Taiwan's new 'electronic fence' for quarantines leads wave of virus monitoring
reuters.com
reuters.com
Of the reported cases, police got involved to track down said persons, and they were fined depending on the severity of the infraction. I don't know if the form DB is now cross-checked with the immigration DB.
If you are visitor and if they need to, within a few hours of landing at an airport and arriving at your destination, you will get a phone call at your destination location/hotel, etc if the government needs to find you -
Have you ever wondered why you fill out those landing / immigration cards that they give you on the plane? For the US and Canada, those are only formalities. For Taiwan, the cards get scanned in and then the authorities will call the number you put on that card to see if you're there or if you've checked into the hotel, for example.
In regular times, this system is mostly used for things like catching overseas males dodging conscription for example, but the system is active already for times like these when it's critical to know where a person has gone after they leave the airport.
So... what happens when you’re not there? I.e. if the government just can’t find you? Does this then translate to a police APB or something?
https://twitter.com/MiloHsieh/status/1241540231595044864?s=1...
Also lack of local sim doesn't mean you aren't transmitting. It just means the towers are choosing not to provide you with service. A SIM's only purpose is to link your usage to a billing account and phone number.
Yes and no. Airplane mode, turning your phone off, etc.
But also, even if your phone is pinging the tower with your device’s IMEI... how would they know it’s your phone’s IMEI? There’s no registry mapping IMEIs to legal identities, in any country, AFAIK. Carriers have that information, but you wouldn’t have yet signed up with any Taiwanese carrier. So the Taiwanese government could only get that information from a foreign carrier.
(Yes, you could plug all the tower pings into a graph DB and run Dynamic Network Analysis to figure out what common unidentified IMEI matches the route pattern you extracted from the CCTV data—but you’re expecting a lot here; that hardly works even when you have tens of thousands of bits of evidence of e.g. a crime ring; and that kind of analysis is one of the “slow checks”, like DNA PCR assaying, that takes months to run—especially if you’re having to go process-of-elimination by adding everyone else’s IMEIs into the graph to find the “UFO” IMEI [which presumes that doesn’t also involve O(N) warrants somehow. I’ll be nice and assume it doesn’t.] Add the fact that the only people trained in Network Analysis will be in your country’s fraud squad, and someone between Customs Enforcement and Fraud will have to come up with the idea of getting the fraud people to use this technique outside of its usual domain of application, and... not seeing it happening.)
Basically, for the Taiwanese government to know your phone’s IMEI, you would have either had to tell them the IMEI on the customs form†; or they would have to ask your previous phone provider in your country of origin what IMEI they last saw registered to your IMSI (in turn attached to the phone number on your customs form); and then, provided your domestic provider had any reason at all to want to answer that question (they certainly wouldn’t be compelled to), then the Taiwanese govt would be able to track you.
But that helps nothing if, again, you just provided the phone number of the hotel you’re staying at as your “contact number” on the customs form, as they ask you to. Then they’d need to take another step back and figure out what your cellular numbers in regular use are, given only your other details, without even knowing what carriers you have relationships with in other countries. (Sure, okay, look it up on LinkedIn. That works for a normal person. I’m assuming a person motivated to hide here.)
It also helps nothing if you bought a new phone at any point between when you last signed up for a SIM in your last country of known residence, and when you showed up in Taiwan; and it also helps nothing if you just set your phone to spoof your IMEI. (IMEIs are like MAC addresses: a hardware-fused default with a software-programmable override!)
† ...or they could read it off the millimeter-wave scan of your phone they took at the airport, if they tune the scanner just so. That solves everything for them except the IMEI spoofing, really.
Think low tech. Taiwan didn't even have a computerized registry when I was born, so everything was done by hand (I can confirm this because when I had to look up my birth certificate, it wasn't in the records! and they had to look up the records by hand - but the records exist and are easily findable by humans)
also, don't neglect a simple phone call from the police to your boss - that's a super easy way to find out what's going on. Especially for Western folks who seem to be tied to their work.
True enough, I guess. Require that you turn all devices on, then either require unlock and look at the IMEIs yourself, or pass the person through a Stingray in an RFID cage.
But I would assume that if Taiwan was doing that, people would notice (requiring turning devices on is a very unusual step) and would have mentioned online somewhere that that’s something that happens when you visit Taiwan.
Also, it still won’t help if this immigration-evader turned super-spy is rolling their spoofed IMEI regularly.
