Coronavirus and the Future of
Surveillance
Democracies Must Offer an Alternative to
Authoritarian Solutions
By Nicholas Wright April 6, 2020
A man walks under surveillance cameras in
Shanghai, China, February 2020.Aly Song /
Reuters
The novel coronavirus pandemic is causing tens
of thousands of deaths, wreaking economic
devastation, leading to lockdowns across much
of the world, and upending societies and their
assumptions. But going forward, one of its most
significant legacies will be the way that the
pandemic dovetails with another major global
disruption of the last few years—the rise and
spread of digital surveillance enabled by artificial
intelligence (AI).
Public health measures have always depended
on surveillance, but that has been especially true
in governments’ responses to the coronavirus.
China, after initially suppressing news of the
outbreak in Wuhan, used its arsenal of
surveillance tools to tackle the pandemic. These
techniques ranged from deploying hundreds of
thousands of neighborhood monitors to log the
movements and temperatures of individuals, to
the mass surveillance of mobile phone, rail, and
flight data to track down people who had
traveled to affected regions. But democratic
countries in East Asia also used expansive
surveillance powers to battle COVID-19, the
disease caused by the coronavirus. South Korea
harnessed closed-circuit television (CCTV) and
credit card data to track the movements of
individuals, and Taiwan integrated health and
other databases so all Taiwanese hospitals,
clinics, and pharmacies could access the travel
information of their patients.
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S I G N U P
As they struggle to contain the spread of the
virus, Western liberal democracies are looking to
China’s tools for limiting the outbreak and
wondering whether they should adopt some of
those authoritarian methods. Over the past
decade, China has been building a digital
authoritarian surveillance state at home while
vying with the United States on the international
stage to determine global standards and shape
key network infrastructure, exporting 5G
technology and Orwellian systems of facial
recognition abroad. The overlap of these two
global disruptions—the epidemiological and the
technological—will shape the next few years of
global history.
East Asian countries have demonstrated that a
robust regime of surveillance is essential to
fighting a pandemic. Western democracies must
rise to meet the need for “democratic
surveillance” to protect their own populations.
But what models can the West demonstrate that
take advantage of the great benefits of AI-
enabled surveillance without sacrificing liberal
values?
Although poorly understood at the time, one of
the biggest long-term impacts of the September
11 attacks was expanded surveillance in the
United States and other democracies, by both
public and private sectors. Similarly, one of
COVID-19’s most important long-term impacts
will be the reshaping of digital surveillance
across the globe, prompted by the public health
need to more closely monitor citizens. The stakes
are high. If democracies fail to turn the future of
global surveillance in their favor, digital
authoritarian competitors stand ready to offer
their own model to the world.
THE WATCHFUL JOHN SNOW
Battling epidemics has long required the
monitoring of populations to understand and
then limit the spread of disease. One of the
founders of epidemiology pioneered the use of
surveillance to tackle infectious disease (just a
mile from the London medical school where I
studied). He was a doctor named John Snow.
Asiatic cholera first arrived in the United
Kingdom in 1831. That first wave killed
thousands and outbreaks recurred for years
afterward. One of those, in 1853, killed over
10,000 Britons.
In August and September 1854, the London
neighborhood of Soho endured a terrible
outbreak. Over three days, 127 people around a
single street died. Snow lived nearby, and his
local contacts allowed him to monitor the
epidemic. He combed the district, interviewing
the families of victims. His findings led him to a
water pump that proved to be the source of the
outbreak. With a microscope, he found suspicious
“white, flocculent particles” in the water. About
ten days into the outbreak, he persuaded local
authorities to remove the pump handle as an
experiment. Cholera cases in the neighborhood
swiftly dropped. Snow went on to carefully trace
cases, compile data, and persuade authorities
and medical practitioners of the connection
between water and the spread of cholera.
Since Snow’s day, every functioning state has
built institutions that attempt to safeguard public
health. Modern public health methods and
practices have saved hundreds of millions of
lives. And each generation since Snow has used
ever more powerful tools of surveillance in the
service of the common good.
