Pandemic Surveillance. David Lyon

phenomena associated with the eruption of a highly contagious virus cannot be understood merely by scientific health and medical knowledge. The historical, geographical and cultural context, described by Spinney and by Camus – among many others – shows the importance of the multiple social dimensions of pandemics. And as Nurhak Polat rightly argues, in the early 2020s one cannot but examine the role of digital technologies in any attempt to understand COVID-19’s manifold impacts. Therefore, she suggests – using “viral” in both actual and virtual senses – “Pandemics in the 21st century are inevitably embedded in the digital context. This also includes the digital and biometric surveillance technologies that track ‘viral footprints’ of COVID-19 across bodies, homes, streets, and borders.”¹² In what follows, we shall consider the wearable trackers, phone apps, drones, remote body temperature checkers that have been sprung into service since COVID-19 began.

However, it is not enough just to discuss those digital technologies as they are applied to formal systems of surveillance, where all the emphasis is on how those systems bear down on “us,” the objects of surveillance. This is because we, those surveillance objects, are also subjects of surveillance. While the apps, the cameras, the wearables “watch” us, we also glance slyly at each other – checking for masks, for 2-meter distance on sidewalks, for signs that neighbors are meeting with others beyond family. Moreover, the way we are classified – “no symptoms,” “has received vaccine,” “was exposed to a carrier” – may affect the way we see ourselves and watch, assess, interact with others, including how we measure our relationships with them. This is because today we develop new cultures of surveillance,¹³ such that there’s a “looping effect”¹⁴ between the classifications and the people classified. Those classified not only classify others, but may modify their own activities due to their surveillance classification.

Pandemic and tech-solutionism

      Almost all the proposed ways of dealing with the pandemic address only the symptoms, not the causes. They are Band-Aids, intended to contain and control the virus. At the time of writing, the original causes are not known to science, so the Band-Aid approach is understandable. Knowledge gleaned from many historical epidemics and pandemics informs how public health officials respond when new outbreaks occur. It is doubtful how much could be learned – except perhaps negatively – from the fourteenth-century Black Death, which killed huge swathes of the population around the Mediterranean. A wide variety of sometimes exotic treatments were proposed, from herbalism to blood-letting to self-flagellation, although doctors did learn to lance the bodily buboes that gave the disease its other name, “Bubonic Plague.”

But – as in the case of the nineteenth- and, especially, twentieth-century epidemics such as the “Spanish Flu” – isolation and segregation of patients, along with the search for a serum, became common patterns. They worked with what was available in their day. So today, we work with what’s available now. Keeping a physical distance – often misleadingly called “social distancing” – became commonplace, as did the need for mask-wearing and quarantine. And because ours is an era loaded with digital devices and systems – not to mention global corporations successfully selling these – data and data analysis, plus Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, are seen as key COVID-containing contrivances.

      Thus, in the early twenty-first century, the pressures pushing “technological solutionism”¹⁵ are strong, and pandemic panic only adds further propulsion. As Rob Kitchin notes, those pressures include intense lobbying of governments by technology companies, their already-existing technocratic practices and their desire to stimulate high-tech innovation.¹⁶ This was already visible in the rush to find “solutions” after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington known as “9/11,” when companies hastily used their home pages to offer simultaneous condolences to bereaved families and advertisements for their “anti-terrorism” products. And governments acceded, using techniques ranging from biometric tests to Artificial Intelligence to trace and impede terrorism.¹⁷

The same kind of response follows in other similar situations. It also happened, for instance, following the terrorist attacks on Mumbai – centring on the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and the Railway Terminus – in 2008. Very quickly, both maritime security and hotel security – scanners, maritime identification systems, biometric IDs for fishermen – were enhanced with new surveillance measures, and new National Security Guard (NSG) units were deployed in major cities. These were “required” because the attack was mounted from the ocean, and due to delays with the NSG, which at the time was based only near New Delhi.¹⁸ Today, in a global pandemic, such solutionism has a seductively powerful pull.

      Why the haste to set up government security agencies and massive surveillance arsenals? Part of the answer is that citizens rightly demand adequate responses to emergencies and crises, by government. But Naomi Klein notes that another factor kicks in – the “shock doctrine.”¹⁹ She shows how governments frequently take advantage of both “natural” disasters and human conflicts to bring about major changes that consolidate their power. Klein now speaks of a “pandemic shock doctrine,” clearly visible in New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s vision for a new New York, with Google and Microsoft “permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.”²⁰ Surveillance capitalism rides again.

      Now, the point is emphatically not that high-tech products have no place in pandemic responses. It is, rather, that any such responses deserve to be checked for their fitness-for-purpose and their compliance with other priorities than health, such as privacy and civil liberties. Each digital offering has strict limits on what it can achieve, and each brings with it challenges as well as benefits to human life. Beyond this, it should also be acknowledged that such products are unlikely to solve pandemic problems. Rather, they are potential contributions to a tool-box of practices that, it is hoped, will mitigate some effects of the pandemic.

“Solutions” are considered in relation to dealing with causes more properly than merely with symptoms. As the “cause” of the COVID-19 pandemic is as yet unknown, dealing with that is more than moot. However, one of the likely contributory factors relates to the fact that COVID-19, like many contemporary diseases, is zoonotic. That is, the virus jumps from animals to humans, as seems to have occurred in Wuhan. A 2020 UN conference on loss of biodiversity hinted strongly that the COVID-19 virus may be linked with – perhaps accelerated by – species depletion, itself related to, among other things, deforestation.²¹ It is systemic. In contrast with the rapid rollout of new platforms, devices and apps, dealing with species depletion is a long-term, massive, planetary project. One might also continue the comparison with 9/11, in that the high-tech “solutions” introduced for national security purposes also ignored the deeper problems of the cause of terrorism in 2001.

The burden of this book

      The burden of this book is that COVID-generated tech solutionism is creating digital infrastructures that tend to downplay negative effects on human life and are likely to persist into the post-pandemic world, endangering human rights and data justice. Many of the proposals and products that have circulated since early in 2020 are highly surveillant. That is, they depend on data that makes people visible in particular ways, representing them to other agents and agencies in those ways, so that those people can be treated accordingly.²²

This is why “pandemic” and “surveillance” belong together. Indeed, the drive behind tech-solutionism suggests that at least two meanings may be given to “pandemic surveillance.” One is the obvious existence of a range of surveillance initiatives prompted by the pandemic that invite critical investigation. The other is that these forms of surveillance have grown and mutated so rapidly that their spread might be thought of as “viral.” In other words, there is a pandemic of surveillance.

      Let me add a note about how we interpret and explain what is happening in the world of pandemic surveillance. Several perspectives are already evident in what has been said so far.