Is Our Privacy Gone?

Utah Jazz basketball player Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 on March 11, 2020. That night, the NBA suspended its season. Over the following days, other pillars of American culture, such as education systems and in-person workplaces, began to shut down. By the end of the next week, New York and many other states had completely halted or banned in-person interaction and limited the economy to essential businesses. Over the following month, the world has seemed to acclimate to the new circumstances of living. The social distancing guidelines developed to stop the spread have largely been approved by the American people, and the oft-mentioned curve seems to have begun its decline in New York. Regardless, comments by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti suggest that the world as we know it will not reopen until 2021. If the current compliance with public health rules and the long-term projections stay constant, the impressions COVID-19 will leave on our society may be grand.

Though America has faced many hardships over the last two decades, none have been as major as the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The brutality and shock of the attack have scarred Americans for the past 19 years. With approximately 2,700 New Yorkers killed, an attack of such magnitude was unprecedented in mainland America. But 11,477 New Yorkers have died due to COVID-19 as of Thursday, April 16. Though the emotional impact left by the World Trade Center attacks may never be matched, the loss of life due to COVID-19 has greatly passed the mark, and the disorientation felt because of it may be similar. These two events are two of the greatest concentrated losses of life in recent American memory, and look at how we have responded to them.

The United States examined the causes that led to the September 11 attacks. There were two courses of action taken in response. One was increased security in airports and on planes, which included the implementation of the Transportation Security Administration. The other major action was the passage of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, better known as the USA PATRIOT Act. The PATRIOT Act focused on increasing surveillance and other measures to protect national security interests. With the public deeply hurt by the attacks, looking for blood against the terrorist organization responsible, Al-Qaeda, and looking to prevent anything like the attacks from happening again, the act was passed with overwhelming support and signed into law by President George W. Bush.

Though the passage of a massive bill to protect American lives and interests is clearly crucial, the PATRIOT Act has several issues that make its overall usage concerning. There are several provisions that raise red flags. Documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed that the government had been collecting the phone records of every phone carrier subscriber, using Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act as the basis for the action. Other sections, 206 and 207, allow for wiretapping of every device at the behest of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the surveillance of any person suspected to be part of international surveillance, whether they are actually connected or not. Another controversial provision allows for FBI agents to issue National Security Letters, which grant access to phone records, computer records, credit history, and banking history. The information contained in the National Security Letters is never destroyed, regardless of innocence, and is rarely useful in uncovering terrorists.

Even worse, multiple provisions of the Act have been deemed unconstitutional, as they violate the Fourth Amendment, attempting to shortcut the need for probable cause. Even the aforementioned Section 215 has been declared illegal under federal law, though not unconstitutional. Despite the controversy and obvious concerns about the security of the American people, expiring portions of the Act have been repeatedly reauthorized over the last 19 years bipartisanly, though not always completely by choice. Last winter, when Congress passed a bill to fund the government and avoid a shutdown, the reauthorization of the expiring sections, including the three mentioned before, were forced into the bill. Though some representatives were unhappy, such as Illinois Representative Bobby Rush, they determined that “[they] must focus on the bigger picture here.” The PATRIOT Act is a lasting staple of American legislation since the September 11 attacks, and though the reasoning and expansions have a strong basis in American interests, they raise worries regarding the security of American people.

There is a precedence for extreme circumstances resulting in the expansion of American surveillance, and it seems to be coming into play. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner has recently come under fire for directing a team that is allegedly searching to build a national COVID-19 surveillance system. The database would give the government a view of the usage of hospitals and their ability to contain patients, as well as help states determine the need for social distancing. Though those policies would have tremendous positive impacts on American life, they would massively increase the government’s access to and usage of private health data. They raise the same flags that the PATRIOT Act did, according to surveillance experts. This also may be due to the increase in personal location data observation, even though it is anonymized. This is part of an international trend of democratic countries taking extreme surveillance measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. South Korea and Italy have compiled several databases of personal data and location tracking to identify the actions and risks taken by COVID-19 patients. Israel has developed a database of location data, intended to be used for counterterrorism, to find citizens that may have been exposed. Similarly, American officials are using mobile advertising firms to track the existence of crowds. In Australia, a bill was passed that allowed the installation of surveillance devices in homes to monitor quarantines.

As the world is changing around us, surveillance is only expanding. Though the motivation for the expansion is rooted in the interests of the American people, a startling trend is developing. As we take part in and recover from traumatic events, we are consistently losing our privacy. After the World Trade Center attacks, we lost key privacies that we have yet to recover. In this fight to save our lives, we must stay vigilant to make sure we do not lose anything else and hold the government accountable for the actions it attempts to take. We should fear a world where we are constantly monitored in our personal lives; a broken quarantine leads to your information being broadcasted to any interested properties. Everything you do is observed, and your employer, the police, your healthcare provider, and your landlord know of your intimate movements. Though hypothetical, the repeated surrender of our privacy has been exploited. The next time we face a crisis of such magnitude, we must make sure to reflect on the September 11 attacks, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the privacy that was put at stake in reaction to them.