The United Kingdom became more
democratic even as the state adopted more
powers of surveillance.
Indeed, more broadly, surveillance was central to
a great deal of social and economic progress
over the past two centuries. In the United
Kingdom, key nineteenth-century key advances—
such as those enabled by the Factory Acts that
protected child and adult workers—required new
regimes of inspection. The initial four-man
inspectorate founded to enforce limits on child
factory labor was tiny, but its precedent was
enormous. Authorities created new police
forces not on existing or overseas models of the
secret police but instead to be “consistent with
the character of a free country.” The British
example also illustrated how proliferating habits
of surveillance didn’t undermine democracy; the
United Kingdom’s parliamentary system became
more democratic even as the state adopted more
powers of surveillance. For good or ill, the story
of economic and political development in many
democratic countries is inextricable from the
expansion of the state’s ability to monitor its
citizenry.
Of course, not all of the state’s uses of
surveillance are benign. Throughout the
twentieth century, the governments of ostensibly
democratic countries used intrusive surveillance
techniques such as wiretaps to monitor political
rivals and suppress dissent. In the wake of the
September 11 attacks, the U.S. government
expanded its powers, including broadening
warrantless surveillance by the National Security
Agency and establishing the domestic Total
Information Awareness project that aimed to
identify terrorist suspects through sifting vast
amounts of digital data. The turn toward greater
surveillance after 9/11 had knock-on effects in
the private sector: the United States did not
adopt commercial privacy protections that would
have guarded the data of individuals, thereby
enabling the business models of companies such
as Facebook and Google that profit from
gathering such data.
COVID AND CONTROL
Just as the September 11 attacks ushered in new
surveillance practices in the United States, the
coronavirus pandemic might do the same for
many nations around the world. Afflicted
countries are all eager to better control their
citizens. Every functioning state now has a public
health strategy to tackle COVID-19 that
emphasizes both monitoring residents and trying
to influence their behavior. But neither the
United States nor European countries have used
the widespread and intrusive surveillance
methods applied in East Asia. So far, the Western
approach promises to be much less successful
than East Asian strategies.
Consider the strategies of five East Asian
countries—ranging from the democracies of
South Korea and Taiwan to the authoritarian
Chinese state—that all relied on prominent
surveillance methods. South Korea has so far
successfully curbed the spread of COVID-19
using classic public health surveillance through
large-scale testing. But Seoul has also intrusively
tracked down potentially infected individuals by
looking at credit card transactions, CCTV footage,
and other data. Local authorities have released
personal data, sometimes with the consequence
that individuals can be identified publicly. Korean
officials can enforce self-quarantine through
a location-tracking smartphone app.
Taiwan has kept the number of cases very low by
employing strict surveillance of people coming
into the country and widely distributing that
information. In February, for instance, Taiwan
announced that all hospitals, clinics, and
pharmacies across the country could access their
patients’ travel histories. Integrating public- and
private-sector databases in such ways would
prove difficult in the United Kingdom or the
United States or under existing European Union
regulations. Just as in South Korea, officials in
Taiwan use phone apps to enforce the self-
quarantine of suspected infected individuals.
The Western approach promises to be much
less successful than East Asian strategies.
Hong Kong issues all new arrivals an electronic
wristband that monitors whether they violate
quarantine. Singapore has kept a lid on the
pandemic using CCTV footage and the
investigative powers of the police: refusal to
cooperate with public health requirements is
illegal.
China’s sheer size makes it the most significant
case. Beijing has successfully curbed the spread
of the disease. Yes, the pandemic originated in
China, but that doesn’t diminish the tangible
success of China’s strategy of heavy surveillance.
Its “grid management” system divides the
country into tiny sections and assigns people to
watch over one another. Over a million local
monitors log movements, take temperatures,
and enforce rules about residents’ activities.
At the same time, China has also harnessed its
panoply of digital tools. State-run rail companies,
airlines, and the major telecom providers all
require customers to present government-issued
identity cards to buy SIM cards or tickets,
enabling unusually precise mass surveillance of
individuals who traveled through certain regions.
