As Coronavirus Surveillance Escalates, Personal Privacy Plummets (nytimes.com) 36
Tracking entire populations to combat the pandemic now could open the doors to more invasive forms of government snooping later. From a report: In South Korea, government agencies are harnessing surveillance-camera footage, smartphone location data and credit card purchase records to help trace the recent movements of coronavirus patients and establish virus transmission chains. In Lombardy, Italy, the authorities are analyzing location data transmitted by citizens' mobile phones to determine how many people are obeying a government lockdown order and the typical distances they move every day. About 40 percent are moving around "too much," an official recently said. In Israel, the country's internal security agency is poised to start using a cache of mobile phone location data -- originally intended for counterterrorism operations -- to try to pinpoint citizens who may have been exposed to the virus.
As countries around the world race to contain the pandemic, many are deploying digital surveillance tools as a means to exert social control, even turning security agency technologies on their own civilians. Health and law enforcement authorities are understandably eager to employ every tool at their disposal to try to hinder the virus -- even as the surveillance efforts threaten to alter the precarious balance between public safety and personal privacy on a global scale. Yet ratcheting up surveillance to combat the pandemic now could permanently open the doors to more invasive forms of snooping later. It is a lesson Americans learned after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, civil liberties experts say. Nearly two decades later, law enforcement agencies have access to higher-powered surveillance systems, like fine-grained location tracking and facial recognition -- technologies that may be repurposed to further political agendas like anti-immigration policies. Civil liberties experts warn that the public has little recourse to challenge these digital exercises of state power.
As countries around the world race to contain the pandemic, many are deploying digital surveillance tools as a means to exert social control, even turning security agency technologies on their own civilians. Health and law enforcement authorities are understandably eager to employ every tool at their disposal to try to hinder the virus -- even as the surveillance efforts threaten to alter the precarious balance between public safety and personal privacy on a global scale. Yet ratcheting up surveillance to combat the pandemic now could permanently open the doors to more invasive forms of snooping later. It is a lesson Americans learned after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, civil liberties experts say. Nearly two decades later, law enforcement agencies have access to higher-powered surveillance systems, like fine-grained location tracking and facial recognition -- technologies that may be repurposed to further political agendas like anti-immigration policies. Civil liberties experts warn that the public has little recourse to challenge these digital exercises of state power.
Another repost on the same subject (Score:2, Troll)
Yes, violating privacy without explicit consent is bad, regardless of the reason. People have died fighting to maintain these freedoms, don't throw them away because grandma may die a little earlier than usual.
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It's not even that. Let Grandma live in her house for a few months with very few visitors, and carry on with business as usual. That is really all that this would take.
There are young healthy people whose lungs fail due to covid-19 too. Maybe they were vapers or tokers with pre-damaged lungs, or maybe they just didn't have humidifiers in their homes or offices. It's not just grandma who needs to be careful.
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Are you really just not paying attention?
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No, it really is. Because those young people problems have been very rare, and won't overwhelm healthcare, which is the whole thing.
We should be building an economy BASED on serving the isolated in this, not destroying the economy for everyone.
Give people jobs literally spraying down incoming people / stuff to locked down facilities. Give people jobs monitoring neighborhoods. Give people jobs checking in on at risk people. Etc.
Then let the rest of the world (including vapers) continue to have a function
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Give people jobs
Who is going to provide the funds to pay them?
Re: Another repost on the same subject (Score:1)
There are young healthy people whose lungs fail due to covid-19 too. Maybe they were vapers or tokers with pre-damaged lungs...
So the meaning of "healthy" completely eludes you?
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Thanks for the misinformation, comrade.
Re: Another repost on the same subject (Score:1)
Good job pushing the Official Narrative, Herr Blockleiter.
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Ah, so the youngins can proudly promenade around acting like Typhoid Mary for Covid-19. That's a brilliant scheme, have you told anyone else about this or is it your own private secret?
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False choice, and disgusting.
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Let's eat, Grandma!
20 years too late (Score:1)
We haven't lost any personal privacy at all because of the Mexican Beer virus. Our privacy was lost years ago, gradually. Only now people are becoming aware.
Fortunately there is zero chance that Big Brother will abuse the totalitarian surveillance state we already live in. 'Cuz Big Brother loves us all...
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We haven't lost any personal privacy at all because of the Mexican Beer virus. Our privacy was lost years ago, gradually. Only now people are becoming aware.
Fortunately there is zero chance that Big Brother will abuse the totalitarian surveillance state we already live in. 'Cuz Big Brother loves us all...
Big Brother is just like the Christian God. Loves us all but still condemns most of us to hell.
