In the U.S., the Supreme Court decided[1] in 2018 that the government couldn't access cell location data without a warrant. However, they made an exception for public safety:
> Such exigencies include the need to pursue a fleeing suspect, protect individuals who are threatened with imminent harm or prevent the imminent destruction of evidence.
Fighting a pandemic arguably falls into this category, since an awful lot of people are threatened with imminent harm. So we already have a constitutional standard for rolling back pandemic-related surveillance measures.
Also, something this article overlooks about the Apple/Google system is that it does a pretty good job of protecting user privacy. Contacts are discovered by direct bluetooth contact, and central servers don't get any information from people except that they tested positive.[2][3]
Privacy discussions often gloss over or outright ignore the many factors that affect perspectives on privacy. Quite often this will make a stance that is perfectly reasonable to one person look like raving lunatic to another person.
Trust is one factor. Even if an individual agreed that the approach being suggested by Apple and Google is a good one, they are unlikely support it if they do not trust those businesses. Even if that individual trusts the motivations of a party, it does not imply that they trust their competence.
Social change is another factor. Whether we acknowledge it or not, there has been an enormous change in attitudes towards privacy over the past quarter century. If you took anyone from 1995 and showed them the technology of today, they would likely be amazed by our access to information and horrified by other people's access to our own information. Keep in mind that was an era when the Internet was just starting to reach into homes and the typical phone call was made from a landline. On top of that, most devices were siloed by necessity so that phone call was between you, the recipient, and the phone company. You did not have to worry about a social media company trying to mine your contact data with an app installed on your phone (because phones did not support apps and barely supported storing phone numbers). Even though we have had decades to adapt to those changes, some people are more likely to embrace their benefits while others have held on to their old values.
Regarding privacy, is there something in particular blocking then from receiving identifying information from people? Because it seems like this wouldn’t be difficult to add in at such a time as the climate is right to do so, and to be frank I’m not sure that they deserve the benefit of the doubt at this point.
Since they control the OS, I guess there's nothing in particular blocking them from uploading your location and identifying information at all times regardless. But this specific proposed system just uploads a set of random numbers when someone tests positive.
I think the article should more clearly distinguish between approaches that indeed gather lots of unnecessary data (that is often of questionable importance) vs. more decentralised (e.g. bluetooth based) approaches that can help with contact tracing while still allowing to be implemented with privacy concerns in mind.
Also, (as a non-American) I think the patriot act is a horrible thing, but I also think that in particular, the threat of terrorism has always been massively overstated (and even if not, many of the subsequent changes e.g. in airport security, are terribly ineffective). By contrast, I think that Coronavirus is a very serious threat and a recent study does seem to indicate that app-based contact tracing solutions could really help. I'll repeat that it's possible to do this in a privacy-conscious manner and it really should be done like that (not just because otherwise people will refuse to use it).
> Governments need information to create containment strategies and know where to focus resources. At the same time, governments have a way of holding onto tools that undermine citizens’ privacy long after the moment of crisis has passed.
I wonder if it’s worth governments’ time trying to come up with automatically expiring bills for “emergency” uses such as these.
> I wonder if it’s worth governments’ time trying to come up with automatically expiring bills for “emergency” uses such as these.
The Patriot Act has a sunset clause, but has been repeatedly extended, which no obvious sign of it ever not being extended.
The ability to change laws makes it easier for government's to sell these sorts of changes to their constituents ("it's only temporary") whilst knowing that it probably won't turn out to actually be temporary, because they can change something that is temporary into effectively permanent.
That can be fixed by making sunset clauses automatically require a few things:
1. Must be voted on alone. That is, no sneaking it into another bill, or into the budget votes.
2. Each renewal requires a higher percentage of yes votes than the last time until 100% is required. To my recollection, there's never been a time when the Patriot Act received 100% approval.
On its face, this sounds great. However, there is nothing to prevent a later amendment then removing one of these requirements, as unreasonable or outdated because of the new way the law is being used.
To law makers, nothing about a law is immutable. Which is the crux of the problem, really. You can't prevent bad actors from messing things up unless you don't do it in the first place.
There are benefits, clear and strong, for several of these laws when they are first prepared. It's the fact you can't rely on anyone down the track not to abuse it that's the problem.