Color-coded smartphone apps tag people as
green (free to travel through city checkpoints) or
as orange or red (subject to restrictions on
movement). Authorities in Beijing have employed
facial recognition algorithms to identify
commuters who aren’t wearing a mask or who
aren’t wearing one properly.
TOWARD DEMOCRATIC SURVEILLANCE
Although many East Asian countries have been
able to contain the disease, Western
democracies seem to have been caught
unprepared. Since public health strategies
depend on the surveillance of local populations,
Western governments will face huge pressure to
increase their surveillance capabilities to ward off
future pandemics. Epidemiologists, for instance,
still anticipate a flu pandemic in the near future
that may kill tens of millions.
As a public health emergency, the coronavirus
pandemic highlights the strengths of the
powerful surveillance tools often deployed by
authoritarian states such as China. Liberal
democracies do need to find ways to take
advantage of AI-related surveillance, while
ensuring that these technologies don’t infringe
dangerously on the rights of individuals. And they
must contend with China’s ambitious global
effort to pose an alternative system to the liberal
democratic one.
China exports its digital authoritarian model
through endeavors such as the “Digital Silk
Road,” the technological arm of China’s
infrastructure and investment Belt and Road
Initiative. That effort alone has amassed over
$17 billion in loans and investments, including
funding for telecom networks, e-commerce,
mobile payment systems, and big-data projects
around the world. Beijing competes fiercely with
democracies in shaping the digital future—
wrestling, for instance, over technical standards
bodies such as the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) at the United
Nations.
There is nothing oxymoronic about the idea
of “democratic surveillance.”
Western liberal democracies must be unafraid in
trying to sharpen their powers of surveillance for
public health purposes. There is nothing
oxymoronic about the idea of “democratic
surveillance.” After all, in the past two centuries,
the United States and United Kingdom have
simultaneously strengthened their democratic
institutions while increasing their powers of
surveillance. Looking ahead, liberal democracies
should identify which methods practiced in East
Asia to contain COVID-19 are worthy of emulation
and avoid those requiring intrusive surveillance.
In particular, Western countries should learn from
the speed and scale of interventions in East Asia.
Every functioning, large democratic state in
normal times employs thousands of “John
Snows”—public health officials and the facilities
they manage for contact tracing and testing—but
democracies also need to build reserve
capabilities to rapidly scale that capacity up to
tens or hundreds of thousands of John Snows.
These reserve surveillance forces should be
made democratically accountable under
legislation, and they should be embedded in
national public health bodies such as the United
States’ Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and in local public health
organizations. Such a structure would eschew the
use of security services, the police, the military,
and intrusive mass surveillance. Public health
data should be ferociously ring-fenced and siloed
and not routinely augmented by credit card,
CCTV, or mass immigration data.
As demonstrated by Taiwan, government
transparency and an engaged civil society are
important in battling a pandemic. The private
sector can help bolster reserve capabilities to
surge ventilators or medical tests, but
democracies should steer digital technology
companies away from data grabs and toward
developing effective, transparent tools that
aggressively shield individual privacy. A reserve
army of John Snows must be built to boost public
health efforts, not to hoard personal information
for other uses.
After developing this model domestically,
democracies must try to export it globally as the
world rebuilds in the wake of the pandemic.
Democracies must redouble efforts to ensure
that the global standards—for AI, digitally
connected objects (such as cars or refrigerators),
and even the Internet itself—now being shaped
in the ITU and other forums do not have
authoritarian habits of surveillance baked into
their design. Similarly, they must work through
international agencies such as the World Health
Organization, as well as academic and other
networks, to ensure that democratic principles
govern international thinking about public health.
Democracies must recognize that while intrusive
surveillance may have helped China control the
spread of the disease, authoritarian
disingenuousness and a lack of transparency
were a prime cause of the outbreak in the first
place. But if they are to be successful in their
global competition with authoritarian states such
as China, liberal democracies cannot simply
preach. They must also demonstrate success.
