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Coronavirus and the rise of social hypervigilance: what about individual liberties?

2020-05-31T05:31:12.896Z


Due to the pandemic, the states deploy a tight control of the movements, the data and the health situation of the people. Experts question whether these measures affect civil liberties and the right to privacy.


Pablo Calvo

05/29/2020 - 7:01

  • Clarín.com
  • Live

Someday we will be able to stop again in front of La Gioconda . She, who has no eyebrows or eyelashes, is going to look at us all the time, whether we are one meter from her nose, squatting or six steps to the side. He will follow us with his eyes just like the cameras that control the Louvre Museum, where we can enter before being pointed with a gun that will take our fever , go through an explosives detector and not use a flash when we activate a cell phone that has been marking the steps since we left the Charles de Gaulle airport, where they scanned our passport and, you can imagine, they checked the QR code of our updated health booklet with the latest vaccines.

The streets of Paris will already know of our presence, because the facial recognition cameras will have already confirmed our features and the cyber patrols will have already verified that we have no intention of killing Ángel Di María or setting fire to the Notre Dame cathedral again. We just want to stop for a little while in front of the Mona Lisa.

But, of course, we are hypervigilated . If a new French May were to arise , the official monitors would record the gestation of each protest march, the telephone companies will have the ability to determine who is in each barricade, with name, surname, political militancy, soccer club and tax debt; and drones will be able to follow them to their hiding places in Montparnasse.

The digital panopticon extended its coverage and expanded its insight into the privacy of people with the coronavirus pandemic . The applications dedicated to dealing with the health crisis also acted as minimal “cornalitos” personal data fishing nets but, added together, they allow scanning the state of health, close contacts and transfers of each person .

Caring App. It is compulsory in the province of Buenos Aires and optional in the City. (Photo: Nicolás Ríos).

If the Argentine Government had to modify aspects of its healthcare platform, Caring was, precisely, because of the tension that was generated with respect to the right to privacy and circulation of citizens, affected when they accepted the fine print of the first version of the terms and conditions of that platform, which gave permission to leave the house for 48 hours, renewable on condition that they measure themselves and confess whether they had a fever or not.

As never before in history, the paradigm of epidemiological surveillance and the use of technologies for the monitoring of people was accelerated : invasive applications to measure social distancing were developed at unthinkable speed in the next phases of the fight against Covid -19.

I know your temperature. Special pistols, at the El Cruce hospital, by Florencio Varela. (EFE).

Governments are at the command and control of this great data mining overturned by citizens in official sites, even when driving permits are managed: the cell phone number, the identity document, the address, the body temperature must be put every 48 hours .

In Europe, where La Gioconda suffers from loneliness, there is already controversy over apps for tracking infections. And officials are excited about cyber patrolling on the networks . The biopolitics has been installed and the question arises: Is it here to stay? Who will win this pulse between freedom and security?

"To confront the virus, Asians are strongly committed to digital surveillance. They suspect that big data could hold enormous potential to defend against the pandemic. It could be said that epidemics in Asia are not only fought by virologists, but also by computer scientists and big data specialists. A paradigm shift that Europe has not yet learned about. Apologists of digital surveillance proclaim that the big data saves human lives ", he wrote for the newspaper El País of Spain South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han , mind bright that announced the arrival of biopolitics for the control and surveillance of citizens .

Sanitary drone. Spray with disinfectant from the heights of a Chinese town. (AFP).

Another is that of the Spanish professor and writer José María Lasalle , director of the Technological Humanism Forum of the Higher School of Business Administration and Management, who talks about the arrival of a Cyberleviathan , a digital revolution that demolishes the conquests of freedom of the French Revolution. and it collapses democracy as we know it in the western world.

"We click on the conditions of use without looking at them, without reading them, which enhances the voluntariness of being spied on, recorded, watched. The problem is that we are used to accepting a panopticon environment and that we are becoming familiar with control and surveillance structures that surround and surround us, without having the feeling that they are suffocating us. Therefore, man's chances of emancipation are less. And the margin for freedom to survive is less, "Lasalle replied to the newspaper La Vanguardia .

Viva spoke to two Argentine thinkers who have intelligent eyes on the matter.

Gonzalo Sarasqueta , researcher, professor and academic coordinator of the Postgraduate Course in Political Communication at the Universidad Católica Argentina, postulates that “in a liberal democracy like ours, the State is expected to preserve the borders between public and private. When we recover the freedoms of movement and assembly, we should also regain the right to our privacy. How? For example, through a process of anonymisation of all the information that was made about us in this exceptional period. In other words: encrypt the data of all citizens (the European Union, with the General Data Protection Regulation, has this right since 2018). This procedure would have to be open, clear and certified by citizens, specialists and representatives of the entire political arc ”.

After series of anticipation like Years and Years or Black Mirror I  eradicated the impossible word.

Gonzalo Sarasqueta, professor at the UCA.

The dialogue with this UCA expert continued as follows:

Is it possible for social control technologies to be applied here as in China or South Korea?

