Pandemic Surveillance. David Lyon

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Pandemic Surveillance - David Lyon


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phenomena associated with the eruption of a highly contagious virus cannot be understood merely by scientific health and medical knowledge. The historical, geographical and cultural context, described by Spinney and by Camus – among many others – shows the importance of the multiple social dimensions of pandemics. And as Nurhak Polat rightly argues, in the early 2020s one cannot but examine the role of digital technologies in any attempt to understand COVID-19’s manifold impacts. Therefore, she suggests – using “viral” in both actual and virtual senses – “Pandemics in the 21st century are inevitably embedded in the digital context. This also includes the digital and biometric surveillance technologies that track ‘viral footprints’ of COVID-19 across bodies, homes, streets, and borders.”12 In what follows, we shall consider the wearable trackers, phone apps, drones, remote body temperature checkers that have been sprung into service since COVID-19 began.

      Almost all the proposed ways of dealing with the pandemic address only the symptoms, not the causes. They are Band-Aids, intended to contain and control the virus. At the time of writing, the original causes are not known to science, so the Band-Aid approach is understandable. Knowledge gleaned from many historical epidemics and pandemics informs how public health officials respond when new outbreaks occur. It is doubtful how much could be learned – except perhaps negatively – from the fourteenth-century Black Death, which killed huge swathes of the population around the Mediterranean. A wide variety of sometimes exotic treatments were proposed, from herbalism to blood-letting to self-flagellation, although doctors did learn to lance the bodily buboes that gave the disease its other name, “Bubonic Plague.”

      Thus, in the early twenty-first century, the pressures pushing “technological solutionism”15 are strong, and pandemic panic only adds further propulsion. As Rob Kitchin notes, those pressures include intense lobbying of governments by technology companies, their already-existing technocratic practices and their desire to stimulate high-tech innovation.16 This was already visible in the rush to find “solutions” after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington known as “9/11,” when companies hastily used their home pages to offer simultaneous condolences to bereaved families and advertisements for their “anti-terrorism” products. And governments acceded, using techniques ranging from biometric tests to Artificial Intelligence to trace and impede terrorism.17

      Why the haste to set up government security agencies and massive surveillance arsenals? Part of the answer is that citizens rightly demand adequate responses to emergencies and crises, by government. But Naomi Klein notes that another factor kicks in – the “shock doctrine.”19 She shows how governments frequently take advantage of both “natural” disasters and human conflicts to bring about major changes that consolidate their power. Klein now speaks of a “pandemic shock doctrine,” clearly visible in New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s vision for a new New York, with Google and Microsoft “permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.”20 Surveillance capitalism rides again.

      Now, the point is emphatically not that high-tech products have no place in pandemic responses. It is, rather, that any such responses deserve to be checked for their fitness-for-purpose and their compliance with other priorities than health, such as privacy and civil liberties. Each digital offering has strict limits on what it can achieve, and each brings with it challenges as well as benefits to human life. Beyond this, it should also be acknowledged that such products are unlikely to solve pandemic problems. Rather, they are potential contributions to a tool-box of practices that, it is hoped, will mitigate some effects of the pandemic.

      The burden of this book is that COVID-generated tech solutionism is creating digital infrastructures that tend to downplay negative effects on human life and are likely to persist into the post-pandemic world, endangering human rights and data justice. Many of the proposals and products that have circulated since early in 2020 are highly surveillant. That is, they depend on data that makes people visible in particular ways, representing them to other agents and agencies in those ways, so that those people can be treated accordingly.22

      Let me add a note about how we interpret and explain what is happening in the world of pandemic surveillance. Several perspectives are already evident in what has been said so far.


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