Covid & Surviellance

After the failure at the pilot phase of the UK government’s first track and trace app, the new ‘NHS covid-19 Track and Trace App’, costing an estimated at £35 million, was launched nationwide on September 24th 2020. Based on Apple and Google’s decentralised model, the app is described on official websites as ‘privacy- centric’, as it only sends exposure notification alerts between devices. But how relaxed should we be about further extension of the state’s power to monitor our movements? Is increased surveillance merely a necessary tool to help save lives, or part of a sinister trend of ever-increasing invasion by both states and private corporations into our privacy? Is covid being used by both authoritarian and democratic states to undermine our civil liberties? Has remote working led to a real-life ‘Big Brother’, with every mouse-click observed through the screen like an Orwellian nightmare? Beyond electronic surveillance, is the ministerial edict to inform on your neighbours if they break the ‘rule of six’ an example of communal responsibility or does it presage a new phase of observation and control by our fellow citizens? Do we trust too much in the benign intentions of those who hold our data, or is the pandemic leading to a fundamental breakdown of trust, both within society and in between the people and the state?

The Pandemic Perspectives group debated the issue on October 1st 2020. The debate was guided by Alex Hern’s Guardian article ‘Shirking from Home’, on remote working, One Zero’s review of ‘How the Coronavirus is driving new Surveillance Programs around the World’, a warning of the dangers from Dissent on “Coronavirus and the Surveillance State’, and Evgeny Morozov’s Guardian article from back in April 2020 that explores the benefits and dangers of tech-based ‘solutionist’ strategies in the light of the pandemic. To give a broader perspective the work of Shoshana Zuboff, the author of, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, was viewed through her interview with DiEM25, and a review of her work in a Guardian interview of October last year.

Surprisingly, our dystopian, Liam, was relaxed about the use of surveillance for covid track and tracing, feeling that it was a necessary step in controlling the spread of the virus and saving lives, a view echoed by the majority of the group. Our New York resident, Grace, however, was adamantly opposed, seeing it as potentially threatening means of social control. The group speculated that differing attitudes to surveillance were perhaps indicative of cultural differences, reflecting British complacency in contrast to the American commitment to liberty and mistrust of over-arching state power. This seemed reflected in our Iranian-born member who quoted a Farsi saying that roughly translates as that whilst it is easy to give up power to those demanding it, it is often very difficult to get it back. He did, however, remind the group that we were discussing surveillance not in an oncological framing, but in the specific context of power given to the state, pointing out that both the humble cv and medical records constituted forms of surveillance but whose function was broadly benign. Niall Gallen felt that the terms of the debate were too focused on the detrimental effects of state appropriation of data, and argued from a ‘solutionist’ perspective that the acquisition of data was also a necessary and powerful tool to ensure equitable distribution of services and resources.

The debate moved on to differing degrees of trust. Sadegh Attari pointed out that in the UK our fears of state control of data were bizarrely mismatched by our willingness to handover or personal data to tech giants, which then used it to manipulate us. He envisaged this in terms of Shoshana Zuboff’s conception of ‘epistemic inequality’, the ‘fast-growing abyss between what we know and what is known about us.’ Trust in the state was then explored in the context of the Singapore government’s use of a tracking bracelet to combat covid. This was felt to be comparable to the use of electronic tags employed to monitor the movements of convicted felons, and seen by the group as highly invasive. Sadegh again put us right, by noting that this was a fundamentally foolish means of control due to its materiality and high visibility, and that control through the object of our mobile devices was far more effective and insidious. David Christie then raised the question of Priti Patel’s statement that she would shop her neighbours for breaking the ‘rule of six’ and how this was, for some reason, far more uncomfortable to contemplate than the invisible electronic surveillance. The conception of neighbours spying on each other reminded him of the latter years of the East German state, where one in six members of the population were ‘informal agents’ of the Stasi, creating a hideously oppressive atmosphere where everyone was induced into spying on everyone else.

Comments were made on the shifting nature of trust under the pandemic, with Hanan pointing out that the atmosphere of ‘everyone in it together’ had long since evaporated, with dog-whistle politics suggesting ethnic minority groups were responsible for the spread of the disease and a new schism of mistrust between young and old had emerged. David suggested that there might be an ideological basis for the British emphasis on surveillance, control and punishment, grounded in right-wing beliefs that human beings were fundamentally self-serving and therefore requiring of strong laws and swift punishment to maintain social order. He noted that although the jury was still out on the Swedish approach to covid, the application of the opposite assumption of humanity, that human nature is inherently co-operative, had led to citizens being asked to act responsibly rather than compelled to do so, was perhaps beginning to bear fruit.

The last word was left to Liam, our dystopian expert who noted that ‘whilst not all surveillance is dystopian, but all dystopia’s surveil.’

There was much more, join pandemic perspectives or set up your own group and have your say…