In recent years, I have eradicated the word "impossible" from my vocabulary. Fiction treads with reality every day. There are the Years and years series or Black Mirror to check it out. But I think there are two limitations of a different nature so that this does not happen here. One is political and the other sociological. The first is of a material-operational nature: until today, the infrastructure and state capacities of Argentina are very far from those of countries such as South Korea or China . In digitizing the bureaucracy, innovation, agility and territorial capillarity take us years (or decades) of advantage. And the second difference is social: our political culture is very different from the eastern one. Here there is not such a rigid sense of discipline and, in addition, we have a very high level of social mobilization compared to them. In the case of China, the variable of the political regime should be added: it is a dictatorship . An asymmetric communication system , where information circulates only vertically upwards: from citizens to the State. There is no accountability. This facilitates social control.

Thermal cameras. In Ezeiza, passengers get fever without consent. (Photo: Luciano Thieberger).


- it does not invade our privacy that there are cameras recognizing our faces by the streets or taking us the fever in the stations?

-Yeah right. But faced with the balance between freedom and security, citizens seem to be choosing the latter. The fear of losing life is stronger than the fear of losing autonomy. There are the high levels of approval as irrefutable proof. With the exception of Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the image of most presidents in the West grew between March and April. They reached stratospheric levels of social support. The problem is that we are not faced with public opinion, but with public emotion. In extreme contexts like this, the critical sense is displaced by the survival instinct. It will be necessary to observe how these leaders "land", democopically speaking, in the economic recession, when the adversary is no longer a virus, but unemployment.

-How do we defend ourselves against cyber patrols, officially defended with the argument of measuring social humor or preventing looting? Is it a threat to freedom of opinion?

- It is that the digital panopticon flies over our democracies long ago. Cambridge Analytica was an indication of this. The difference with China is that in the West, instead of the Communist Party, there are the big technology companies. Without any permission, these platforms suck our information daily and use it for commercial purposes. With the coronavirus, the problem worsened. Why? Because in several countries the State began - supposedly, for health purposes - to carry out data mining. Not on the scale of China, of course. But this process is extremely dangerous because the State is the last containment barrier that the citizen has against cognitive capitalism. Without laws that protect our privacy, we depend on the goodwill of digital platforms. The State is in charge of putting a legal framework on the Internet.

-And for a drone to fly over a protest, isn't that another way of controlling who's there and who's not?

-Exact. The security cameras that we see every day in every corner, the SUBE card and the last ID card, to cite other examples, too. The dilemma is a thorny one: more security or more freedom? Cyberleviathan , as Lasalle calls it, arrived a while ago. Devices change, but the logic is the same. The Internet only enabled a more sophisticated surveillance system. More unspoken. Invisible. A Big Brother as silent as effective. Regardless, technology is not to blame. Our manipulation of the instrument is what defines whether we are facing an opportunity or a threat. The problem is the verb (the use), not the noun (the tool).

Under control. At the train stations in France, each passenger is observed from the screens. (AFP).

Martín Hevia  is dean of the Di Tella University School of Law and founding president of the Alliance for the Framework Convention on Global Health, and offers a nuanced vision.

Regarding the danger of going towards a “techototalitarianism ”, he considers that “this crisis is actually also an opportunity to reinforce our commitments to humanitarian and democratic values ​​and so that we can control from the citizenship the decisions of the governments that affect us”.

The problem is that, even without knowing it, we consent to the use of our personal data.

Martín Hevia, Di Tella University

In his opinion, the choice between health and rights "is false", because "as Yuval Harari says in a column in the Financial Times , Humanity will have to choose to go one way or the other. The danger is that we move from control on the skin to control on the skin or inside the body, with chips and technological tools that can access information about us and that governments can use to control us. ”

Professor Hevia recalls that “we are already geolocated , although by technology companies, which have access to information from our cell phones about where we are, where we are going (the iPhone warns you how long it would take to get to a place where you usually go without being ask for it). This does not mean that these companies do not take care of this information. Recently, in the United States, Apple defended its position of not opening iPhones with sensitive information, even though they were accused of crimes and President Donald Trump attacked them strongly for it.

“The difference is that, although we do not know it fully, we consent to these companies using the technology. Personal data laws, like those in Argentina, establish restrictions on the use of sensitive information. To the extent that there is no consent on our part, when the State is involved, it is potentially a restriction on the right to privacy. For there to be restrictions, they have to be based on a legitimate objective and they have to be proportional to the objective ”, he points out.

Hevia highlights that “we are not at war!”, To expose that the use of war narratives during the pandemic has ulterior motives : “The military metaphor appeals to a language of necessity, which offers few options. It is curious that the most liberal rulers also fall into this language.

The Gioconda in quarantine. On a wall in Barcelona, ​​with a chinstrap designed by someone other than Da Vinci (Europa Press).

He cited the case of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who called on his people "an unprecedented effort, which circumstances demand."

For Hevia, "that is a language that does not empower to act, but requires submission to the leader's decisions."

The analyst at the Di Tella University considers that “ institutional and democratic control of government decisions is crucial . Liberal democracies are developing legislative instruments to exercise this control, which is legitimate and based on respect for rights . Australia, for example, has had an interesting and intense discussion about this control. The role of the courts is central, because they are the guarantors of the protection of these rights ”.

La Gioconda looks at us. He wonders if Silicon Valley , inhabited by Apple, Facebook and Google, is the new Geneva , where civilization agreed on the rules of international humanitarian law. He doesn't know if a social algorithm will end up dominating each of our biometric data. Or if even she will have to take refuge from the panopticon, in a can of sweet potato sweet.


PC

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2020-05-31

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