I’ll go with the smart phone scrutiny

For civil libertarians, these are alarming times — but less alarming than they might be. During a pandemic, when everyone agrees life cannot go on as normal, people who place maximum value on individual freedom are liable to look rather selfish. “Trust our leaders” types get a big boost.

But if Canadian officialdom has not botched its response to this crisis, neither has it excelled. Theresa Tam’s defenders are right that official advice will naturally change over the course of a pandemic — but nothing justifies her proactive downplaying of the COVID-19 risk at a time when several Canadian governments were, we now know, woefully unprepared.

The pandemic doesn’t care that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went to Harrington Lake, against advice from three governments including his own to stay away from any second homes — but it would have been so bloody easy for him not to go, to set an example. It’s equally inconsequential that Andrew Scheer added six more human beings than necessary to a government charter flight from Regina to Ottawa — and it would have been equally easy for him not to bring his family along.

Meanwhile, certain big Canadian cities have so obviously overstepped the mark, by cracking down on perfectly safe behaviours — walking in parks, notably — as to highlight the value of some don’t-tread-on-me pushback. An unscientific survey of social media suggests not a single real human being supports the City of Ottawa’s latest ridiculousness: Days after its bylaw officers threatened a father and son for kicking a ball around, fined a man $880 for walking his dog, and allegedly assaulted a man questioning his eviction from a park — none of which seems to be supported by the provincial emergency act they were ostensibly enforcing — a public health official now advises against exchanging properly distanced outdoor pleasantries with one’s neighbours lest it “turn into a parking lot or backyard party.” (Don’t laugh: Studio 54 was a cozy little jazz bar before Mick Jagger and Debbie Harry showed up one night with some records and a pound of blow.)

For civil libertarians who remember life before smart phones, meanwhile, the plan Google and Apple are working on to help governments control COVID-19 might as well be custom-designed to induce heebie-jeebies. The basic idea is that your phone’s operating system would reach out to other phones via Bluetooth and record the date, time, duration and location of the meeting. No personal information need be attached to those data points, just the identity of the device. When someone reports a COVID-19 diagnosis on an app, using a code provided by their public health department, devices that had been nearby would receive a warning that their owners might have been exposed, and should take such measures as local authorities advise.

It could be the stuff of dystopian sci-fi. You can just see the guy with the giant translucent computer screen shouting “magnify! Enhance!” Really, though, this comes down to a simple question: Whom do you least distrust? A co-production between Google, which is not at all known for respecting users’ privacy, and Apple, which at least seems to make an effort? Or governments?

Tracing the contacts of sick people isn’t new, after all. It’s especially common in managing outbreaks of tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases. And it always puts privacy at some risk. To take an extreme example, imagine being HIV-positive in 1988. President Reagan’s Commission on AIDS heard expert testimony that the virus could be transmitted via toilet seats and improperly washed cutlery, and that “it is dangerous and misleading to endorse condom use as a protective measure.” A year earlier it was considered an extraordinary humanitarian gesture that Princess Diana was willing even to hold an AIDS patient’s hand.

Now imagine being interviewed about whom you might have transmitted the virus to, trusting a total stranger to guard your identity both from those people and from the general public. Not only were patients living under a likely death sentence, the overwhelming stigma meant they risked losing everything and everyone they had for whatever time they had left. If there were some compelling commercial motive for Google or Apple to misuse contact-tracing data, that would be one thing. But there doesn’t seem to be.

In any event, it’s not an either-or proposition. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control is mounting a small human army of contact-tracers, director Robert Redfield told NPR last week. “We are going to need a substantial expansion of public health fieldworkers … to make sure that when we open up, we open up for good,” he said — that, and much more testing capacity. That should allow jurisdictions to manage the back half of the curve, once our medical and immune systems aren’t so overwhelmed as to necessitate locking everything down. The hope is that smart phones might simply prove to be a very valuable tool.

As of now, much is left unknown about just how the Google/Apple system would work. Crucially, opinions vary as to how discriminating Bluetooth can be with respect to judging a device’s proximity to another device, especially through clothes or backpacks or briefcases — i.e., in managing the risk of false positives. But the general idea, as it has been reported, strikes me as compellingly simple and elegant. The risk that it doesn’t work well strikes me as more worrying than that it might be used against us. After all, depending on the jurisdiction, human contact-tracers might have considerably more power to intrude on your business — credit card statements, public transit usage, etc. — and far less efficiently.

Indeed, it has been an interesting decade or so for people — I am one — who instinctively abhor the idea of a society under surveillance. There’s no question that new technologies, deployed by governments, can and do threaten our freedoms — often for no good reason at all, and at great public expense. But in North America, at least, the ever-growing percentage of daily public life that’s caught on cameras, both public and private, has actually been a boon to the civil libertarians holding governments and their agents to account. Incidents involving police behaviour both horrific (unprovoked shootings) and banal (demands they not be filmed, despite it being perfectly legal) have activated the libertarian instinct in a lot of law-and-order conservatives who would otherwise have taken the cops’ word on just about anything. That’s a huge win. It won’t help fight COVID-19, but if John Q. Bylaw is hassling you just for taking a walk, for heaven’s sake get your smart phone out and make a righteous stink.