(Also, where would they get the information on who your boss/company is? From your customs form? That’s one of those things too expensive to verify for every case ahead of time, so they won’t bother until they actually want to find you; in other words, that’s one of those things that’s perfectly easy to lie about. From your visa, presuming you need one? Information like that could be entirely outdated by the time you visit.)
They ask you at the customs checkpoint. Human intelligence collection is the custom official's job. Even when coming through Canadian Customs border, they do (and are able to) ask directly: who do you work for. What do you do? What is your job? Do you have family here? Where do you live? How old are you?
Those are level 1 questions for crossing the border at pretty much any country.
Driving through the Peace Arch border crossing into the US, I've been asked all of those questions.
And sure, you could leave it on airplane mode -- but you have to keep in mind that you are eventually going to be found, and I'm not really clear why we're even evading quarantine but when you are found the punishment is going to be much more severe if the government believes that you were intentionally avoiding detection. Keep in mind, Taiwan still punishes drug trafficking with death -- I can't imagine they'd look kindly on intentionally endangering their entire population.
Although upon further thought, IMEI should be fine too. Consider that international travel is mostly shut down right now. I'd be surprised if there are more than 500 international travelers at the airport within 30 minutes of you. They would just check every one against their quarantine reporting status (hint: EVERYONE else will be where they're supposed to be and checking in as part of the procedure) Then all you have to do is remove IMEIs that are at their correct reporting location one by one. I'd guess less than a hour's work given that the reporting is already being handled.
Are these civil servants that have been re-purposed from other jobs? Are they telco company employees?
I detailed my experience in another comment.
I feel mostly the same. That’s what I’m looking forward to after this quarantine. I’m on day 6 as well - The lack of exercise or movement is the worst part.
Off-topic but, I just discovered your music on spotify a few weeks ago and can't stop listening to your albums, amazing stuff man!
The virus will go soon enough, one way or another, the surveillance state built for it, will not.
I guess the issue is not how they do it but if they should do it at all. I think freedom is a balance of what we want and what society needs. If we're living in a society, there's a degree of sacrifice in our personal freedom we must make sometimes. Things like vaccines, limits to speech, and taxes are examples of things that we agree are necessary to run a society that's better for everyone, at a personal cost to our own freedoms or resources. Finding that balance is tricky but I don't think that "maximize personal freedom always" is an approach that always leaves you better off.
The other thing is how much trust you put in your society and the government. Taiwan's government had a rocky past, but it's on a good trajectory of strong personal freedom and democracy now. I can forgive them for using this power in this extreme circumstance, but after all this is done, I'd like to see them review this process and ensure there are the right safeguards and oversights in place.
Off-topic, my son is a big fan. Neon Shore is one of his favorites, so I have that playing as I type.
At the same time they've been making changes to support people who's jobs are going away (tourism is big, it's collapsed) and to keep businesses running (last week), mortgage holidays (today).
It's not going to be easy, there's going to at least be a recession, and we're likely to be cut off in some form for far longer than a month.
So yes you can do what China and other Asian countries have done in the West, but you do need real leaders capable of framing an issue so that the whole society can get behind it
I am American. I live near, and teach at, a large state university -- which has closed for the spring semester and moved to online instruction.
This past Friday there was a house party across the street -- presumably all students. Usually I am very chill, but this time I called the cops.
Culture works in conjunction with good policy and leadership. I would be wary of attributing too much to the relatively immutable and hand-wavy notion of culture.
I disagree. There are idiots in Taiwan that can ruin it just like anywhere. One nightclubber violating quarantine was just fined the amount cited in this article ($30k USD).
Taiwan has been able to control the virus as a direct result of electing Tsai Ing-wen in January 2020. Her Vice President managed the SARS outbreak for Taiwan in 2002-2004, and since Taiwan was not allowed to participate in the WHO, they had to figure out for themselves how to deal with that outbreak. They are now better prepared.
Tsai Ing-wen's opposing candidate, Han Kuo-yu, wanted to unify with China. He appeared to have momentum from winning the mayoral election in Kaohsiung, which is the 2nd largest city in Taiwan. Prior to his win there in 2018, Kaohsiung had always had a DPP mayor, DPP having been founded by people who fought for an end to martial law and the beginning of elections.
In fact, the elections in Taiwan were on January 11 and may have played a role in China's delay in notifying the world community about the outbreak. The doctor who wanted to share the news (and has since died due to contracting the virus) was detained on January 1st, and China did not announce the outbreak until January 20th.
