How Various States Used Covid-19 Technology for Invasive 'Surveillance'?

A year-long investigation by the Associated Press reveals the chilling truth behind practices that are supposed to protect individuals from Covid-19 but are instead directed against them, threatening civil rights and freedoms. The investigative report also revealed that governments around the world are using software to prevent the spread of Covid-19 to track and monitor people for criminal purposes.

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Details on Surveillance of Pandemic Technology in Some Countries

A young man working in a café in occupied East Jerusalem received a text message from the Shin Bet, Israel's security service, which read in Arabic: "You have been identified as a participant in acts of violence at Al-Aqsa Mosque". "We will hold you to account." Majd Ramlawi, 19, said, "It's like the state is in your bag. When you act, the government is with you on this phone."

The Shin Bet sent the same text message to hundreds of people, most of whom only lived or worked in the area and had nothing to do with the protests. According to the report, instead of surveillance technology, the agency used coronavirus applications "against Israeli residents and citizens" for purposes completely unrelated to Covid-19.

During the pandemic that ravaged the world, killed 6.67 million people, and ravaged the global economy, people were willing to provide private personal information about themselves to official apps that promised to warn them of the presence of the virus in their environment and hide them. Little did they know that authorities would use these technologies and data to prevent activists from meeting or traveling to meeting places, profiling certain minority groups, and linking health information to law enforcement tools.

The AP notes that these applications are not limited to one country or city, pointing out that they are being used "from Beijing to occupied East Jerusalem, Hyderabad, India, and Perth, Australia".

The report, the result of more than a year of research and interviews, suggests that governments are misusing these technologies to "flatten the curve" and put individuals under the metaphorical microscope for surveillance and policing without their proper consent. John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Toronto-based internet watchdog Citizen Lab, told AP, "Any intervention that increases state power to monitor individuals has a long tail and is a lockdown system"

China Hacked a Protest

In June, a group of bank customers asked to travel to Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province, to show that they could not access their online bank accounts after learning that a police investigation had blocked 40 billion yuan in funds. Each of them left their homes after taking a Covid-19 test and testing negative. Only when scanning QR codes at arrival stations or airports were they labeled 'Code Red'.

One of the potential protesters, bank customer Xu Zhihao, said he met three people in the basement of the train station in Zhengzhou who came to the protest but withdrew. Through a group chat, they learned that hundreds of others had similar experiences trying to get to the protest site and were caught before they got there.

The AP's discussions with dissidents and human rights activists suggest that China will continue to use local-level health codes as a means to severely limit mobility, using public health as a pretext to enforce social control. The report also notes that Beijing encourages local health officials to link with national databases.

Privacy in India

Technologies that should combat the spread of the coronavirus, such as facial recognition and artificial intelligence, have become all the rage since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. The country is now on track to build one of the world's largest facial recognition networks, linked to a database containing photos, fingerprints, police records and other relevant data.

Apar Gupta, executive director of the New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation,