Sabrina DelMonaco

"I think on one hand we listen to the health experts... but none of those people have been elected. I just wanna remind... All of us something. We live in a democracy. We live in a country where we elect our leaders to make decisions. We do not relegate, delegate, and give over those decisions to people no matter how smart they are. We don't give them to people who havent been elected by we the people. And ultimately, while I respect what they're telling us and we need to listen carefully, these are decisions that are gonna be made by the president, and by the fifty governors of the states, and they make them on what's best for their population and balancing the health concerns with the fact that right now we've got millions of people out of work, our economy is tanked, and it is really threatening the civil liberties of a lot of people." 

Huckabee continues to say that, “That is a concern to me that I don’t hear enough about — how we are shredding the Constitution by telling people such things as you can’t sit in a car by yourself, you’re going to get arrested, you can’t drive up to a church in your own vehicle, and the closest contact you have is with the police officer who comes and tells us you can’t do it." It is ironic that Huckabee uses the scenario that one might be stopped while driving as an example of a gross violation of one's civil liberty, as we know that Black people are needlessly pulled over while driving at such a rate that the phenomenon has its own idiom: Driving While Black. The only unique phenomenon in Huckabee's scenario is that the police interaction could be the "closest contact you have." Ultimately, it's clear that the "you" in Huckabee's statement addresses white people, which may be why, to Huckabee, this "oughta scare the daylights out of us for the long-term future." Not only is Huckabee's response indicative of how our idea of civil liberties are distinctly racialized, but it is also indicative of what may be most terrifying about COVID-19: The virus's indiscriminate spread. – April 10th
III. Surveillance & The "Just Like" Fallacy
This article maps which countries' governments are attempting to prevent the spread of COVID-19 through heightened surveillance measures. While the content of this article is especially useful, I was most struck by the rhetoric in its introduction: It is one of several articles I've seen that cite the Patriot Act as a way to raise concerns about increased surveillance measures today. Author Dave Gershgorn writes, "Governments have a way of holding onto tools that undermine citizens’ privacy long after the moment of crisis has passed. Take, for example, the United States’ 2001 Patriot Act, which was passed in response to the 9/11 attacks. The Patriot Act gave the government broad surveillance powers with little oversight, including demanding customer data from telecoms without court approval. Twenty years later, it’s still around." 
I tend to be critical of parallels; Too often, I find that they veer dangerously into a reductive analogy. To say one phenomenon is "just like" another is usually tone-deaf at best and callous at worst (see: Ellen Degeneres's "This is just like being in jail" joke, which I learned of from Emily Fiorentino's page). Still, I think that the endurance of the USA PATRIOT Act is a useful example of how the American federal government exploits surveillance technology in times of crisis; Moreover, it is indicative of how surveillance technology disproportionately affects people of color. The USA PATRIOT Act allowed federal agents to profile individuals who they suspected to be Muslim, while Vox just reported that more Black and Latino Americans are affected by COVID-19 than whites. While I admit that the connection is certainly not 1:1—No tangible reports have been released that indicate that Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by surveillance technologies—Past patterns of government surveillance merit concern. Gershgorn writes that "Apple and Google recently announced a new set of digital tools for detecting if individuals have come in close contact with those diagnosed with the coronavirus." If more Black and Latino people are affected by COVID-19, then it seems that people of this demographic may be most affected by these new technologies. – April 17th
IV. Contact Tracing & Pessimism/Helplessness
I found this article around the time it was published (which was around two weeks ago), but had some trouble accessing it until recently. It’s an opinion piece from the MIT Technology review titled “We need mass surveillance to fight covid-19—but it doesn’t have to be creepy” by Genevive Bell. I kept coming back to it because of its narrative introduction, where Bell reports that the Australian research university where she works requires students who remain on campus to keep a “contact log” that catalogues where, when, and who they interact with on a daily basis. This is a form of “contact tracing” that is meant to limit the spread of COVID-19. 
Contact tracing is a practice with historical roots: It was used to help prevent the spread of  SARS, HIV/AIDS, typhoid fever, venereal disease, and influenza. Bell articulates the potential drawbacks of the practice from several angles. First, she asks her reader to think about how they would track their own activity, as well as to whom they would be comfortable reporting their every move. Next, she recalls the time she visited an Australian prison called Port Arthur, the structure of which was influenced by the panopticon; She writes that there, the incarcerated person was “regimented, documented, and constrained.” This acknowledges that surveillance-based abuse is a reality rather than a theoretical threat. She then reminds us that contact tracing was already taken to an abusive extreme in the case of Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant cook who is better known by the epithet “Typhoid Mary.” 
After this, Bell asks “can we strip [contact tracing] of [its] moral and punitive overlays?” She believes it’s possible: She writes that if we establish regulations on data-collection (which would be the primary method of contact tracing) and reimagine the purpose of the practice, we might be able to develop a practice that is more humane than the past (and present, considering contact tracing is in place right now) suggests it can be. 
My knee-jerk, pessimistic answer to her question was, “No.” I don’t believe we can effectively reform any practice that reinforces the carceral system. Still, parts of Bell’s argument were intriguing. She writes that contact tracing can be seen as one avenue of a patient’s journey: “Here the focus could be helping someone decide whether and how to seek care, and guiding health-care providers to the appropriate treatment. As one physician put it to me recently, it’s about helping patients “triage their worry”—work out when they should be concerned and, equally important, when they should not.” Personally, I’ve had my worry triaged via contact tracing: I’ve called my local hospital, answered the questions that the healthcare provider asked, and been assured that, so long as I haven’t had any direct contact with someone exposed to COVID-19, I should be fine. This call was really helpful to me, a self-absorbed twenty-something with diagnosed anxiety; Moreover, up until ten minutes ago, it didn’t feel like it replicated the carceral system. Still, this may be because I was fine. What if I had been in contact with someone with COVID-19? Would I feel the same vitriol for them that America felt for Mary Mallon? Probably. 
Bell goes on to write that contact tracing

“could be a way of identifying hot spots without identifying individuals—a repository of anonymized traces and patterns, or decentralized, privacy-preserving proximity tracing. This data might help researchers or government agencies create community-level strategies—perhaps changing the layout of a park to reduce congestion, for instance. It might help us see our world a little differently and make different choices—a collective curve flattening. We could create open-source solutions or locally based tools.”

This sounds nice—I’d love to live in a world where our first response to a virus hot spot is to help the community—but the data could also be used to ostracize a community hot spot, which would be more likely if the hot spot is a community of color. We see this now: People of color are more likely to die of COVID-19 than white people.  Ultimately, contact tracing is a method that authorities are using to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. I wish I could offer a better method for prevention. I wish I knew a way to help other than what I’m doing: Sheltering in place, washing my hands, etc., because I still feel helpless, both in the face of my own situation and the situations I know others are in.