The use of surveillance powers around the world to track individuals in the fight against Covid-19 is an embarrassing symptom of decades lost to preparing for the wrong problem.
The UK’s announcement that the Silicon Valley giant Palantir, an analytics company which typically works with intelligence agencies and immigration enforcement agencies, is partner to a new deal to “coordinate a truly national response to the pandemic” is just one example of how the global response has resorted to the tools of counter-terrorism to deal with a public health emergency. The Israeli NSO Group, a surveillance company normally associated with the targeting of activists and journalists, has also pledged its services towards fighting this crisis. It joins Israel’s Shin Bet, now tasked with monitoring phone locations; authorities in Hong Kong who are tagging people with geo-fenced electronic bracelets; and agencies in Russia now deploying networks of facial recognition cameras to enforce the quarantine.
These gadgets might be temporarily useful. But they’re also an indictment: the result of an approach that has been held victim to a narrow and self-interested view which sees security as a priority only when it makes headlines. The wars on terrorism, drugs, and migration have demanded seemingly endless amounts of airtime, funding, wars, research, ‘emergency’ laws, and hi-tech gadgets. This has spawned a lucrative security industry that has sucked up limited resources from public services and other sectors and left us unprepared for a crisis we knew was coming.