Chinese-backed media was pushing Han Kuo-yu very hard during this election, spreading lots of fake news, and it was not clear whether or not he would pull an out-of-nowhere win like the other right-wing nuts who've been elected all over the world. Had he been elected, things would be different. I doubt he would have shut down flights to China. Fortunately, the Taiwanese people gave Tsai Ing-wen the biggest margin of victory Taiwan has ever seen in a presidential election.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcc...
This here is really the problem, none of these emergency changes should necessarily become permanent. Income tax started out as a war fund some one or two hundred years ago...
But I sense we are fighting human nature.
Personally, I'd rather take my risks and live free.
The German approach mentioned above is better in my view. I believe we can find ways to be effective and protect people's civil rights.
Prior to industrialization almost all profit surpluses accrued to the elite, who always were taxed quite heavily. Industrialization meant the rise of the wage-earning middle-class and a shift in wealth (not to mention expenditures), thus the income tax.
That's not at all what they hoped to create. The colonists didn't write no taxation or minimize taxation but no taxation without representation. Don't take my word for it, though, they wrote up a whole list of grievances (most of which have to do with the representation bit): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievances_of_the_United_State...
They were happy to tax themselves -- they just didn't want to get taxed by England.
Why do you think so? My reading of history is that the term 'loyalist' wasn't coined until well after the Boston tea party and several people who were later considered loyalists were participants in that event. It wasn't until it was clear that King George wouldn't respect their rights as Englishmen (three years later) that the patriots drafted the declaration of independence and the revolution began.
The actual list of grievances in the declaration of independence were focused mostly on self determination and representation, not taxes:
1. He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most necessary for the public good
2. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
3. He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only
4. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
and so on.
https://www.alcoholproblemsandsolutions.org/taxes-and-prohib...
People here are mostly calm, cautious and despite a few outliers have largely high compliance rates from everything I see on the streets.
More authoritarian governments have the clear upper hand in fighting COVID-19, but I'm very curious how this will play out and if we can weather this situation just as well as a free and privacy-sensitive liberal democracy.
It would be very heartening if the German strategy works.
And I really like the way Germany remains consistently conscious of personal values, things like rejecting mass surveillance and looking for another way. It's one of the things I like best about Germany.
But it really depends how people behave next.
In the UK, the government has announcement a bigger lockdown with strong rules and enforcement, because at the weekend masses of people were simply ignoring requests to socially distance. Too many people were using the "time off" to go on holidays and cluster in high density situations, completely ignoring all health advice for the protection of themselves and others.
The German approach of "you're free to go around, but don't meet with more than one person" will only work if people actually comply.
this is pretty easy to enforce:
see N>2 people, fine/ticket/arrest/whatever.
The UK barely has enough to deal with crime at the best of times.
Shouldn't the virus spread little by little so people gain immunity and the hospitals can manage the number of patients? I doubt we can continue this shutdown for 12-18 months (vaccine) and who knows if meds cure it.
So the better strategy might be to not drive the health system to its brink (also not clear how well it could sustain that strain for long anyways) and instead keep infection numbers very low until we have a vaccine (while opening society and the economy as much as possible).
In each case, we need to keep R0 more or less exactly at 1.0 . If it is any bigger, we have exponential spread which will quickly overwhelm the health care system. If it is much smaller, we have gone overboard with containment measures and should relax them to ease the burden for society. The only difference is how much strain is put on the health care system (which is usually already operating close enough to capacity without a pandemic).
It works well here partly I suppose because the local culture doesn't expect you to get very close even at the best of times. One metre of separation is pretty normal so now we cross the road to get out of each other's way.
Not everyone gets it of course and bars are now closed by edict in Oslo because they would not enforce the one metre separation rule.
Shops are open and have signs saying keep a metre apart and places where you queue have marks on the floor to show how much distance this is. Most also have alcohol gels and single use gloves available for those who want to use them.
There are also signs saying please pay by contactless card or mobile app if you can.
I go out for a walk for about an hour every day as usual and now it feels like Sunday every day.
https://www.therakyatpost.com/2020/03/23/what-malaysia-can-l...
""If people don’t have symptoms, they’re put in home quarantine. And home quarantine is very strict. A couple times a day, you’ll get an SMS and you have to click on a link that will show where your phone is.
In case you cheat and leave your phone at home with someone else, the government has people knocking on doors now and then. The penalties are pretty harsh. ""
They took away his PR status.
thats good. Rules are rules, especially in these times.
Not "we'll call it permanent but it doesn't mean anything".
