Frustrating the State: Surveillance, Public Health, and the Role of Civil Society

Executive Summary

This essay in the Watching the Watchers series draws on historical and contemporary examples of how states have exploited public health and safety concerns to expand surveillance of their subjects. In doing so, it demonstrates that current attempts to monitor and control the public during the COVID-19 pandemic are neither an aberration nor an unprecedented event, as some have described. It also highlights the means by which targets of surveillance have resisted such efforts, challenging the notion that more data necessarily means better decisions and better health outcomes. It closes with recommendations for how we should rethink the issue of surveillance and the role civil society plays in countering its harms.

Although contact tracing, case documentation, and monitoring of at-risk communities made effective public health surveillance essential to driving back the pandemic, the surge in digital surveillance left many feeling as if they were living in unprecedented times. Drawing on James C. Scott's argument that states render populations "legible" in order to control them, and that "legibility is a condition of manipulation," the essay argues that state surveillance and government overreach in times of crisis are recurring rather than novel. The idealistic notion that more data yields better outcomes is potentially harmful, particularly for marginalized groups. The essay surveys the motivations and effects of surveillance during past and present health crises, examines civil society's response and resistance, and offers recommendations for the next health crisis.