Sunset clauses aren't reliable mechanisms (patriot act). Beyond special interests, I wouldn't blame legislators if they were a little afraid to deny an intelligence service some of their toys if they've gotten comfortable using them.
I don't know how often sunset clauses are used in (US) federal legislation, but I do recall that the original "Assault Weapons Ban" of 1994[1] had, and eventually utilized, a sunset clause. The law did, in fact, expire in its entirety in 2004.
But that is up to the people to pressure for change. As long as most fear the ever dreadful terrorist and as long as the ever going war on terror creates new terrorist, there is an everlasting accepted need for the patriot act.
And here with the new surveilance against corona, we will probably find out, that to fight new more dangerous deseases and of course terrorism, crime and pedophiles, we cannot really give up on these tools. There is no alternative, like my chancellor merkel says with everything. And when enough people believe it, it is true.
"Majority of people wanting something does not mean it can pass at all."
Depends. It does not matter for example, if the majority wants to have nice weather, no.
But if the majority would insists on mandatory privacy, for example, then yes, it would pass.
But they do not. Most give up privacy voluntarily for all their "free" apps and services.
In contemporary America, there are host of issues where polls consistently shows majority wants x, but it does not matter in actual politics. Two parties mean that average person opinion on this or that issue does not matter all that much.
Same if other countries I am sure, but America is the topic.
That's a good thing, but lingering emergency laws are not the full extent of the risk.
The risk is largely related to changing perceptions and standards for what is normal, beyond the pales & such. Once something has been done widely and publicly, it becomes more normal and less scary.
> Emergency measures being valid for the duration of the emergency would be pretty straightforward.
Deciding when the emergency is over is less straightforward than a fixed time period. A government that wanted to extend the measures indefinitely would just claim there's still an emergency.
But the cooperation of legislators is required because of the fixed deadlines. If the government would be allowed the right to extend the provisions on their own, they probably would try to do that in perpetuity. With a legislative branch that actually cares about civil rights, the former is the much better option.
Not straightforward - somebody would have to decide when the emergency is over, which then becomes a political question.
And even if the emergency is not over in a year, it makes a lot of sense to reconsider if the measures (which were decided very quickly) are actually appropriate and necessary going forward. Hopefully a lot have been learned in a year.
You are forgetting to factor in complacency. When is the second wave? when should we stop waiting for it? that just depends on how useful the law is for those in power.
That's quite a long time - the state of emergency here in Cze Republic can be only 30 days, after which the parliament needs to confirm any extension. Which it already did & for less than the extra month originally requested by the government.
I would also assume that the GDPR would impose severe restrictions as to the allowed duration of data collection for contact tracing purposes (in the sense that it shouldn't be legal anymore once Coronavirus ceases to be a major threat), but IANAL, so I could be wrong.
In Canada, the Government tried to pass broad emergencies measures giving it essentially unlimited power without parliament oversight... until December 2022.
I know Apple is marketing themselves as pro-pricacy, but I doubt they can anonymize the data in a way that preserves privacy while still achieving the goal of tracing contacts.
It just seems like a convoluted way of making a gigantic knowledge graph of interactions between individuals under the pretense of public health.
Although it's still considered a fringe/conspiracy theory, I've heard some interesting claims on the use of digital ids and immunity certificates for verifying who has been vaccinated.
It's not a theory, recently Bill Gates did an AMA on Reddit [1] and verified that ID2020 would indeed be used to verify who has been vaccinated. The conspiracy theory aspect is whatever one wants to expound on from there...
IMO, it doesn't seem appropriate to set up a global identification system by leveraging the crisis, but I don't know what the alternatives would look like.
The combination of rapid spread and not negligible mortality makes covid19 a much higher threat globally than most other diseases, as has been shown repeatedly. Even a lot of not-at-risk individuals will die from it. We really shouldn't be arguing over these facts anymore.
and in fact, we're still lucky. nothing guarantees that we might not have a worse infection in the future that is as contagious but much deadlier (think of something like Ebola but much more contagious).
if we can somehow diminish the threat, it's worth thinking about it. it might be that the tradeoffs are not worth it (locking everyone up for two years for example wouldn't qualify), but it's still worth thinking about options. that includes imperfect options like a vaccine.
you do understand what it means to be at the beginning of an exponential curve, right? this is not going to grow linearly, if this is not contained somehow, you could be looking at millions of deaths in the US alone.
again, all these numbers have been debated so many times before.
