The Return of Big Brother

There's An App for That

The past week of coronavirus news has more than once left me staring, mouth-open at the television or re-reading something in news multiple times just to make sure I read it correctly. It's not the mounting casualty numbers. It's not Trump's daily efforts to one-up the previous day's buffoonery.

A Message from The Ministry of Truth:
Stay Home and Get the App

Instead it's the speed with which technology is being heralded as the solution to all of our SARS-CoV-2 problems. It seems there will an app for this too!!! There's just one catch... that app may soon be sharing information directly with authorities.

We've known for a long time that our phones have been "spying" on us. Indeed, our phones are doing things most of us would rather not know about. As we live more and more of our personal and professional lives through our smart phones, we've become complacent about the data we willingly share. Sure, there are these ubiquitous "terms of use" certificates we instinctively click without reading. If we actually read them, the proper reaction ought to be to throw the phone in the river. But, since a lot of the data being mined about our habits is designed to sell us more stuff we don't need, we just roll with it.


Among my more alarming discoveries in the past few years are the traffic alerts I receive from Siri as I approach my vehicle to go home at roughly the same time every workday. For the convenience of knowing how long it will take me to go home, Siri has been gathering data about my habits; all without me asking Siri to do so. Just because my phone can do this, doesn't mean it should.

Hey Siri, Can I Go to Work?

This week's news that Apple and Google are working on ways to update the operating systems of smart phones to allow them to communicate with other phones about one's virus status was chilling. More chilling still is the relative lack of pushback about the profound civil liberties implications.

It seems we are once again looking to technology to bail us out of a sticky problem. But in doing so, our faith in technology may be misplaced and well out in front of our ability to think through the long-term implications. When playing with fire, one is libel to get burned.

Coming to a Lock-Down Near You

Putin's Days of Youth in the Stasi; hey, are those QR Codes?

Several weeks back, I first learned of China's efforts to use QR codes on mobile devices as a means of slowly restarting the economy in and around Wuhan. Ostensibly a means of allowing the healthy to return to normal movement and work while separating out the ill, I knew immediately the Chinese version of these monitoring technologies would be a part of life there forever. Indeed, it's not hard to imagine the health status of millions of Chinese citizens being folded into their evolving "social credit system;" a system analogous to credit scores in the West except one's social credit score involves everything from consumer habits, the quality of the company you keep, whether you've jaywalked, or bother your neighbours with loud music. Without the right social credit score and thus, the requisite level of trustworthiness by the state, you may be denied all manner of opportunities for socio-economic advancement in Chinese society.

The State Approves of You

The average Chinese citizen was already living in an authoritarian, centralized state; no unfettered access to information outside of China-based social media and intranet, state media, suppression of free expression and assembly, etc. Hence, I am not at all surprised Beijing has used the emergency around the SARS-CoV-2 fight to centralize and consolidate even more power over its people.

I suppose I naively took some solace in watching this unfold in China from the fact that I live in a liberal democracy where we at least pay some attention to civil liberties, including a right to privacy.

I was appalled to learn last week that Google had already shared "anonymized" aggregate data of citizen movements with at least a dozen governments. Indeed, images capturing the clustering of everyone holding cell-phones on beaches, in specific zip codes, or across the country, before and after lock-downs went into effect began appearing in newspapers last weekend. I suppose I assumed Google could gather such data, but the fact that they would so readily share it with government minders ready to scold us for having traveled too far from our homes or for lingering a bit too long at the grocery store was deeply unsettling.

Unfortunately, this isn't about private firms trying to throw targeted advertisements at us to sell us crap. We are talking about the private sector and the state working together to deepen surveillance of our lives. I recognize that this is a public emergency. But "public emergencies" are routinely used as justification for the extension of state power.

Leviathan on the March

Think this is something only China and other thugish authoritarian states do you expand the power of the state? Think democracies are uniquely good at limiting the extension of the state just to the period of the emergency? Think again. On September 11, 2001, hijackers commandeered 4 airplanes with box-cutter knives and fake explosives, turning those planes into missiles that killed nearly 3000 people in a matter of hours. We eventually arrived at a straight forward solution to the proximate problem; put locks on cockpit doors. Of course, the murder-suicide that was German Wings flight 9525 in 2015 demonstrated the need to modify even that.

