By David K. Shipler
The novel
coronavirus is giving rise to novel surveillance tools. They can help contain
the sweep of COVID-19, which is an urgent need, but the monitoring and
categorization of citizens could also survive the pandemic with undue invasions
of privacy. Legal safeguards are necessary to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Innovative
hardware and software, some rushed into production by profiteers, are aimed at
recording and storing peoples’ physiological functions, locations, and immunity
levels. As in any new technology, error rates are high, and the consequences of
mistakes will be magnified if used to require quarantine or exclude non-immune
people from jobs, housing, courthouses, and public transportation. Furthermore,
unless information is automatically erased or sequestered, medical records could
be combined in databases of extensive personal files accessible to law
enforcement and immigration authorities.
The virtue of monitoring is
self-evident during the crisis; less obvious are the longer term dangers of
doing so. With no treatment or vaccine, self-quarantine and social distance are
primary means of curtailing the spread. If people don’t know they’re sick—and
neither do their fellow workers, diners, shoppers, passengers, theatergoers,
sunbathers, gym users, and the like—the disease cannot be contained as public
spaces reopen.
This is a matter of security, and
as seen after 9/11, public acceptance of extraordinary measures soars in the
moment, then persists long after the need abates. The Patriot Act, which
Congress passed hastily in 2001, created exceptions to legal protections that
had been enacted in the 1970s. Government agencies had been violating the
Fourth Amendment by spying on antiwar campaigners, civil rights leaders, and
other political activists. But it’s been nearly two decades since the 9/11
attacks, and Congress has applied only minor patches to the holes the Patriot
Act tore in the fabric of civil liberties.
The same thing could happen now.
