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Comment by briefcomment | Hacker News Reader

It might hard to accept this, but "public health" is now a part of the surveillance justification tool kit too. When it's impossible to argue against measures taken in defense of public health without seeming selfish, why wouldn't it be?

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Can you provid examples of this? De we have examples of public health being leveraged for anything other than public health?

... Are you serious? Did you just wake up from a 20 month nap?

It may be better for me to rephrase this part of my post like this:

> ""public health" is now likely to be a part of the surveillance justification tool kit too"

I don't have any specific examples, but this article gives a good gist of what might be at stake. [1]

I think this is a key quote

> "The Snowden disclosures came twelve years after the initial implementation of the Patriot Act, and it was only last year that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that the subsequent dragnet surveillance employed by the NSA may well have been unconstitutional."

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/government-data-collect...

last may, i recall public health officials and figures coming forward to say that mass protests were acceptable because racism was a greater public health threat than covid. you can see a similar push for gun control using the same rhetoric taking shape

What health officers said is that 1st amendment rights supersede health orders. Perhaps you could link to a health officer or health order saying otherwise?

What did public health officials say about those who protested lockdowns?

I don't recall health officers specifically saying this. But it was public policy in NYC to explicitly not trace infections spread through the George Floyd protests:

https://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-contact-tracers-not-aski...

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/racism-pu...

those health officials couldn't bring themselves to offend the protesters by pointing out that the protests were cesspools of shedding virus. even though the protests were cesspools of shedding virus.

Do you have any references for that? I’ve read a few informal attempts and nobody had compelling evidence that the protests caused increased transmission. Seems unlikely since they were outdoors, which is now known to be relatively safe right?

outdoors with a 6' halo is fine in most cases, even with an unvaccinated population. The protests were not that in many cases, but health officials refused to tell people to stop, for whatever reasons they had. I believe the reasons were personal cowardice and dereliction of duty in the face of being scared of being called racist.

it only seems unlikely if you don't understand how covid works. covid-19 is an airborne illness that is passed through moisture between humans. humans radiate moisture when engaged in activities that increase heart rate. protest involve a lot of marching and yelling at each other, which, spread moisture through droplets, perspiration, breath etc. many protestors were mask averse, to put it mildly. so, no, not now known to be relatively safe right?

Several state governments in Australia recently had to enact special legislation to stop law enforcement from using covid tracking data to find witnesses and suspects.

All state governments had initially ensured the public that the data was not available to LE, but none of them had actually passed legislation to make it unlawful until journalists discovered that the Police were using the data.

https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/call-for-nat...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-15/safewa-app-sparks-urg...

https://www.innovationaus.com/qld-police-accessed-qr-code-ch...

In Germany every piece of data you collect has to specifiy as narrow as possible what it is being collected for before you collect it. Using pandemic related data for policing is a data privacy violation.

Of course that didn't stop police from still going into some places and demanding the data. But doing so was a clear breach of law.

Every piece of personal data you collect creates a pull factor for various actors to abuse said data, which is why you shouldn't collect more than you need, you should delete (or anon/pseudonymize) it once it is not needed anymore or you should collect it in such a way ot wouldn't be useful for state actors.

I am amazed how the German Corona-Warn-App was designed with these principles in mind. They managed to allow people to register into locations while only storing the data locally on your phone. Your phone then downloads the data from the servers in an non-revealing way and queries it for warnings/positive cases that have been issued in these locations at that time. If yes, you get a warning and you can decide how to proceed with this without having any other actor knowing of this.

This software is a piece of art from a privacy standpoint.

At the same time the state-level regulatiins require recording name and contact data, thus making CWA not enough of a (legally accepted) solution, leaving paper lists or trainwrecks like Luca.

That is really weird afaik, but I saw stores which used CWA despite that : )

Canadian police departments got caught for this also (Ontario iirc)

Singapore COVID-19 contact-tracing data accessible to police

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-singap...

It's been suspected that enforcing the lockdown was a way to get rid of protests, for instance in Algeria.

Not where I live. Is your request simply not to be seen as selfish while making a selfish argument?

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