Mass curfews, mass quarantines
lockdowns everywhere.
But let’s talk about mass surveillance.
Want to fight COVID-19?
There’s an app for that.
Facial recognition, GPS, Bluetooth.
They make it easy.
Cameras and drones keep an eye on us too.
This is a kind of watershed event.
Surveillance is really spreading everywhere.
It’s all about tracking people to contain the spread.
But some want to know: Who’s policing the police?
So how will our governments protect our health
and our privacy?
And how do we make sure all this extra surveillance
doesn’t stick around longer than we need it?
This coronavirus has been tough to contain
because it spreads so easily.
It’s why governments are trying to do two things:
monitor people’s health and keep tabs on where they are.
And surveillance technology makes that a lot easier.
Singapore’s government released this app
that logs everyone you bump into.
The German government has an optional smartwatch app
that tracks your pulse, temperature and sleep.
And if you’re quarantined in Hong Kong
you have to wear an electronic wristband.
Police are also flying drones.
This US company says it can even tell if you’re sick.
Anonymised data on social distancing, heart rate
respiratory rate and fever detection.
That’s a lot of technology to
help stop the spread of COVID-19.
And privacy advocates have noticed.
I’m not against surveillance itself.
We need to make use of
whatever technology is available to fight the epidemic
and to ease the economic crisis.
But it should be done carefully.
Technology has to be used and data gathered in a way
that’s necessary and proportionate
to a particular end.
Thing is — even before the pandemic
we were giving away a lot of our data already.
We share personal information online all the time.
Even the stuff we don’t post
like what we google and what we buy.
We give our fingerprints to governments when we travel
or to our smartphone to unlock the screen.
Companies like Apple and Samsung
have a record of our faces.
Intelligence services use facial recognition too.
And all of that data is being collected
sometimes with, sometimes without
our consent.
Police in the UK have been building up
a facial recognition database
by scanning people in designated areas.
Last year they used the tech to track down
more than 450 suspects in Wales.
We don’t know how long it’s being stored
on that database and for what purpose.
Russian police also use facial recognition
to monitor protesters.
With biometric data collection seemingly available
at nearly every street corner the authorities say
they can easily catch criminals.
Other countries like India and Kenya
are phasing in a national ID card
that’s linked to your biometric data.
Possibly the world’s most privacy invasive
digital ID system — lots of very sensitive data
about people, so including their iris scans
their earlobe shape, their GPS.
Without the card people can’t access things
like loans or healthcare.
And now we have a pandemic.
Governments everywhere are expanding their power
to bring this global threat under control.
In China they’ve harnessed one of the most
pervasive surveillance systems in the world.
Cameras are pretty much everywhere
one for roughly every eight people.
Police once used facial recognition to track down
a wanted man at a concert with 60,000 people.
Cameras are even used to enforce
China’s social credit system which ranks businesses
and citizens on their behavior.
Back in the ’40s and ’50s that was all done through
humans asking their neighbours lots of questions.
Now that’s really all gone high tech.
And because of COVID-19 it’s gone into overdrive.
In Hubei, where the virus first broke out
police used cameras, drones and facial recognition
to quarantine 56 million people.
Even as lockdowns ease up millions of Chinese people
are still being monitored.
In some cities they have to log their health
and travel history in an app that generates a colour code.
To leave home or go shopping
security has to give you the green light.
If you’re red or yellow you’re really not meant
to be moving around.
It’s not just China.
Surveillance is being stepped up everywhere.
So how far is too far?
Yuval Harari, a historian and author
says it could open us up to abuse.
It is, of course, focused on the disease itself.
The system needs data about what's happening
inside your body — your body temperature
maybe your blood pressure, maybe your heart rate.
But once surveillance goes under the skin
it can start to be used for many, many other purposes.
They can know not only that you're watching
but also what you’re feeling.
What makes you angry? What makes you laugh?
It gives some clue about your political views or personality.
And the implications of that are extreme.
It can go all the way to the
establishment of new totalitarian regimes
worse than anything we've seen before.
That’s obviously a worst-case scenario.
But what’s to stop that from happening?
Well that’s the key question, right?
That’s why Amnesty International
as well as other NGOs and digital rights organisations
are very closely tracking the rollout of these systems.
Privacy advocates say we should scrutinise
the emergency laws
governments are passing right now.
Often with little or no public debate.
The UK, Hungary, Russia, the Philippines, Thailand
they've all done it.
Israel tried too.
The government has turned to the secret police
and authorised it to use some of their skills and technologies
it initially developed to monitor
and control the Palestinians.
But the Israeli Supreme Court put on the brakes.
We know, especially in Israel, that measures taken
in an emergency have this nasty tendency
to long outlast the emergency.
We need to be extremely careful
about what we're allowing and for how long.
Will we be able to turn that back once this is over?
And then there’s the language
some politicians have been using.
I view it as, in a sense, a wartime president.
We must act like any wartime government.
We are at war.
There are plenty of examples where conflict has led
to governments expanding their powers.
9/11 is a good example.
The Patriot Act was brought in just 45 days later
in the name of fighting terrorism.
And it was criticised for expanding
US government surveillance.
And some of those powers are still around.
Human rights are born out of the modern world’s turmoil.
Now is precisely the time where we need to
protect them and uphold them.
So how do we make sure the authorities don’t abuse
the data they have on us
in the name of fighting the pandemic?
This is not a war. This is a healthcare crisis.
If you want to put somebody in charge
put a nurse in charge — not a soldier or a general.
Some actually think governments in Asia
are doing it right.
In Singapore and South Korea, for instance
officials say the data they’re collecting now
will be deleted later.
There’s also been in some cases a lot of public data
and public transparency around why they’re
doing things and how they’re doing things
such that people understand.
It’s not just necessarily a kind of power grab.
Citizens should demand that first of all
their privacy be protected as far as possible
and that any increase in monitoring of the citizens
be accompanied by an increase in
the monitoring of the government.
So maybe that’s it.
Sure, surveillance technology will help
contain the pandemic.
But while they’re watching us
we might want to be watching them.
“We don’t know when we’ll be back on
the Start Here set but not to worry.
We’re still going to be bringing you more episodes
any way we can.
In the meantime our website aljazeera.com
has all the latest on the coronavirus pandemic.
I’ll see you next week.”