COVID19 – Sledgehammer Attack On Right To Organise

Written By: Bill Posters

The COVID19 pandemic has provided governments around the world with the opportunity to roll out new highly invasive surveillance systems and provided justification for already established ones. Rights activists have begun to question to what extent government and corporate snooping is necessary to protect society during the outbreak of a highly infectious disease and, even more worryingly, whether states will give up their enhanced powers once the emergency passes. Governments have a long history of eagerly snapping up new powers and only very reluctantly relinquishing them.

As country after country records exponentially growing numbers of COVID19 cases, governments have unveiled new laws, or dusted off emergency provisions hidden in old laws, granting them increased emergency powers to surveil, control and restrict the lives of their citizens. South Korea, Mainland China and Hong Kong were among the first to develop compulsory mobile phone apps that harvest a wealth of personal information and inform authorities of where people are at all times12. In Mainland China, any resident who wishes to enter any public space, or in many cases their own apartment complex, must scan a QR code and display their “Healthcode” before being allowed to enter. To receive this code, an app must be downloaded; all permissions must be given including personal information such as national ID card number and location information. Refusing to use this app means being imprisoned in one’s own home and the likely loss of one’s job as they won’t be allowed into public spaces or workplaces. According to Politico, Europe is now jumping on the bandwagon as “Spain, Romania, Slovakia and Poland have already created their own version of these apps”.3

On March 29th, the Australian government released its coronavirus information app which was believed to not collect any personal information beyond your phone number and didn’t involve real time tracking4. However, the government has been learning from Singapore and taking notes on how to develop their own tracking app5. Australia’s Chief Medical Officer stated, “We’ve actually got the code from Singapore, we’re very keen to use it and use it perhaps even more extensively than Singapore,”6. The Australian government is at pains to claim that the tracking app will be voluntary and urged people to download the little spy on their phones, yet Morrison couldn’t help spilling the beans in a plausibly deniable way, saying: “My preference is not to do that[make it mandatory], my preference is to give Australians the go of getting it right … I don’t want to be drawn on that [making it mandatory], I want to give Australians the opportunity to get it right,”7. The media war to ram tracking down Australian’s throats has already begun. One particularly on the nose ABC editorial claimed, “Conspiracy theorists would have us believe that the Government can access mobile phone technology and public security cameras to achieve mass surveillance — but it can’t.”8. This is of course a blatant lie, as actual academic research has proven the “conspiracy theorists” correct9. The author of that amazing anti-privacy hot take works for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an organisation founded by the Australian government, with government appointed directors, partly funded by the Department of Defence and that has received US State Department money1011!

Unfortunately, mandatory government tracking apps aren’t the only threat to privacy. Companies providing mobile phone services have been quick to offer metadata to authorities, allowing them to pinpoint who has been where12. In other countries, such as Israel and Iran, intelligence agencies have been deployed to spy on and track the movements of citizens13. European governments have been floating new anti-privacy laws and contacting telecommunications companies to demand metadata on their customers, despite the fact that Europe is supposed to have the strongest privacy protections in the world14.One specific example of this was Deutsche Telekom turning over the data of 46 million customers to a German government agency15.

Privacy rights activists are sounding the alarm about the dangers of allowing greater snooping powers. One danger is that once the powers have been unleashed they will hang around long after the crisis is over. A writer at Forbes commented “The surveillance measures now being imposed on national populations risk permanently altering how much privacy and freedom we have as individuals.”16 Another danger is that governments will use these tools to increase their ability to suppress dissent or other challenges to their rule. Powerful contact tracing tools could easily discover who attended a rally, who they met with before the event, where they met and where they live.