Gov'ts around the world (Score:5, Insightful)
Will never let an emergency go to waste, especially if it allows them to grab more power.
Re:Gov'ts around the world (Score:5, Insightful)
Just take a look at Hungary where Orban is currently about to disable the parliament and tries to push it through that he can rule by decree.
In case our Hungarian friends wonder where he got that bright idea from, here's [wikipedia.org] the Wikipedia article for you.
(English version here [wikipedia.org]).
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This week the UK Parliament is voting on a bill that would severely limit the mobility of UK subjects and justifying it with the pandemic virus. Privacy is pretty much gone in the UK so that is not so much of an issue there. The US Dept of Justice has just requested "extraordinary powers" to expand the scope of their activities, again justified by the pandemic. The privacy and liberty of people around the world is being threatened by bureaucratic power grabs around the world, all justified by the pandemi
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It's not the Government that is doing the real tracking. It is Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft and Apple. These companies do not have to follow any laws because they make them up as they go along. Then they sell the information to other data collectors who provide access to the Governments. In the end, the Governments get what they want. If anyone bitches - then the Government just moves in with secret court justification and takes it. Then the Governments share it all among themselves.
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Fear is Power! (Score:1, Insightful)
Governments will not hesitate to give everyone a FALSE promise of security to get you to agree to take your liberty.
Those of give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety.
Everyone supporting this is a fear driven coward that deserves whatever comes their way!
It's fucking 911 all over again! The world is changing again folks, and the Fear Mongers are going to win because everyone has had such a good life that they are too afraid of losing it and will allow anythin
Re: Fear is Power! (Score:1)
Shelter in place is a privacy issue too. (Score:3)
It's an interference in personal autonomy. Typhoid Mary was essentially arrested and imprisoned for life without a trial.
Pretending that we don't *ever* have to do things like that means that when things get scary to the average person, the government will act outside the law. Then when things get better, its new powers will seem *normal*, part of its ordinary law enforcement toolbox.
Government must be restrained by law; that was John Adams' definition of a Republic -- a government of laws, not men. The law must regulate what the government must do, limiting its power to appropriate situations, making its exercise of power transparent and accountable, and affording due process protections to citizens. A government without laws restraining what it *must* do ends up being unrestrained.
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Typhoid Mary was essentially arrested and imprisoned for life without a trial.
~hey!
Admittedly, my last reference for Mary Mallon was reading The Book of Lists as a teenager, but she had repeatedly refused to not continue working as a food preparer and left infections in her wake when releaased on two occasions.
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I didn't say it was wrong. It's something you have to do, so it should be regulated.
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My respect for the adversarial procedures of habeus corpus is not trivial, but neither is it paramount to draw comparison to the due process of other cultures. Few analogues
Comment removed (Score:3)
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The real life Ben Franklin...
~MikeRT
Is either an action figure or specious conjecture.
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And yet, if someone is determined to have COVID-19, wouldn't it be a good idea to access all relevant cell towers' data and scan for phones/people who were around this person, alert them, test them, and treat them if appropriate? And if this is outside the law, change the law.
You're right about the Whiskey Rebellion, but don't forget Shays Rebellion. Come t
Lame comment (Score:1)
It's nice to see a major newspaper like the NY Times be in favour of not having too much surveillance. It's good for society and democracy. I am pleasantly surprised.
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You may look the other way
The New York Times' effect on man
Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother
You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive
You can't have security and privacy (Score:2)
Says the website with tracking cookies.... (Score:1)
We already gave up our privacy to google and facebook so that we could have accurate traffic reports and look at memes for free. The government has access to this data already.
Simple solution (Score:3)
Civil liberties experts warn that the public has little recourse to challenge these digital exercises of state power.
Yes they do. They can turn off their damn phones!
Come now citizen... (Score:3)
Is there something you're trying to hide?
No, I'm certain that if we were to give the government new and expanded surveillance powers they would NEVER be abused. They've done so well with warrantless wiretaps, location monitoring, and civil asset forfeiture so far who WOULDN'T want to give them more ways to ensure whatever political nutjob is currently in office has unopposed and unsupervised tools to contain and control the population?
Commies and "libtards" (gotta use that smart talk they do!) that's who. Screw those guys!
(100% sarcasm, in case it wasn't very apparent already.)
That is why this must be made a serious crime (Score:2)
In the very near future, snooping on (almost) everybody all the time will be easy from a technical point of view. What we need is legal protection. And by that I mean that anybody doing mass surveillance, ordering it and using the data from it must go to prison and that the data and anything learned from the data (no matter how bad) must be erased and may not be used in any fashion. In addition, any damage done to an individual (again, no matter what) from using that data must result in outrageous compensat