COVID-19 | A boon and boost to the surveillance state

A person wears an electronic wrist band, Hong Kong, China March 19. REUTERS

Rakesh Neelakandan

Members of the ruling political class in the West, largely in the United States and Europe, have apparently failed in their duties of preventing the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 or the novel coronavirus. However, instead of being held accountable for complacency, the political class, as a whole, is appallingly being empowered further at this critical juncture. They are being empowered as laymen are being asked to trade their privacy for health in subtle and sometimes pronounced ways as a matter of containment measures in multiple parts of the world.

If forced to choose between health and being brought under surveillance, people invariably choose the former over the latter for obvious reasons.

In other words, instead of a health and privacy solution, the ruling dispensation comes up with a health or privacy dilemma. The citizenry, on its part is conventionally conditioned to make trade-offs as it is a part of normal economic life. When presented with carefully filtered information, which give the impression that a person can only obtain one (health) at the expense of the other (privacy), all that people respond to would be by opting in for a death-to-privacy system.

This elicits the necessary compliance.

Crippling Factors

The other aspect is that one cannot take to the streets to protest against this conditioning even if one wants to, for fear of ill-health and facing the consequences of not abiding by COVID-19-specific laws and ordinances. A classic case of psychological oppression indeed, with no human agency one can point fingers at — and that’s the political beauty of it.

The use of technical concepts and jargon, and the high degree of knowledge required to frame the entire problem, constitute yet another set of issues preventing the formation of a collective political response by the public. Obviously, the known unknowns are overwhelming, starting with the behaviour and spread of the virus, not to speak of the unknown unknowns.

Additionally, the often confusing information deluge or recurring data avalanche in the media in conjunction with the above mentioned aspects give rise to a shifting-sand conundrum according to which no sound decision can be taken by a citizen, thereby forcing her to place trust in an authority — in most cases, the government. This not only reinforces the government’s grip on the system, but also empowers it to run roughshod over democratic norms and principles leading to the amassment of a greater degree of political power.

Importantly, citizens, estranged and harbouring mutual mistrust, will only look at one another as probable carriers of the virus. The social estrangement from physical distancing runs counter to the basic instinct of social assembly and can further vitiate the political atmosphere to the advantage of ruling authorities.

Herein also lies the threat of a social engineering pivoted towards the creation and sustenance of the ‘other’. The threat — it need not be a pandemic — can be a ‘hostile community’ or an ‘enemy country’ for that matter. It can even be a cocktail of both: pandemic and threats posed by aliens.

 Threat Until Proven Otherwise

 In a surveillance State, data generated is hoarded, sorted and sifted through for classified ends. Even as the data generated by a person is virtually her own property, the ‘I Agree’ buttons tick away the terms and conditions governing hoarding, sorting and sifting. The citizen is stalked under the assumption that she can potentially become a threat, and if it happens, then the government should be in possession of the necessary data on the person at that point in time. The citizen is a treated as a threat until proven otherwise.

It should also be noted that a person by now is reduced to a digital identity, a number, a key, a thumb impression, an iris scan or a DNA sequence. When a citizen is thus equated with her identity enablers, the first casualty is her humanness in the eyes of the authority.

Ultimately, democratic freedom is lost not by a sudden attack carried out by a larger force, but by attrition rooted in a cacophony of silence and a passive consent to oppression. By the time we realise the same, the strategic pressure points of democracy would have been compromised beyond repair and healing.

It is mass testing for detecting the virus that is the answer, not mass-surveillance. The collective resources of the planet should be directed towards this end.

Rakesh Neelakandan is a Kerala-based analyst. Views are personal.