Al Jazeera - Surveillance will not save us from COVID19
The use of tech-based surveillance to fight the virus can exacerbate the suffering of the most vulnerable communities.
This opinion piece was published on Aljazeera.com on 21 May 2020 here.
As COVID-19 continues to devastate the world, a growing number of countries are opting to use invasive surveillance methods to stem the spread of the virus and “flatten the curve”.
Since the emergence of the novel coronavirus, several countries, led by Israel, China, Singapore and South Korea, started collecting security camera footage and bank records and using facial recognition technologies and mobile phone data to track the movements of their citizens. Australia recently joined this trend by releasing Covidsafe, a “coronavirus tracking app“. The UK is also known to be trialling a similar mobile phone app to increase its contact-tracing abilities and get its population back to work.
In countries where the majority of the population is not used to being subjected to overt mass surveillance, the discussions surrounding the implementation of these measures has focused on “privacy”.
But there is reason to be concerned about this new wave of surveillance beyond privacy. Unless we acknowledge the role surveillance plays in perpetuating structures of oppression, the use of tech-based surveillance methods to tackle the virus will serve to exacerbate the suffering of the most vulnerable communities.
We can see what surveillance is really for, and who usually pays the price for it, simply by looking into its history.
Surveillance as a colonial strategy
Surveillance emerged as a colonial strategy. It was essential for the classification of people and the control of the newly acquired territories.
From the 14th to the 19th century, European colonisers amassed vast quantities of data on the populations they colonised. The most basic tools of surveillance, such as fingerprinting, census taking, map-making and profiling, were refined and implemented in colonial settings by the Dutch in Southeast Asia, the French in Africa, and the British in India and North America.
The British, for example, collected data on caste, religion, profession and age among other classifying characteristics across colonial India. This information was used to solidify inequities of the caste system, and increase religious tensions; essentially to divide and rule.
Surveillance as a tool of scientific racism
In the 19th century, surveillance tools developed in the colonies were used by European governments to classify populations according to innate biological traits, and construct racial hierarchies, both in the colonies and at home. During this time, surveillance aided the implementation of discriminatory policies based on what we now call “scientific racism” and contributed to the development of pseudo-scientific justifications for white supremacy.
In Australia, for example, white colonisers used “scientific” theories based on surveillance data to justify massacres of First Nations people, land theft, removal of children from families, and erasure of language and culture. Over time, they established a racialised hierarchy of citizenship, and started granting citizenship rights and associated benefits based upon whiteness. They eventually banned all non-white migrants from entering the country. The “White Australia policy“, which enshrined this racial hierarchy of citizenship in law, only officially ended in 1973.
Surveillance today
Today, surveillance is still being used as a tool to classify people into various zones. Thanks to the “architectures of oppression” that surveillance help built, some people remain safely in “zones of access, inclusion and privilege“ while others remain stuck in “zones of invisibility, exclusion and death“. Rapidly developing surveillance methods are helping governments keep “undesirable” migrants and refugees outside of their countries’ borders, and internal “undesirables” – members of minority communities and the poor among others – inside prisons, detention centres and racialised ghettos.