otherwise, she says, we're risking an indefinite infringement on privacy rights. Her organization will be keeping tabs as the crisis progresses.
It's not that we shouldn't avail ourselves of modern technology to fight the pandemic. Indeed, once lockdown restrictions are gradually lifted, public health officials must increase their ability to isolate new cases and trace, test, and quarantine contacts.
But tracking the entire populace "Big Brother"-style is not the ideal way out of the crisis. Last week, for instance, a group of policy experts -- including former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb -- published recommendations for how to achieve containment. They emphasized the need for widespread diagnostic and serologic testing as well as rapid case-based interventions, among other measures -- and they, too, were wary of pervasive measures to follow citizens.
The group wrote: "Improved capacity [for timely contact tracing] will be most effective if coordinated with health care providers, health systems, and health plans and supported by timely electronic data sharing. Cell phone-based apps recording proximity events between individuals are unlikely to have adequate discriminating ability or adoption to achieve public health utility, while introducing serious privacy, security, and logistical concerns."
The bottom line: Any broad increases in surveillance should be carefully considered before we go along with them out of fear. The Founders knew that privacy is integral to freedom; that's why they wrote the Fourth Amendment to protect it, and that right shouldn't be thrown away because we're in an emergency. Once you lose a right, you don't tend to get it back.
On left, people excitedly line up for Salk's polio vaccine in 1957; on right, Joe Biden gets one of the COVID vaccines on December 21, 2020.
On the morning of April 12, 1955, newsrooms across the United States inked headlines onto newsprint: the Salk Polio vaccine was "safe, effective, and potent." This was long-awaited news. Americans had limped through decades of fear, unaware of what caused polio or how to cure it, faced with the disease's terrifying, visible power to paralyze and kill, particularly children.
The announcement of the polio vaccine was celebrated with noisy jubilation: church bells rang, factory whistles sounded, people wept in the streets. Within weeks, mass inoculation began as the nation put its faith in a vaccine that would end polio.
Today, most of us are blissfully ignorant of child polio deaths, making it easier to believe that we have not personally benefited from the development of vaccines. According to Dr. Steven Pinker, cognitive psychologist and author of the bestselling book Enlightenment Now, we've become blasé to the gifts of science. "The default expectation is not that disease is part of life and science is a godsend, but that health is the default, and any disease is some outrage," he says.
The Rise and Fall of Public Trust
<p>When the polio vaccine was released in 1955, "we were nearing an all-time high point in public trust," says Matt Baum, Harvard Kennedy School professor and lead author of <a href="http://www.kateto.net/covid19/COVID19%20CONSORTIUM%20REPORT%2013%20TRUST%20SEP%202020.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>several</u></a> <a href="https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/COVID19-CONSORTIUM-REPORT-14-MISINFO-SEP-2020.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>reports</u></a> measuring public trust and vaccine confidence. Baum explains that the U.S. was experiencing a post-war boom following the Allied triumph in WWII, a popular Roosevelt presidency, and the rapid innovation that elevated the country to an international superpower.</p><p> The 1950s witnessed the emergence of nuclear technology, a space program, and unprecedented medical breakthroughs, adds Emily Brunson, Texas State University anthropologist and co-chair of the Working Group on Readying Populations for COVID-19 Vaccine. "Antibiotics were a game changer," she states. While before, people got sick with pneumonia for a month, suddenly they had access to pills that accelerated recovery. </p><p>During this period, science seemed to hold all the answers; people embraced the idea that we could "come to know the world with an absolute truth," Brunson explains. Doctors were portrayed as unquestioned gods, so Americans were primed to trust experts who told them the polio vaccine was safe. </p>The Shift in How We Consume Information
<p>In the 1950s, the media created an informational consensus. The fundamental ideas the public consumed about the state of the world were unified. "People argued about the best solutions, but didn't fundamentally disagree on the factual baseline," says Baum. Indeed, the messaging around the polio vaccine was centralized and consistent, led by President Roosevelt's successful <a href="https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ978264.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>March of Dimes crusade</u></a>. People of lower socioeconomic status with limited access to this information were <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1551508/?page=3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>less likely to have confidence</u></a> in the vaccine, but most people consumed <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?506891-1/a-special-report-polio" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>media that assured them</u></a> of the vaccine's safety and <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-salk-polio-vaccine-greatest-public-health-experiment-in-history/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>mobilized them</u></a> to receive it. </p><p>Today, the information we consume is no longer centralized—in fact, just the opposite. "When you take that away, it's hard for people to