We need Big Brother to beat this virus

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Don’t let the civil liberties lobby blind us to the fact that greater state surveillance, including ID cards, is required

‘Hands in the air! Step away from the Easter eggs!” The Keystone Coppery of recent weeks has had some people muttering darkly that we are heading the way of a police state. Those who style themselves as defenders of ancient British liberties will soon have bigger fish to fry: the digital surveillance tools that government hopes to use to trace the infected. Prepare for dire warnings of state intrusion and an avalanche of Nineteen Eighty-Four quotes on social media warning that Big Brother is upon us.

Yet if we are to beat a path out of this pandemic without destroying our economy, overblown concerns about threats to our liberties must be countered by pragmatism. To recover some semblance of normality before a vaccine is found, we must accept the need for the state to access more information about ourselves, our health and our whereabouts — and not waste precious weeks arguing about it.

Look east to see how digital surveillance is an integral part of returning to “normal” life. Hong Kong has mandatory tracking wristbands for those in quarantine. In Taiwan the phone-tracking system is known as an “electronic fence”; those who are meant to be in isolation will be visited by the authorities if their phone is turned off. In South Korea the pooling of data from credit card use, mobile phones and CCTV cameras means that they can detail the movements of an infected citizen down to where they sat in the cinema and which bar they went for a beer in afterwards — and in less than ten minutes can trace and contact the woman who was sitting two stools down. Public support for these measures is high, for the simple reason that they are working.

In the West, proposals nowhere near as strong as these are meeting serious opposition. Edward Snowden, patron saint of the paranoid, has warned the digital remedy for this disease will become a disease itself, remaining long after we have been given the all-clear for coronavirus. “Privacy advocates” across Europe are determined to thwart what they see as unacceptable levels of state intrusion. Last month there was an outcry in Germany over plans to require mobile phone operators to hand over customer data, forcing the government to pull the proposals and go back to the drawing board for a softer, voluntary alternative.

Expect similar tussles in Britain, where civil liberties pressure groups are particularly noisy — as demonstrated a few years ago by their successful rebranding of a perfectly sensible piece of legislation as “the snooper’s charter”. Any moves to use our data for public health purposes is bound to stir up complaints. Indeed, when a new NHS contact-tracing app was announced last week, the former head of MI5 Lord Evans of Weardale said it was a “very intrusive set of proposals” that would be a “real intrusion into people’s private lives”.

Such dark warnings seem strangely out of date in an age when we all endlessly volunteer data about ourselves, unthinkingly click “I agree” to the box that pops up with every website we visit, and send information about our wants and desires to big tech companies, who monetise this information. To be comfortable selling our digital souls to Facebook and co and not to our government — which has a clear and life-saving reason for wanting some basic information — would be nonsensical.

The real problem with the NHS app as proposed is that it doesn’t go far enough. It has two major flaws. First, it relies on self-diagnosis, which — given the number of hypochondriacs out there — will be painfully inexact. Such a system needs to be paired with testing on a huge scale to be of any real use. The second issue is that this is voluntary. To be properly effective, over 80 per cent of smartphone users must take it up, a heroically ambitious target given that Singapore’s similar Tracetogether app only had take-up of 12 per cent.

The government must explore less comfortable terrain, beyond voluntarily downloaded apps. Last week a draft memo was leaked suggesting that alternatives included “making use of existing apps and other functions already installed on people’s phones (eg Google Maps)”. Following the leak, the health service’s digital wing fell over itself to deny this: “To be very clear — there have never been [such] plans”.

Why should such defensiveness be necessary? Using smartphone tracking, with all the expected caveats about ensuring anonymity, seems a perfectly proportionate measure given that thousands are dying and parts of our economy are being read the last rites. Indeed, last week an Ipsos Mori poll found that 65 per cent of people agreed with using smartphones to identify those who had been diagnosed, and work out who they had been in contact with.

Another idea that may raise the heart rate of privacy campaigners but which would be useful in the UK’s recovery from this crisis is biometric ID cards. The health secretary has suggested that, down the line, immunity passports may be used to prove the status of those who have overcome the virus. Yet wouldn’t these be too vulnerable to forgery or theft? Far better to have an unforgeable, untransferable, unique document. ID cards would also provide a much richer source of data with which to trace the infected; South Korea’s comprehensive national identity system has been an important part of its success.

The creation of a national ID card system would not exactly be fast work, but who knows how long this crisis will continue or if future pandemics will occur? Besides, this a good idea beyond the current crisis; a stone to kill multiple birds, from voter fraud to welfare abuse, identity theft to illegal immigration (once citizens need a card to access bank accounts, housing and healthcare it will be much harder to melt into anonymity). There will always be high-profile huffing and puffing about such measures, but under that noise is the quiet pragmatism of the British public, who understand that some mild incursions on our privacy may be necessary for the sake of public health. The most recent poll on the subject found that a majority would support even the compulsory carrying of ID cards.

Britain has been too slow on many fronts in the first weeks of this crisis. We must now take seriously the example of other nations who have successfully restored some normality to life, and rapidly develop a system of digital surveillance that is comprehensive and useful enough to map and break chains of infection extremely quickly. Arch civil libertarians might not like it, but our health, prosperity and freedom depends on it.

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