Mission creeps
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As we saw the government moving from monitoring terrorists’ phone calls to listening in on all American citizens, once a practice is accepted as a legitimate but temporary measure, it stays and expands.
DARPA-funded technology touted as an anti-terrorist tool, being deployed against Trump
An anti-Trump Democratic-aligned political action committee advised by retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal is planning to deploy an information warfare tool that received initial funding from DARPA, the Pentagon’s secretive research arm -- transforming technology originally envisioned as a way to fight ISIS propaganda into a campaign platform to benefit Joe Biden.
The Washington Post first reported that the initiative, called Defeat Disinfo, will utilize "artificial intelligence and network analysis to map discussion of the president’s claims on social media," and then attempt to "intervene" by "identifying the most popular counter-narratives and boosting them through a network of more than 3.4 million influencers across the country — in some cases paying users with large followings to take sides against the president."
Social media guru Curtis Hougland is heading up Defeat Disinfo, and he received the funding from DARPA when his program was "part of an effort to combat extremism overseas." He explained in an interview with the Post that he was unhappy that top social media accounts often supported Trump, and had effectively defended the president in recent days from claims that he had suggested Americans inject themselves with disinfectant.
We have already seen our attitudes toward privacy dramatically changing in the first few months of this pandemic. People want to know the zip codes with the highest rates of infection, which nursing homes have had COVID related deaths, and who the “super-spreaders” are. People openly share their risk factors—heart disease, diabetes, asthma—as a means of justifying their isolation.
Never before in our society have we considered disallowing employment or free movement based on disease status or immunity. In normal times, this would be considered discriminatory and likely illegal. But in the time of a global public health crisis, it would be wrong not to treat those without immunity differently. Our society has an obligation to protect them through policy and the non-immune have an obligation to stay home, wear a mask and protect the rest of us from the virus.
Antibody testing will become as normal as a blood pressure screen at CVS. Those with immuno-privilege will be able to enjoy restaurants, sporting events and activities at large public venues. Those without immunity will be isolated for their own good. On the basis of having antibodies or not, our society will be split into two classes until we have a vaccine for COVID-19. Believe it or not, this will be a good thing, preventing deaths, keeping healthcare workers safe, keeping our economy open.
Contact tracing for everyone COVID-19 positive in the entire country will become the standard. Contact tracing is inherently incredibly invasive and it has to be for it to work. It also requires Americans to trust state health authorities to hand over intimate details about their movements and relationships. It requires us to abandon many previously held notions of privacy for the good of our society. It will be extremely difficult to extract this information and to adequately protect it. This sensitive information may be used in inappropriate or truly discriminatory ways; but a loss of some privacy is the the cost of restarting our economy and keeping us healthy.
Any meaningful notion of health privacy will be abandoned until this crisis ends. Immunity certificates are likely to come to pass. Immunity status will be known by neighbors, employers, and friends to keep the vulnerable safe from this deadly virus. Letting everyone know, from your employer to your neighbor to the grocery store clerk, that you are in a high-risk category should be the norm. Along with designer cloth face coverings, immunity bracelets may be a popular Christmas gift for 2020.
Sacrificing our private health information is the price we will pay to resume even a modicum of normalcy in our lives. Public health and economic goals demand this of us. Radical health data transparency is likely our only way forward.
Will privacy be a post-pandemic victim in CT?
As he announced the state’s new effort to track and contact people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus, Gov. Ned Lamont acknowledged an inherent concern: “it sounds a little big brother.”
The contact tracing effort will take procedures already in use for monitoring the spread of diseases like tuberculosis and scale it up for slowing down COVID, with hundreds of volunteers to be trained on contacting people who may have been exposed to a sick person and instructing them to quarantine. Along with an announced, then quickly shelved, plan by Westport Police to use drones for surveillance, efforts to monitor the spread of the disease have raised new questions about where public health collides with personal privacy in the post-pandemic world.
“It does spell real concern about our life after COVID-19,” said David McGuire, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut. “Whatever we do during this public health emergency needs to be grounded in public health and science, not fear, and it needs to be limited in this crisis.” That means having explicit policies on data usage and safeguards, and having all efforts run by public health departments, not law enforcement, he said.
“With any surveillance technology, we’re always concerned about mission creep,” McGuire said.
Lamont and Chief Operating Officer Josh Geballe both defended the data security of the state’s contact tracing effort, which is currently being developed with Microsoft, and believe people will willingly participate.
“My sense is most people understand how important the contact tracing is,” Lamont said, adding that it’s optional for people who test positive for coronavirus to provide their most recent contacts to the state.
Some of it can be done anonymously, Yale School of Public Health Dean Sten Vermund said, which could make it easier to cope with handing over that information. Volunteers need to know who sick people interacted with before they were diagnosed, to instruct those people to quarantine, but they don’t need to know the patient’s identity.
“The personal liberty offense there is actually very much in the person’s self interest,” he said. “You don’t want to invade someone’s privacy unless you’re going to do them some good. There’s the promise of good for the individual and then the privacy issues are not as dramatic.”
He added that other illnesses, like tuberculosis, come with much stronger public health protections over privacy: in all 50 states, people can be forcibly confined and treated to stop the spread of that infectious disease. Contact tracing, while potentially seen as invasive, is “a routine part of public health.”
“You saw a test case in Westport where there was a lot of protest about the drone program almost immediately after the news broke,” the ACLU’s McGuire said. “People are not willing to wholesale trade their privacy and liberty for a speculative promise of a way to safeguard against COVID-19.”