know what to trust and what not to trust," Baum explains. We've witnessed an increase in polarization and the technology that makes it easier to give people what they want to hear, reinforcing the human tendencies to vilify the other side and reinforce our preexisting ideas. When information is engineered to further an agenda, each choice and risk calculation made while navigating the COVID-19 pandemic <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-science.html?referringSource=articleShare" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>is deeply politicized</u></a>. </p><p>This polarization maps onto a rise in socioeconomic inequality and economic uncertainty. These factors, associated with a sense of lost control, prime people to embrace misinformation, explains Baum, especially when the situation is difficult to comprehend. "The beauty of conspiratorial thinking is that it provides answers to all these questions," he says. Today's insidious fragmentation of news media accelerates the circulation of mis- and disinformation, reaching more people faster, regardless of veracity or motivation. In the case of vaccines, skepticism around their origin, safety, and motivation is intensified. </p><p>Alongside the rise in polarization, Pinker says "the emotional tone of the news has gone downward since the 1940s, and journalists consider it a professional responsibility to cover the negative." Relentless focus on everything that goes wrong further erodes public trust and paints a picture of the world getting worse. "Life saved is not a news story," says Pinker, but perhaps it should be, he continues. "If people were more aware of how much better life was generally, they might be more receptive to improvements that will continue to make life better. These improvements don't happen by themselves."</p>The Future Depends on Vaccine Confidence
<p>So far, the U.S. has been unable to mitigate the catastrophic effects of the pandemic through social distancing, testing, and contact tracing. President Trump has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bob-woodward-rage-book-trump/2020/09/09/0368fe3c-efd2-11ea-b4bc-3a2098fc73d4_story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>downplayed the effects and threat of the virus</u></a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/14/cdc-directors-trump-politics/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>censored experts and scientists</u></a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/06/america-giving-up-on-pandemic/612796/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>given up on containing the spread</u></a>, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/world/covid-coronavirus.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>mobilized his base to protest masks</u></a>. The Trump Administration failed to devise a national plan, so our national plan has defaulted to hoping for the <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/26/nation-of-miracles-pence-coronavirus-vaccine-rnc-402949" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>"miracle" of a vaccine</u></a>. And they are "something of a miracle," Pinker says, describing vaccines as "the most benevolent invention in the history of our species." In record-breaking time, three vaccines have arrived. But their impact will be weakened unless we achieve mass vaccination. As Brunson notes, "The technology isn't the fix; it's people taking the technology."</p><p> Significant challenges remain, including facilitating widespread access and supporting on-the-ground efforts to allay concerns and build trust with <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/african-american-resistance-to-the-covid-19-vaccine-reflects-a-broader-problem" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><u>specific populations with historic reasons for distrust</u></a>, says Brunson. Baum predicts continuing delays as well as deaths from other causes that will be linked to the vaccine. </p><p> Still, there's every reason for hope. The new administration "has its eyes wide open to these challenges. These are the kind of problems that are amenable to policy solutions if we have the will," Baum says. He forecasts widespread vaccination by late summer and a bounce back from the economic damage, a "Good News Story" that will bolster vaccine acceptance in the future. And Pinker reminds us that science, medicine, and public health have greatly extended our lives in the last few decades, a trend that can only continue if we're willing to roll up our sleeves. </p>Scientists Working to Develop Clever Nasal Spray That Tricks the Coronavirus Out of the Body
Biochemist Longxing Cao is working with colleagues at the University of Washington on promising research to disable infectious coronavirus in a person's nose.
Imagine this scenario: you get an annoying cough and a bit of a fever. When you wake up the next morning you lose your sense of taste and smell. That sounds familiar, so you head to a doctor's office for a Covid test, which comes back positive.
Your next step? An anti-Covid nasal spray of course, a "trickster drug" that will clear the once-dangerous and deadly virus out of the body. The drug works by tricking the coronavirus with decoy receptors that appear to be just like those on the surface of our own cells. The virus latches onto the drug's molecules "thinking" it is breaking into human cells, but instead it flushes out of your system before it can cause any serious damage.
This may sounds like science fiction, but several research groups are already working on such trickster coronavirus drugs, with some candidates close to clinical trials and possibly even becoming available late this year. The teams began working on them when the pandemic arrived, and continued in lockdown.
Biochemist David Baker, pictured in his lab at the University of Washington.
UW