[02 February 2021] The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the nature of surveillance —and by extension surveillance studies, an area of scholarship with which intelligence studies has interacted for decades. There is no question that, in almost every country, the need to track and trace the coronavirus disease has triggered an unprecedented growth in the techniques of surveillance. There is also little question that these surveillance techniques —which are primarily based on smartphone applications— have been instrumental in enabling governments to monitor, and in many cases control, the pandemic in their respective territories.
But, as Rose Bernard, Gemma Bowsher and Richard Sullivan (of Conflict and Health Research Group at Kings College London) recently wrote in The American Journal of Public Health, these new participatory or voluntary surveillance techniques are rapidly “obscuring the relationship between health information and traditional government surveillance techniques”. What is more, they pose critical questions relating to effective oversight, as the latter appears to be non-existent for the time being.
In their article, entitled “COVID-19 and the Rise of Participatory SIGINT: An Examination of the Rise in Government Surveillance Through Mobile Applications”, the three authors remind readers that public health measures have traditionally resisted the incorporation of government-led intelligence techniques, such as signals intelligence (SIGINT). But the usefulness of such methods in containing pandemics is now changing that trajectory and is pushing it toward potentially unpredictable directions.
The implications of these developments for intelligence and intelligence studies are apparent. In their paper, Bernard, Bowsher and Sullivan suggest that the rise of participatory SIGINT is a new phenomenon that must be explored as an extension of historical bio-surveillance through the prism of surveillance capitalism, as well as a political, moral and security imperative. The question for intelligence studies is not whether these mechanisms are successful in tracking and containing epidemics and pandemics. Rather the question should be, how quickly can oversight and regulation mechanisms be put in place, given that these are essentially government-sponsored intelligence collection systems? The answer to this question is a pressing one, and must be prioritized by scholars in our field. [EIA]