However, think about everything 9/11 generated; the PATRIOT ACT and its renewals, a large infusion of cash to the Pentagon, big changes to the U.S. immigration system, expanded surveillance powers to the intelligence community and the FBI (anyone remember Edward Snowden?), and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, a leviathan with 240,000 employees. It was the biggest reorganization and expansion of the U.S. government since World War II.

I've Taken a Pass on the Pass

I think some of these changes remain justifiable; a less-leaky immigration system, only ticketed passengers past airport security, etc. But, it's hard to say whether all of our post-9/11 measures have been justified or not. It's like trying to prove a counter-factual. It's true we have not had another 9/11-scale terrorist attack in the United States, but it's harder to say whether everything we've done was the reason nothing happened? Moreover, no one wants the responsibility for having relaxed any measure in the aftermath of some future attack. Hence, everything stays in place.

Consider all of the trusted traveller and trusted cargo programs that are now in place. The bargain between you and the government with programs like NEXUS or Global Entry is a lot of personal information (including an RCMP/FBI background check) for expedited security and immigration procedures.... all so you can wait in the boarding lounge with everyone else for your delayed flight. On their face, these programs are designed to allow legitimate, law-abiding travellers cross easily while officials focus on finding the bad guys. I don't have anything to hide from authorities, but object to being presented with choices such as this, particularly when air travel has been transformed from a luxury into a necessity in our modern economy.

The point is I am hard pressed to think of a new power the state willingly gives up once it is given.

Moreover, think about these kinds of proposed measures for dealing with SARS-CoV-2 in a larger context. The world is becoming less and less open. Populist nationalism is on the march everywhere. Border closures (including the Canada-U.S. border) are limiting the movement of people. Governments are interfering with supply chains, competing with each other for medical supplies. SARS-CoV-2 is plunging the entire global economy into a deep recession. And governments are rushing out economic programs to cushion their own populations from the effects of virus lock-downs. Thus far, there's been little international coordination charting a path back.

Are these not the emergency conditions that could be readily used to justify the extension of emergency conditions?

A Modern Scarlet Letter?

I get that we are in the middle of a pandemic. I also understand the public interest in saving as many lives as possible. Instead, my alarm is at the evident readiness of the public to entertain a level of monitoring as intrusive as is currently being proposed. Health information crosses a line for me.

In addition to Apple's and Google's efforts to embed monitoring capacity into the operating systems of our mobile devices, a number of third-party app developers are working on products that would allow users to voluntarily input their infection status, ostensibly to broadcast it to other users in their vicinity. Authorities are also considering using such apps as a way to enforce quarantine orders, much the same way as electronic ankle bracelets are used for house-arrest.

Your Papers, Please....

Next week Chile will begin issuing "immunity cards" to those who've recovered from SARS-CoV-2. The problem is that Chile is hardly the only country heading down this road. Indeed, many countries are contemplating some form of certification as a vehicle for simultaneously slowing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and allowing people to slowly go back to work. Sounds like a sensible thing to do, right? A nice balance between public health and the economy?

Labour is going to be presented with a stark choice; if you want to earn a living, you need to have your health status certified to the authorities and subsequently monitored. What sort of a choice is this? Who among us is going to stand on privacy principles and risk being evicted from our homes or forced into bankruptcy? Indeed, as lock-down conditions persist for the next month or two and economic desperation deepens, there will be no shortage of people willing to turn over all manner of information to public health authorities in exchange for being able to go back to work.

Think about the perverse incentives this kind of system creates. A black market in immunity cards would almost certainly ensue. More insidiously, the desperation to return to work might actually incentivize risky behaviour among some (perhaps millennials or Gen Zers) as they seek infection to accelerate the path toward a "negative" test to get out of quarantine and be able to work.

Governments desperate for solutions to the immediate problems of virus mitigation and economic calamity are not thinking this through. In our haste to return to work, we are not thinking about it clearly either. Some might counter that Amazon, Google, Apple, your telephone provider, or your grocery store already know more about you than you do. In a wired, online world in which becoming an Instagram or YouTube "influencer" is more important to us than basic civil liberties, what's the point of resisting what seems like a reasonable intrusion in the midst of an emergency? We already give airlines and the state tons of information for the "privilege" of being treated badly when we fly.

