[liberationtech] Security, Privacy, and Coronavirus: Lessons from 9/11

[Yosem Companys]

Author Peter Swire is the Elizabeth and Tommy Holder Chair of Law and Ethics
at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business, a Senior Counsel to Alston &
Bird LLP, and Senior Fellow of the Future of Privacy Forum. He served as one of
five members of President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and
Communications Technology.
A few days after Sept.  11, 2001, I entered the Mott House on Maryland Avenue,
not far from the Senate. The national D.C. office of the ACLU was hosting a
somber meeting of privacy and civil liberties experts from across the political
spectrum. We all recognized that everything on our agenda had changed
drastically. We were in a new era, where security was paramount, and privacy a
policy  afterthought at best.
This week, nearly 20 years later, Greg Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and
Technology convened and ably led a similar meeting—online, of course—to consider
surveillance in the context of the coronavirus. The world is once again at a
moment where myriad practices must change, especially for the public health
system, and many new laws will be considered. The Justice Department has already
asked Congress for new powers, including the ability to ask a judge to detain
people indefinitely during emergencies.
In this moment of true national emergency, how does the public know whether new
surveillance programs are necessary? In some ways, everything that people are
facing right now seems unprecedented and thus open to change. Every legal limit
can appear, in the crisis of the moment, a relic of the prepandemic era.
Perhaps the biggest surveillance debates will occur about a type of data that is
far more pervasive than in 2001—location data.

Here are some points that came to me while discussing the new challenges,
including relevant terms and concepts that emerged from the earlier period, such
as data mining, false positives, security theater and warrantless wiretaps.
[snip]
Security, Privacy and the Coronavirus: Lessons From 9/11 In this moment of
true national emergency, how does the public know whether new surveillance
programs are necessary? lawfareblog.com
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