 The novel coronavirus pandemic is causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, wrecking economic devastation, locking down much of the world, and upending communities globally. But going forward, one of the virus's most significant legacies arguably won't be its death toll, or its effect on daily life. But the way the pandemic strengthens another major global disruption from the last few years, the rise and spread of digital surveillance. Let's talk about that. Public health measures have always depended on surveillance, but that has been especially true in government's responses to the coronavirus. China, after initially suppressing news of the outbreak in Wuhan, used its arsenal of surveillance tools to tackle the pandemic. These techniques ranged from deploying hundreds of thousands of neighborhood monitors to log the movements and temperatures of individuals to the mass surveillance of mobile phone, rail and flight data to track down people who had traveled to infected regions. But honestly, we've come to expect this level of mass surveillance from China. It's the rest of the world following in China's footsteps that has become most worrying. Just beyond China's borders, democratic countries in East Asia have also used expansive surveillance powers to battle COVID-19. South Korea, harness CCTV and credit card data to track the movements of millions of citizens. And Taiwan integrated health and other databases, so all Taiwanese hospitals, clinics and pharmacies could access the personal travel information of their patients. While depositories of information like these can be valuable for tracking down at-risk individuals, there's nothing to stop government agencies from tracking people in general now that this information has been compiled. And that's before we even talk about the possibilities of bad actors gaining access to these databases. As they've struggled to contain the spread of the virus, even Western, more liberal democracies are looking at China's tools for limiting the outbreak and wondering if they should adopt some of these more authoritarian methods. What makes this debate even trickier is how effective these methods have been at containing the virus. East Asian countries have demonstrated that a robust regime of surveillance is essential to fighting a pandemic, and Western democracies have been somewhat forced to meet the need for democratic surveillance to protect their own citizens. The expansion of surveillance in response to a crisis isn't anything new. One of the biggest long-term impacts of the September 11th attacks was expanded surveillance in the United States and other democracies by both public and private sectors. After 9-11, the government, through programs at the NSA and CIA, began monitoring millions of Americans who could have any connection to people in global hotspots like Iran, even if there was nothing linking these people to any known terrorist threat. And tens of thousands of people got secretly added to government lists, like the no-fly lists, to be monitored all without ever being accused of wrongdoing. Similarly, one of COVID-19's most important long-term impacts will likely be a similar reshaping of digital surveillance across the globe, prompted by a global health need to more closely monitor citizens. Battling epidemics has long required the monitoring of populations to first understand and then limit the spread of disease. One of the founders of epidemiology, John Snow, no relation, pioneered the use of surveillance to tackle infectious diseases. In 1831, cholera first arrived in the UK. Its first wave killed thousands, and outbreaks kept popping up for years afterwards. In August and September of 1854, the London neighborhood of Soho got hit by an especially bad outbreak. Over three days, 127 people died on a single street. Snow lived nearby, and his local contacts allowed him to monitor the epidemic. He combed the district, interviewing the families of victims. By tracing their comings and goings, he found the source of the outbreak to be a water pump used by the community. About 10 days into the outbreak, he persuaded local authorities to remove the pump handle as an experiment. Almost instantly, cholera cases swiftly declined. Since Snow's day, every functioning state has built institutions that attempt to safeguard public health by a similar means of tracking the spread of infections by tracking the spread of people. These modern public practices have saved hundreds of millions of lives, and each generation since Snow has used ever more powerful tools of surveillance in the service of the perceived common good. Oddly enough, surveillance and freedom don't inherently have to be at odds. In the 20th century, the UK became a far more democratic country, even as the state adopted more powers of surveillance. Key 19th century advances, like those enabled by the factory acts that protected child and adult workers, required new systems for inspection and monitoring of the country's economy. The government made new police forces designed to watch the economy and enforce these new laws. This example illustrates how expanding surveillance capabilities don't have to be at odds with personal freedoms. Of course, not all states use surveillance for the betterment of the people. The governments of seemingly democratic countries use surveillance techniques like wiretaps to monitor political rivals and suppress dissent. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the US government expanded its powers, including broadening warrantless surveillance by the NSA, the aim to identify terrorist suspects through sifting vast amounts of digital data. Think the NSA's massive data collection centers. The turn toward greater surveillance after 9-11 wasn't just limited to the private sector. The US never adopted commercial privacy protections that would have guarded the data of individuals, preventing companies like Facebook and Google from collecting vast amounts of user data with nearly no limits on its use. Just as the September 11 attacks ushered in new surveillance practices in the US, the coronavirus pandemic looks poised to do the very same in many countries around the world. Every functioning state now has a public health strategy to tackle COVID-19 that emphasizes both monitoring residents and trying to influence their behavior through different levels of stay-at-home orders. But neither the US nor Europe have used the widespread and intrusive surveillance methods applied in East Asia, and as a result, the Western approach promises to be much less successful. Consider these strategies of five East Asian countries, ranging from the democracies of South Korea and Taiwan to the authoritarian Chinese state that all relied on prominent surveillance methods. South Korea has so far successfully curbed the spread of COVID-19 using classical public health surveillance through large-scale testing, but Seoul also intrusively tracked down potentially infected individuals by looking at credit card transactions, CCTV footage, and other data. Local authorities even released personal data so individuals could be publicly identified, and Korean officials have taken to enforcing self-quarantine through tracking citizens' smartphone locations. Taiwan has kept the number of cases very low by employing strict surveillance of people coming into the country and widely distributing that information. In February, Taiwan announced that all hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies across the country could access their patients' travel histories. Just as in South Korea, officials in Taiwan used phone apps to enforce the quarantine and keep track of suspected infected individuals, and Hong Kong issued all new arrivals and electronic wristband that tracked their movements and monitored whether they violated quarantine. China's sheer size makes it the most significant case, while the pandemic did originate in China that doesn't diminish the tangible success of their strategy of heavy surveillance to curtail its spread. Its grid management system divides the country into sections and assigns people to watch over one another. Over a million local monitors, log movements, take temperatures, and enforce rules about other residents' activities. At the same time, state-run transportation companies and major telecom providers all require customers to present government-issued IDs to buy tickets and SIM cards, enabling unusually precise mass surveillance of individuals who traveled through certain regions. Authorities in Beijing have employed facial recognition algorithms to identify commuters who aren't wearing a mask or who aren't wearing one properly. And because of China's use of social credit scores that can affect everything from what school you get into to what loans banks will offer you, there are real-world consequences to violating these orders. Since public health strategies depend on the surveillance of local populations, Western governments have faced huge pressure to increase their surveillance capabilities to ward off future pandemics. And the biggest fear is that, after these latest crises pass, the governments won't be quick to give up their newfound surveillance capabilities. Liberal democracies across the world are going to have to grapple with the delicate balance between protecting their citizens and overreaching their powers. And if history is any prelude, they'll struggle to do so. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Everything Science. If you did, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an upload. And remember, there's always more to learn.