Authoritarian states are alarmingly easy to slip into, much harder to dig out of. Freedom is a fragile thing. As Wendell Phillips said, Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. One of the tried-and-tested methods of stealing power from the many, especially in democracies, is by exploiting (or creating) “emergencies” in order for the few to award themselves “temporary” powers.
Which, of course, turn out to be as permanent as the power-grabbers can make them.
From the Reichstag Fire to the Patriot Act, emergencies have been turned by legislative sleight-of-hand into coercive power. Unless the many push back, they risk losing their freedoms, one by one, forever.
A new report from the left-leaning Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology has warned state-level governments to avoid crossing into “new frontiers” of citizen surveillance following the increasing adoption of home quarantine apps in the country.
While there was certainly a place for rigorous contact-tracing in the early days of the China virus pandemic (Taiwan, for instance, used their contact-tracing to admirable effect), that time is long past. The virus is endemic: even governments are admitting that there’s no “eliminating” it. Yet, in Australia and New Zealand, governments are pushing contact-tracing apps harder than ever.
It’s purely coincidental, I’m sure, that such apps are a near-perfect method of tracking citizens’ every move.
But at least we can avoid using contact-tracing apps. The quarantine-compliance apps, which use geolocation and facial recognition technology, mooted by certain Australian state governments are another order of potential panopticon spying altogether.
As always the sell is “emergency measures”: the apps are a “trial”, using the carrot of serving out quarantine at home rather than government facilities. In other words, swapping a jail cell for an ankle bracelet.
This is something on which both right and left should – and to some extent do – find common ground. While the “freedom rally” movement is being painted by the mainstream media as a “far-right” bogey-man, even impeccably leftist groups are waking up to the threat of government snitch apps.
Peter Lewis is one of the main drivers of left-wing think-tank Essential Media, and a Guardian regular. He’s also absolutely right about the potential threat of new spying apps.
“It is important to learn the lessons of recent history and not allow moments of global crisis, like the pandemic, to reshape the way surveillance technology is used,” Peter Lewis, director of the Centre for Responsible Technology, said in a press release on Oct. 11.
After all, why would anyone trust the government and their bureaucrats to give up “temporary” powers, given the track record?
“Twenty years ago, the world responded to 9/11 and the threat of terror by forcing technology companies to access the search history of their users, something that had never been contemplated before.
“Once this increased degree of surveillance was normalised, it was adopted by corporations like Google and Facebook to track users and to target ads, and by governments around the world to control their citizens […]
Lewis called on governments to recognise the deficiencies in facial recognition technology and the risks it posed to privacy rights.
The report stated that the increasing use of surveillance technology to monitor compliance was a “troubling trend” as well as the “normalisation of surveillance culture” […]The Centre recommended that facial recognition be limited to single-use and for there to be precise expiration dates for any data collected. Further, the group called on state governments to update laws to cover facial recognition and stronger human rights protections.
The Epoch Times
Like contact-tracing, quarantine technology is not in itself evil or threatening. But its use should be strictly limited, and strong, enforceable sunset clauses attached. The window of usefulness for contact-tracing has already passed. Quarantine will join it soon, if it hasn’t already: the virus is here and trying to keep it out is increasingly futile.
We can learn to live with covid – but we absolutely must not let ourselves learn to live with 24/7 digital spying.
We’ve let governments copy too much from China already with lockdowns. We don’t want to find ourselves similarly shackled to a nascent Chinese-style social credit system.
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