> you could be looking at millions of deaths in the US alone
That's not true. Very worst case scenario will be 160,000 deaths based on our last data. But around 60,000 is more probable even we go out of lockdown right now.
notice the preceding clause in the sentence you quoted, "if not contained somehow".
The numbers you cite all assume social distancing measures, it says so at the very top (and also the forecast only goes to the end of August, there is no guarantee that the virus doesn't come back in winter or so, we saw this with the Spanish flu).
of course, no growth is truly exponential forever, but a sigmoid model is still basically exponential in its initial stage and as long as there is no big saturation factor (i.e. lots of herd immunity), the limiting factor is negligible.
so, as long as herd immunity is not high, the curve is approximately exponential.
" that includes imperfect options like a vaccine."
A vaccine is not an imperfect option. It is our standard way of defeating diseases. Only problem here is, there is none ready, but several on its way. This is the only reason why covid19 is a higher threat and not really because of the disease itself. Neither our medical system, nor our immune system is prepared for it.
So we need a vaccine, for the risk groups, yes. But why do we need to give up on privacy and freedom for it, I do not really understand.
Bill Gates strikes me as someone who will be a villian to society as he ages. Bill Gates lacks the empathy necessary to design solutions with people in mind. The threat comes from the power he unleshes through his charity foundation.
Things like ID2020 will be expanded. The forced vaccination program through excluding participation in society hasn't started yet.
Chances are your kid will not be allowed in school without one at some point.
He was but really he had more of a commercial mindset that was against level playing fields and against free software. It didn't make him evil but not a role model either. Now that his imagine has changed and he is playing with medicine buying off the news he is more dangerous to everyone.
That would be more fair if the same people who don't get the vaccine actively support the vaccine mandate. From my experience this is not true. They simply do not trust institution. Their motive is not free loading herd immunity and avoiding the hassle of doing it themselves.
the whole CDC mask recommendation fiasco only adds fuel to the fire here. how do you explain to these people "yes, the CDC just mislead you, but you should really trust the vaccine recommendation"?
I had measles, didn't die from it. I also had several kinds of flu, didn't die from them either. I almost died in a climbing accident, and from drinking way too much alcohol in my teens.
Plenty of lives are destroyed by side effects from vaccines, same thing with the current lock down, where do you draw the line?
Blindly trusting science is about as smart as blindly trusting the catholic church, the issue was always blind trust.
Big pharma has proven over and over and over again that the only thing they care about is profit; and given enough money, anything can be bought in this society.
I know it's uncomfortable to question authority, but it's also a responsibility.
Glad you didn't die of measles. Unfortunately other people did.
Please cite evidence of the lives destroyed by administering vaccines.
I didn't claim that a lockdown has no adverse effect, quite the contrary. That's why a vaccine (which we don't have, sadly), of course only if it's safe and effective (which is what we generally test for, hence why it takes so long), would help: it would immunise us and we could stop the epidemic at a much lower cost to society than with lockdown.
"Blindly trusting science" is not a thing; science is all about facts and evidence, not about trust.
There's plenty of evidence out there, and plenty of motivation to shoot down any attempt at objective research. Which is where your brain and your responsibility to use it enter the picture.
Of course it's about trust, science has been wrong about many things along the way, because of ignorance and lately to an increasing extent because of money.
Please refrain from putting words in people's mouth to hide your ignorance.
I don't know if ID2020 is being proposed as compulsory, but one is not required to obtain a driver's license, or any other form of state issued ID, in the US. If asked to present ID by an officer of the law, merely giving your full name and birth date is sufficient.
> one is not required to obtain a driver's license, or any other form of state issued ID, in the US
Practically, one is required to obtain an ID to do many common activities. Being able to theoretically opt-out of these systems is a fiction that forms a cornerstone of their justification.
This is exactly the kind of thing the lunatic militias in the 90s were terrified about. Those people are still around, and if you try to give them 'the mark of the beast', for better or worse, there will be blood.
But it is an invisible, beneath the skin imprint, and for a good reason to help with large scale vaccination. And without such vaccination, especially in the case of covid-19, millions could die. Who would argue with such a beneficial and convenient approach?
However, for some reason ID2020 is distancing themselves from this quantum dot approach.
