Day #11: Irreversible into Surveillance State? ON material & ethics

30th March 2020:  Earlier this month in the US there was a case information released by a city Mayor of the infection of a Doctor with great detail.  This caused some uproar on the  invasion of privacy. Couple of days ago, it was reported that Government of India will use the tracking of individuals to effectively map the spread of the virus across India, particularly tracking the secondary infected people. Today the Karnataka government has announced that those in quarantine need to upload selfies through the day with the geo-location mapped so that the govt. can keep track of their location. Already other state governments trying this level of surveillance is being reported. In the coming days many more states may likely follow suit.  

Edward Snowden, the whistle blower a few days ago had cautioned that the Pandemic situation could lead the world into an irreversible surveillance state situation.  A video circulated about 10 days ago with a Chinese bureaucrat was openly promoting surveillance and suggesting that to give up a few of one's rights is fine for ones' own safety. A view many countries globally seem to be subscribing to. In one go, as the people across the world are isolated in a bid to save themselves, internationally policies, processes, regulations, technologies and perceptions are being altered towards a major surveillance system. This may be the moment in history remembered as the world becoming a Control State.  

Globally today the people highest in demand are the ones who are telling the world how to lock down, how to implement the lock down and keep it that way for the safety of people who are locked down. These are a specialists of very narrow domains and small in number. The fact remains that we still don't know how and where this virus originated, the conditions for the origin and whether anyone cares to at this point in time talk about addressing the same.  In the absence of such knowledge, it is remarkable how much of the world has been asked to shut down with a global uniformity that definitely gives raise to many conspiracy theories. 

Politicians are justifiably worried about not losing voter lives, they are accountable to the people who elected them. Currently surveillance is presented as the ideal medium to achieve it.  So, control / track citizens movements, their privileges curtailed, their privacy invaded, health records compromised, individual financial status and  transaction revealed  like never before, tracking every one continuously, all these are currently happening. While technology was always available for such a control centric surveillance state, the impediment was the rights  granted by certain societies that valued individual freedom.  

Apart from health care and essentials, modern drug industries and defense (and law enforcement industry) are the only ones functioning just now.  Just ponder over it for a minute. Both are control centric.  Safety is not being constructed through individual choice, rather through capacity of the State to control us just now. We are in isolation because that way the State can curtail the spread and the reason it needs to be curtailed is because no State has the mechanism to cater to everyone. So, the operational limitation of the State machinery is defining our idea of safety. Because purely on medical record terms, this can be argued both ways (as is being done by several people). There are people with no symptoms affected as much as people with all the symptoms, testing negative.  We have of course constructed our own theories that are most suitable for our current reality. 

As new laws, policies, regulations are all being created and many old ones violated in the name of public safety in a great hurry, and technologies and systems to implement the new regulations and monitoring methods being put in place, the question to ponder is - will these ever be rolled back at the end of the Pandemic? why would a State do so? isn't it tempting to retain this level of control, 'just in case' there is one more? are we then getting into a state of irreversible invasion of privacy of a very high order? 

 ***

The lock down has created scenes that are both extremely disturbing and truly hope generating. The sudden unprepared lock down announcement, abandoned migrant laborers in thousands on a roads in a long march to their native places, only to be received by 'don't enter' signs and spraying of disinfectant. The government justifies this abandoning act because it is getting all the materials to address the eventual spread of the virus. 

As news spread of the long march, another visual unfolded, poor people, ordinary people of this land, families, small neighborhood groups, all pooled whatever they could and offered them en route to the migrant laborers in their long march, heart warming scenes of poor roadside food cart vendors offering whatever they have - fruits, snacks, some people pooling resource to cook a meal, water...the endless videos that have appeared online of people providing whatever help. Those who are offering seem to do so with abundance and care and those receiving, only taking as much as they need and not fight over what is being offered (unlike toilet paper fights seen elsewhere). It is as though the poor had the ethics to handle the Pandemic while the government was concentrating on the material.