While activists are voicing these concerns there are those who willingly accept the loss of rights without complaint and feel that these measures are justified. Their rationale is that submitting to total surveillance will allow health authorities to contain the spread of the virus and save lives. A German researcher gave an example from his native country where residents demanded curfews be imposed to stop people from congregating in parks at night to hold parties during the outbreak17. He explained that ,”therefore, it’s not difficult to imagine that people will also readily give up their right to privacy in order to allow for measures to track and monitor the spread of the virus….”18. Another European expert commented that “Everyone feels at risk. The personal benefit of briefly giving up your privacy feels much bigger than with terrorist attacks.”19

This kind of argument is as old as time and is regularly used to legitimate pervasive surveillance and police powers. A good example of this rhetoric in play is Beijing’s justification of its “Skynet” surveillance system which Beijing police claim has “100 per cent” coverage20. Beijing police claim the system allows them to keep residents safe and has helped them to solve 22 per cent more cases year on year21. A common debate point wheeled out by Chinese nationalists on Wechat is that they are grateful for the protection of Skynet and would rather live under total surveillance than be robbed by ethnic gangs in Europe’s “lawless” streets. A different argument in support of surveillance during the COVID19 outbreak is that downloading an app and being quarantined at home is a more humane, comfortable and safer option than being quarantined in a detention centre or hospital.

There may well be something to both of these arguments in terms of saving lives during a pandemic but those arguing along these lines in response to legitimate concerns about growing police state control are missing the point. Even if we assume deeply invasive state snooping is both legitimate and preferable to the alternative during a pandemic, it does not negate a couple of important facts. The first is that these new surveillance technologies and techniques have now been developed, tested and deployed on a large scale. Governments now have proof that these techniques work in practice, they already have a tested means of rolling them out and they know that the public will put up with them. All they need to do is generate a climate of fear, whether via “boat people” or “Islamic terror” to justify the permanent application of what were previously “emergency” measures.

Legal protections and democratic rights under capitalism are as flimsy as the paper of the documents that supposedly ensure them. The same proverbial pens that ink the laws can return to strike them out at a moment’s notice. It would mean nothing if “Scotty from Marketing” appeared on TV and promised that certain powers granted during the COVID19 outbreak will be immediately rolled back when life returns to normal because his party could easily draft new legislation extending those powers and, with the Labor Party’s eager support, ram them through parliament turning them into law. Australians saw how fundamental due process rights were denied to CFMEU members in the building industry when they were summoned by the ABCC to secret hearings and threatened with whopping fines and jail time if they refused to answer questions. They also faced the same penalty for refusing to attend or even telling their spouse they were summoned!22 The same can be said of recent attacks on whistle-blowers and journalists.

If one doubts the government’s intentions, they need only hear it from the horse’s mouth. When the interests of massive mining corporations were marginally challenged by short blockades of roads and a mining conference, the state put its oppressive apparatus into overdrive as police brutally beat peaceful protestors. Not satisfied with sending peaceful protestors to the hospital, Scott Morrison immediately addressed the media floating government support for new laws to ban protests and boycotts23. Saying the quiet part loud, the Prime Minister claimed “…we must protect our economy from this great threat”24. Not to be outdone in the race to protect capital from the unwashed masses, Fuhrer of Home Affairs, Peter Dutton called for climate protestors to be jailed and to have any owed welfare payments cut25. This bears repeating: the man in charge of the mega department that controls law enforcement, the Australian Federal Police and Australia’s internal spy agency appears to believe that protestors should be arrested or starved into obedience. Does anyone trust this mob with new draconian emergency powers and wide-scale tracking?

Anyone who doesn’t still have their head stuck in the sand of electoralism and social democracy is likely unsurprised by any of this. Marxists are under no illusion about the role of the state under capitalism. They expect the state to eagerly grasp any powers that will help it to discipline labour on behalf of capital and to ensure that any sparks threatening to light the prairie fire of revolution are snuffed out. To this end the COVID19 pandemic is a golden opportunity for the ruling class to roll out more powerful surveillance tools to make future organising by activists that much harder. Marxists oppose all attempts by the state to increase its oppressive apparatus and fight for expanded democratic rights, such as they are, under capitalism.