Wrong. Money, power & control. If you limit what one can do if they don't have a vaccine, you create an artificial demand for the vaccine, thus driving profits through the roof.
Basic economics there.
I won't be getting my "ID" card if they ever make one.
What if it’s a non profit who use Western profits to subsidise third world efforts? This already happens in other areas of medicine, far more so in the for profit sector. Limit what one can do without a visa, up the artificial demand to useful levels of herd immunity, and use the profits to fund doing the same in Africa.
Except the fewer people who get (or can afford) the vaccine, the weaker herd immunity becomes, and the more likely a future outbreak might lead to another shutdown of the economy, to say nothing of the profits from a vaccine you might only need to take once per year likely not offsetting the losses from sick workers who can't be vaccinated throughout that year.
The ROI for that scheme seems terrible, but maybe I just don't understand basic economics well enough. It seems obvious to me that they could make more money charging less for the vaccine and more to companies and government for implementation and data infrastructure.
These protests we are seeing would be significantly more powerful if they didn't mention politics. Instead people are quick to say "it's just the other political party and those people are stupid".
Sometimes the Western Governments test the waters during a crisis (or the threat of a crisis) to see if there is a public outcry.
Lots of people protested the Patriot Act and other post 9/11 stuff but the majority of people at the time were fine with it because it was to find the terrorists. Not sure if they ever found a terrorist on America soil but now we have TSA screens, Homeland Security, and a boat load of other extensions of federal power.
Each event adds a new layer of the surveillance state.
9/11 had the patriot act.. can hold you forever without a lawyer loss of freedom.
So far we've seen google give away location data on millions of people. Ditto for providers. The government used it to determine who was away from their homes over the weekend.
It's not one event but a series of events that changes a society.
Do you know why there are no Jews left in Holland?
They had the most efficient census of any European country. So when the Nazis came in and replaced the moderate Democratic Monarchy all they had to do to round up all the Jews was to select the column for religion on the IBM punch cards from the last census.
It's a travesty that next to no one knows the fact that the holocaust was the first large application of computers and the atom bomb was the second.
>It's a travesty that next to no one knows the fact that the holocaust was the first large application of computers and the atom bomb was the second.
Almost everyone knows the Nazis used census data to initialize the Holocaust, it's practically the number one argument given against mass surveillance and data collection of any kind, and of censuses in particular.
Also, Allied cryptanalysis of German ciphers (particularly the Enigma code) was, arguably, the second large application of computers, and by the time we got to the atom bomb, I think they had already been in widespread use for radar and missile trajectory calculations.
"Digital computers" would've been a more accurate usage in the comment to which you're responding. World War II guided weapons (mainly just the German V missiles) used very simple and rudimentary analog computers for coursekeeping, and World War II gun laying and fire direction was done with analog integrating machines of impressive heft and complexity [1]. They're actually very fascinating devices, not to mention being among the pinnacles of the manual machinist's art even in that art's own halcyon days, but they're not really relevant here.
Fair enough, but I think any definition of "digital computer" that includes IBM electro-mechanical punch card tabulators would surely also include the Enigma, Allied Bombe and Colossus, which makes at least three feasibly large applications of computing between the Holocaust and Manhattan Project.
Maybe instead of taking that as an argument to not have a census the solution here is to conclude that Nazis are bad and they ought to be stopped.
This is not a reasonable argument because it can be applied to anything. Telephones enables nazis to communicate better. Guns allowed them to shoot faster. Cars made it so they could round them up even more quickly. Without fuel they wouldn't have had any tanks. The list goes on.
The fact that technology empowers nazis as much as good people is trivial and obvious. As an argument against technology it's useless because by that logic we need to go live in a cave again.
> Such exigencies include the need to pursue a fleeing suspect, protect individuals who are threatened with imminent harm or prevent the imminent destruction of evidence.
Fighting a pandemic arguably falls into this category, since an awful lot of people are threatened with imminent harm. So we already have a constitutional standard for rolling back pandemic-related surveillance measures.
Also, something this article overlooks about the Apple/Google system is that it does a pretty good job of protecting user privacy. Contacts are discovered by direct bluetooth contact, and central servers don't get any information from people except that they tested positive.[2][3]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/us/politics/supreme-court...
[2] https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/
[3] https://github.com/DP-3T/documents