How Surveillance Could Save Lives Amid a Public Health Crisis

“I’m not sure that we should be making longer-term judgments, in an emergency situation, about what the right balance is right now,” said Jennifer Daskal, faculty director of the Tech, Law, and Security program at American University and a former national security official in the Department of Justice. “That often doesn’t work out so well.”

Pointing back to 9/11, when Congress granted immense surveillance powers to the federal government, Daskal said decisions made during emergency situations tend to lead to overreach. Another thing to remember: There were no iPhones on 9/11. Technology has progressed rapidly since then, and in some cases, has outpaced the laws meant to govern it. “One of the lessons I hope we learned from 9/11 is that new powers in an emergency situation” should come with preset expirations, she added.

The rapid spread of the disease has prompted even some traditional defenders of personal privacy to acknowledge the potential benefits of digital tracking. “Public policy must reflect a balance between collective good and civil liberties in order to protect the health and safety of our society from communicable disease outbreaks,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blog post earlier this month. But, the group continued, any data collection “must be scientifically justified and … proportionate to the need.”

Balancing privacy and the need to quickly isolate patients is only becoming more complex as companies which individually target and identify individuals are also volunteering their technology. The controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI is reportedly in talks with state officials to use its software to identify anyone in contact with people who are infected. The weapons detection company Athena Security claims its AI-enabled cameras can detect the coronavirus by spotting fevers. Clearview and Athena did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

One potentially powerful tool for public health officials is contact tracing—identifying the people that an infected person has been around. This reveals potential outbreak hot spots, offers some idea of where the virus may spread next, and importantly, warns officials who to contact next and potentially isolate if they become symptomatic. Earlier this month, the CDC issued a temporary rule requiring airlines to share data on passengers traveling from overseas on request, including addresses, phone numbers, and email.

“Contact tracing is giving you an idea about how many people are being infected, along with a control strategy to stop those people that you’ve tracked from infecting” others, said Cameron Browne, a mathematical biologist at the University of Louisiana studying the virus’s spread in China. “You need to know where these clusters of cases are coming from and how strong the transmission is going forward. So it is both a control and a surveillance.”

In epidemiology, a “control” is a means of intervention used to stop the spread of a disease. It also, necessarily, involves controlling people. Investigators in China and Singapore, for example, interviewed patients, then reviewed their credit card receipts, personal diaries, and calendars to trace where they’d traveled and with whom they had contact.

In the US, however, that prospect unsettles some. “I’d love to give the federal government all the latitude that they deserve, but the reality is that [we’ve seen] abuse after abuse after abuse,” said Jake Williams, a cybersecurity expert and former member of the NSA’s hacking unit. “When you start adding in identifiers and email addresses, [physical] addresses, [and] other flights you’ve been on, you start to see patterns of behavior. Now, suddenly we’re in a little bit different territory.”