Coronavirus hands world leaders sweeping powers they may never give up

LAST WEEK, the mayor of Ecuador’s largest city ordered the international airport’s runway blocked to prevent a KLM airliner from landing to pick up Dutch tourists stranded by the coronavirus.

Cynthia Viteri, who is now subject to an investigation, defended the decision to move police cars onto the tarmac to stop the plane from carrying out its mercy mission as an attempt to protect her city of Guayaquil from the pandemic.

In desperate times like these, leaders on all levels are going to extraordinary lengths to do whatever possible to contain the virus. And while some are one-off moves like the episode in Ecuador, others can be much more invasive — and potentially last long after the virus threat eventually subsides.

Like the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US, the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis of such magnitude that it threatens to change the world in which we live, with ramifications for how leaders govern. Governments are locking down cities with the help of the army, mapping population flows via smartphones and jailing or sequestering quarantine breakers using banks of CCTV and facial recognition cameras backed by artificial intelligence.

The restrictions are unprecedented in peacetime and made possible only by rapid advances in technology. And while citizens across the globe may be willing to sacrifice civil liberties temporarily, history shows that emergency powers can be hard to relinquish.

“A primary concern is that if the public gives governments new surveillance powers to contain COVID-19, then governments will keep these powers after the public health crisis ends,” said Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney at the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “Nearly two decades after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government still uses many of the surveillance technologies it developed in the immediate wake.”

In part, the Chinese Communist Party’s containment measures at the virus epicenter in Wuhan set the tone, with what initially seemed shocking steps to isolate the infected being subsequently adopted in countries with no comparable history of China’s state controls. The lockdown of Wuhan expanded to Hubei province and then other parts of the country.

Chinese authorities followed up with more intrusive measures shaped by decades of experience monitoring citizens for dissent and marshaling state-owned companies to the cause. Authorities sourced data from telecom companies, called on private tech companies to set up virtual health hot lines to trace people exposed to Hubei, and later drew on a sprawling network of Communist Party members and community groups, encouraging citizens to go around doorknocking to monitor their neighbors’ health and movements.

On Tuesday, the symbolism was clear as China lifted long-standing travel restrictions on Wuhan even as lockdowns were implemented or tightened in the UK, Italy and the US.

“China was able to control the outbreak because government was tracking people closely,” said Joy Huang, a white-collar worker in Shanghai. “I don’t want to get tracked, but meanwhile, I don’t want infected people not getting tracked. Freedom has a price.”

The rest of the world is now finding that out.

Already in Hungary, the government has introduced a bill that would give self-styled “illiberal” Prime Minister Viktor Orban the power to rule by decree indefinitely. The opposition tried to slow the bill, but Orban’s coalition has the supermajority it needs to pass the legislation anyway. It includes provisions to impose up to five years in prison on anyone judged to “distort facts” to weaken the government’s “defense measures.”

Russian police meanwhile used Moscow’s sprawling camera network to nab more than 200 people for violating quarantine required after returning from high-risk countries. They’ve deployed one of the world’s most comprehensive facial-recognition systems to monitor more than 13,000 people under mandatory self-isolation.

It’s not just those governments with authoritarian tendencies that are stepping in to restrict their citizens. French President Emmanuel Macron set up a committee to come up with measures to fight the virus that include a possible “mobile identification strategy” for anyone who has been in contact with infected people. That’s after Paris police deployed drones last week to make sure the city’s inhabitants respect confinement rules.

Singapore, which has won praise for mostly containing the virus, recently launched a mobile phone app that uses Bluetooth technology to map close contacts in case a sick person fails to recall all of their social interactions. The app remains voluntary.

Although democratic Taiwan and South Korea have seen success containing the virus, some experts suggest Asia’s experience with pandemics, as well as citizens’ different experience of politics, has enabled slightly more intrusive means of control.

In India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed an unprecedented three-week lockdown across the whole country from midnight Tuesday, officials are tracking mobile phones, pulling out reservation data from airlines and railways, and stamping people’s hands with indelible ink as part of a process to follow suspected infections. Modi’s administration also used the virus as a reason to clear an anti-government protest that had camped out in New Delhi.

Although India has fewer than 700 confirmed cases — less than half of Ireland’s tally — its shutdown is the world’s most severe, and police and vigilantes were filmed on Wednesday beating people standing outside.

Cultural differences mean that such strict controls are running into opposition in the West. In Canada, the health minister warned citizens that failing to self-isolate — like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose wife tested positive for COVID-19 – could bring harsher measures and “put our civil liberties in jeopardy.”

President Donald Trump has fueled the sense that a clampdown is questionable, suggesting that a time limit be set on restrictions to avoid unnecessary damage to the economy, apparently without recourse to medical advice.

Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the US doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a Chinastyle enforcement of stay-at-home policies, because the information available is disaggregated and mostly in the hands of private companies, not the government. “We’re going to have to accept, as with any law in our society, a little bit of noncompliance,” Ms. Granick said.

In Ecuador, meanwhile, Mayor Viteri’s controversial actions to halt a Dutch airliner from landing failed to stem the virus. Hours later, she announced that she had tested positive for COVID-19.