Rules means justice and enforcement too.
You're not supposed to have a different justice system for people on PR than for citizens. They should have jailed the person, if that's what they do to citizens, or done whatever else they do to citizens who break the rules.
If you're on an EP / WP which is then cancelled you have 30 days to get a new visa or leave the country.
PR != Citizenship in any shape or form.
Regular administrative renewal, yes, but aside from that, I guess my complaint is that PR should resemble citizenship better, in matters of justice and in other matters.
People live in PR status for an extraordinarily long time. Decades. Sometimes their whole life after obtaining it.
Nobody should be have to live their lives in "second-class person, second-class justice" mode for such a long time wihout being able to lay down roots. It's not good for individuals and it's not good for society, and it's not right.
The same applies to partners or spouses of citizens.
Generally if you're an immigrant partner or spouse of a citizen, you live a second-class life, with second-class justice and second-class healthcare, because you know everythig you have can be taken away by one bad domestic argument. All it takes is uncertainty about a breakdown of the relationship for you to be remainded that you can lose just arout everything you have and value in life. So suck it up and be a good wife/husband, now fetch me my dinner etc.
There should at least be reasonable time limits on such second-class status, purely on moral and natural justice grounds.
Alot of the benefits of PR have been taken away or reduced over the last 8 years that i've lived here.
Kill one to warn hundred
As a tourist, I had to provide a phone number of a contact person in Taiwan upon my arrival. They call the number and confirm it works before you even leave the CDC checkpoint at the airport. You also self report your health condition. I then stood in line for 4 hours to get a special taxi to my place of quarantine. Taking public transport is forbidden. Before finally getting into the taxi, I was sprayed all over (including the bottom of my shoes) with with I presume was disinfectant.
I was later requested to add a police officer on the social media platform Line, through which I’m now asked daily how I’m feeling, and offered help if I need anything. However I don’t think they can track my position through it.
There’s a stall selling cheap SIM cards for tourists at the airport, but it’s past the CDC checkpoint, so no tourist has a local number to provide. Perhaps they should move it upstream (and just provide the cards for free), if they want this “electronic fence” to be watertight. I’m not sure but I think I could technically go wherever I pleased right now.
Other passengers provided the number of their hotel. The CDC called the hotel and (I believe) checked whether they were aware that these passengers were about to self-quarantine there.
Edit: even if you arrived without having anything booked at all, you can pay to stay at a designated quarantine hotel, though that is more expensive.
Also note that Taiwan doesn’t grant the “visa exemption” usually granted to tourists, when they now arrive from countries assessed as level 3 (requiring home quarantine). I was able to enter during a short window of time where home quarantine was instated but the new visa rules were not yet in effect. So I think it isn’t usual for the situation you described to occur.
Today Taiwan fined a guy $33k USD for breaking quarantine by going to a nightclub (not a positive COVID case just a mandatory isolation due to travelling):
https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/heavy-fine-for-taiwan-man-for-...
They aren't joking about the fines.
Taiwanese Dollars isn't that shitty (yet)
To balance things out, they are paying a $466 stipend for those that complete the quarantine.
This sound similar to ankle-bracelet-level Parole / house arrest structures. In fact, I'd prefer that because it would only be providing a single source of sensor data to the government instead of possibly making my entire phone and location history accessible.
Freedom for everyone also means freedom for people to band together and decide not to want anything to do with those who don't want to follow their rules.
Especially in this case, where the health risk arguably makes it aggression to try to force contact on others.
There is surely a compromise option here as well where the government does not get the data and/or you do not give everything up in order to achieve this outcome?
Even a strict agreement about what specific data goes to the government, for how long, or having private companies or a purposely formed non-profit entity handle this would be better than handing your phone to your government.
I'm hardly a libertarian but I do think it's important to consider how best to protect hard won freedoms before running toward the expedient, safe-feeling choice.
> Officials also call twice a day to ensure people don’t avoid tracking by leaving their phones at home.
I'd hate this so much. I get why they feel it's necessary, I do. But I still absolutely hate this.
I hope stuff like this doesn't get nomralized. Especially in other non-first-world countries
Imagine this being rolled out for the flu.
“CDC estimates that the burden of illness during the 2017–2018 season was high with an estimated 45 million people getting sick with influenza, 21 million people going to a health care provider, 810,000 hospitalizations, and 61,000 deaths from influenza.”
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden-averted/2017-2018.htm
The panic is at least in part responsible for the present havoc that has been caused to the healthcare system (again in the US). Forecast havoc is all disease.