This doesn’t stem from a naïve belief in laws but from an understanding that it is much easier to organise for the interests of the working class when the state has been forced to make concessions and allow communist activity. Russian communists organised under intense political repression while being chased by the highly organised and technically skilled Tsarist secret police. Activists became proficient in wearing disguises, sending secret messages and operating clandestine printing presses. However thousands of them were arrested, tortured and executed. Time and time again months of work would be ruined by a single police raid. Imagine how much easier the work of the Bolsheviks would have been if they had benefited from basic democratic rights of association.

In this time of crisis where capitalist governments around the world are eagerly applying new, powerful surveillance tools and have already demonstrated their intent to shut down criticism and protest, it is necessary for communists to take the lead in exposing the power grab and organising the working class to fight for democratic rights. Unlike social democrats whose tactic appears to be wringing their hands and begging governments to perhaps consider toning the powers down later, communists know that only organised, working class struggle is enough to claw rights back from the state. An example of this was in 1969, after years of organising by communists, upwards of 500,000 Australian workers went on strike in support of Clarrie O’Shea and to seek the abolition of penal powers. The strike scared the ruling class which stopped using penal powers against unionists for at least a decade.

The most important message in all of this is that governments like Australia’s, a typical committee of management for the entire capitalist class, must not be trusted to safeguard our rights, including the right to organise. They fear and always seek to weaken that right. Their behaviour during the COVID-19 crisis has exposed their priorities by finding money they insisted could not be found previously to meet people’s needs and then distributed it in ways that favour their corporate backers. They are using the pandemic to venture into authoritarian territory unimaginable in normal times. The lesson from history is that these measures must be resisted to prevent them being used to thwart the efforts of people to secure their basic interests. There are many challenges ahead as capitalism seeks to put the entire cost of the COVID-19 crisis on the backs of workers, and governments must not be allowed any additional ammunition in their war on our class.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/watching-covid-19-surveillance-raises-privacy-fears-200403015854114.html

2 http://www.undp.org/content/seoul_policy_center/en/home/presscenter/articles/2019/korea_s-rapid-innovations-in-the-time-of-covid-19.html

3 https://www.politico.eu/article/coroanvirus-covid19-surveillance-data/

4 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/apps-and-coronavirus-what-you-need-to-know-about-protecting-your-privacy

5 https://www.innovationaus.com/govt-eyes-singapore-covid-19-tracking-app/

6 https://www.zdnet.com/article/australia-looks-to-go-harder-with-use-of-covid-19-contact-tracing-app/

7 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/australias-coronavirus-contact-tracing-app-what-we-know-so-far

8 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-16/coronavirus-tracing-app-should-i-download-it/12151324

9 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0267364913000587?via%3Dihub

10 https://www.aspi.org.au/about-aspi

11 https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/the-think-tank-behind-australia-s-changing-view-of-china-20200131-p53wgp

12 ibid

13 https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/03/14/coronavirus-spy-apps-israel-joins-iran-and-china-tracking-citizens-smartphones-to-fight-covid-19/

14 https://www.politico.eu/article/coroanvirus-covid19-surveillance-data/

15 ibid

16 https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonchandler/2020/03/23/coronavirus-could-infect-privacy-and-civil-liberties-forever/#6cc857a8365d

17 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/watching-covid-19-surveillance-raises-privacy-fears-200403015854114.html

18 ibid

19 https://www.politico.eu/article/coroanvirus-covid19-surveillance-data/

20 https://qz.com/518874/absolutely-everywhere-in-beijing-is-now-covered-by-police-video-surveillance/

21 http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2015-10/05/content_22091634.htm

22 https://theconversation.com/bringing-back-building-watchdog-helps-a-political-agenda-but-not-concerns-about-union-corruption-54051

23 https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/morrison-s-boycott-plan-sparks-free-speech-furore-20191101-p536o1.html

24 ibid

25 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/03/peter-dutton-accused-dictator-urging-welfare-cuts-protesters