In Europe especially, security crackdowns and surveillance have risen to new levels in the name of public health.
Mass surveillance is only ever in the news for two reasons—either because a whistleblower has exposed structural government overreach (as happened with Edward Snowden) or because nations are readying to fight a common threat. Over the past two decades, those threats have usually come either from migration or terrorism.
Yet COVID-19 is something different: a global pandemic. And it’s allowing governments to increase their surveillance states beyond what they would even typically do in a crisis. In Europe, currently paralyzed by the novel coronavirus, the European Union has dropped its new privacy standards completely. In a conference call with telecom executives, the EU’s commissioner for the internal market, Thierry Breton, demanded that mobile phone data be handed over in order to track the movement of the virus. As with other data collections, this is supposed to be anonymous—but that amounts to little once closely analyzed. It does not take much deductive ability to figure out that the phone moving in and out of your home belongs…to you.
In the UK, policy departments have used drones to track the personal movements of those taking walks in the countryside, which they’ve then publicized on Twitter for the purpose of shaming them. This video belongs in a Mission Impossible trailer, not a law enforcement tweet:
Click for Full Text!