Interesting side effect of the social distancing is that it has materially reduced influenza numbers as well. Take a look at some of the recent stats at https://healthweather.us. Many states are dropping below average fever counts.
Except Florida.
I think what folks working in ICUs think about flu is probably more complex than what they are saying right now; most people in ICUs are dealing with clear and present dangers with the technical systems that they have. What matters more is researchers and folks who do aggregate analysis of costs on a countrywide or larger basis, averaged over longer times, and considering second-order effects.
Presumably if this became the new norm then we would up our hospital capacity to match and then re-adjust our life expectancy numbers as well.
By that definition then "not having capacity" means that people who go to the ER have to get turned away based on medical triaging.
> In our jurisdiction of just over 4 million people, we have 191 positive tests and 5 deaths. The number of new cases is already tiny, so how much lower do they have to go before we can switch to targeted interventions?
Targetted interventions may not be sufficient if you're at the leading each of the wave - the exponentially rising part, or after the inflection point but still rising. In that phase the number of people actually carrying the virus and passing it on is much higher than the number of positive tests, most of them are asymptomatic spreading it (or were before shutdown), and nobody knows who they are. It can be at the start of an exponential growth, even with small numbers, and even if the numbers dropped temporarily.
> so how much lower do they have to go before we can switch to targeted interventions?
It totally depends why they are low, and for how long.
Their entire strategy was one of targeted isolation rather than blanket shutdowns.
They've had one of the best results so far. Some of the responses out of the west really comes across as a kneejerk reactions by leaders who don't have the slightest clue what to do.
1. Shut down most of the economy to dampen the enormity of the tidal wave as peak pandemic hits, to reduce the overwhelm in intensive care units, and thereby reduce deaths.
2. After the peak (shape and size altered by 1) has passed and it is decaying, if the shutdown ends abruptly then the pandemic here will start up all over again. So instead, the shutdown will be eased off alongside extensive personal testing and individually self-targeted isolation.
I worry that 2 won't work so well because there are a lot of people who will turn into spreaders: Test negative at home for "had the virus", but in the phase where people who had the virus can get back out, will be happy to get out and pretend they had it already had it, hidden in plain sight among those who have. After all we already saw, here in the UK, that a lot of people are happy to be spreaders on the grounds that "only sick and old people are dying anyway".
The key here is that we understand it to be for the common good. Whereas most authoritarianism is to force people to fit the same mold, here it has an application in keeping people from hurting each other by their actions.
I know in my case I did a couple shopping trips before the panic buying started. I bought nothing at all out of the ordinary but I did stock my house up a bit more than average on various things. You multiply that by the majority of people and it's not hard to clear out a store.
What we want to avoid is stupid responses; for example, for all the people complaining that you needed an ID to travel on an airplane domestically in the US after 9/11, the real problems were the increased security theater- unnecessary changes that mainly existed to make people feel confident while travelling.
Even strict libertarians believe in having a government to deal with crime, war and epidemics.
"Authoritarianism" is something else.
Taiwan has been first world since the 1950’s (just to clarify to others reading the thread).
Hint: or was.
In the technical sense, yes. By the same token, Ireland and Sweden are also "third world".
> Taiwan’s electronic fence has drawn some complaints for its intrusiveness.
> “It’s creepy that the government is teaming up with telecommunications companies to track our phones,” said a flight attendant in Taipei who was put under 14-day quarantine after returning from Europe in mid-March.
> The woman, who identified herself as Xiaomei, said she was scolded by a local administrator after failing to pick up a check-in phone call in the morning when she was asleep.
> “They said the police will come to me if I missed another phone call,” she said. “I’m treated like a prisoner.”
That's the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy. You can have at least a little trust in a democracy to do the right thing when it does the necessary evil.
This pandemic isn't a reason to take the pressure of china when it comes to human rights. Quite the opposite.
[1] https://foreigntalentact.ndc.gov.tw/en/cp.aspx?n=128B875DE9C...
Yeah until after the coronavirus craziness is over and the (now tested) system is used by China to round up dissenters
Where are these dissenters? China, Taiwan, or elsewhere?
Joking aside, and I suppose privacy concerns aside, this measure is better than nothing and is also less draconian than the physical enforcement by police that was seen in mainland China.
i was just responding in the tone of the thread
absolutely amazing
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
This is just 3 days after the publication of the Reuters article, so it seems like it may be growing at similar rates to elsewhere (doubling every 3 days), just from a low base?