All of these measures seem reasonable until they're deployed for a different purpose. I suspect they will be.

Fear and Denominators

Fear is always the great weapon used by governments to bludgeon us into ceding our civil liberties. Fear drove the post-9/11 expansion of the national security state. Fear helps justify its continuance.

No one wants SARS-CoV-2 and the immediate fear of becoming ill is understandable. However, all of these fears are being compounded by the laxity of state authorities to embark on a large-scale testing program. We do not have a grasp of the actual scale of SARS-CoV-2!!!! Moreover, the failure to do large-scale testing will make any efforts to restart the economy that much more difficult. Who is going to go to a restaurant, get on a plane, or go to a theatre in the midst of uncertainty about what's really happening?

We need data on a bunch of denominators in order to adopt a strategy that isn't anchored mostly in playing upon people's fears. Knowing how many people are walking around with SARS-CoV-2 asymptomatically as well as how many may have developed anti-bodies would change everything. There's a huge difference between reporting mortality rates of 4%-5% among the who've been tested because of visible symptoms and reporting a mortality rate of < 0.1% among a more broadly tested population of millions. Moreover, broad-based testing would help us understand more about what appear to be significantly different mortality rates among countries; in addition to age and a host of co-morbidities, genetics may also be playing a factor.

Put differently, knowing more about SARS-CoV-2 would go a long way toward quelling everyone's fears.

We need the news to calm down and treat us like adults. Trump calls you #fakenews. Don't make him right. #Coronapocalypse #PanicPorn pic.twitter.com/PcJA8ccliM

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) April 18, 2020

Without that knowledge, who will decide when the "emergency" is over? At present, no one seems willing to say. But even when our risk-averse authorities decide it's time to go back to work, will anyone trust what they're saying? Why would they when so few governments are putting in place the basic processes required to actually know when the "emergency" will be over, or whether the "emergency" was even required in the first place.

The lack of data is contributing to the fear. That fear in turn is driving all of us to do irrational things, like hoard toilet paper, in the search for normalcy and control. It will also be fear that leads us grasping for the kinds of quick tech fixes being advanced by Apple and Google to help us safely return to work. Is our fear going to overcome our concerns around privacy and data protection; concerns that until recently were growing with every data breach or hack of a system?

Laziness Silver Lining

The silver lining in the lack of testing is that the absence of data will make it far more difficult to advance down the road toward "immunity certificates" or dystopian technologies that track our movements and health status. Indeed, experts seem to agree that such schemes will require testing that is both widespread and reliable, something few governments have the capacity to do.... yet. Moreover, some experts reiterate that technology is not a silver-bullet to all of our problems. In fact, the main pathways to dealing with the pandemic are relatively old-fashioned; laborious contact tracing. Technology can only assist with this. It's no substitute.

Too Close for Comfort

The other silver lining here is that, for now, a lot of people are skeptical of the deployment of technology to deal with SARS-CoV-2. Indeed, a Pew Research Poll last week found that 60% of Americans don't think technology will be very effective in combating SARS-CoV-2. More disturbingly, however, 52% of Americans believe it is somewhat acceptable for the government to use technology to track the virus. Moreover, 45% of Americans think it's acceptable for the government to use cell phone data to track whether or not someone has come in contact with someone who's been infected. Only 54% of Americans think this kind of tracking is unacceptable. Finally, just 62% of Americans thought the use of cell phone tracking technology to enforce social distancing or quarantine measures was unacceptable.



However, the bare majorities skeptical of all this are too few to make me comfortable. Our societal willingness to accept the pervasive intrusion of technology into our lives has made us numb to the implications of it all in the hands of the state. Most of those under 50yrs old are too young to have felt the tensions of the Cold War, seen the Berlin Wall crumble, marvel at the collapse of the Soviet Union, or watch "Tank Man" in Beijing in 1989.

I am not some luddite or Unabomber figure who thinks technology is destroying humanity. However, I think we underestimate some of the lessons of the 20th century around the power of the state and its propensity to turn on those it governs. The same technologies that bring us all the modern conveniences and connectivity we've come to appreciate could quickly be profoundly dangerous if turned against us.