Is govt surveillance adopted during pandemic becoming permanent?

Governments are seeking to adopt temporary surveillance used during the pandemic and make them permanent

In March 2020 Edward Snowden warned the public how the new systems being imposed during the pandemic will continue long after it's over. Tech has curbed the virus and led to surveillance, which still continues even today.

In an interview with the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, Snowden had said, "When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky." Elaborating on his idea, he said that "the emergency tends to be expanded. Then the authorities become comfortable with some new power. They start to like it.”

Rightfully so, the pandemic has witnessed a range of surveillance tools to ensure everything and everyone is monitored, from biosurveillance systems to drone monitoring. Amnesty International agreed that human rights violations spread as rapidly as the virus did all across the globe.

Governments are actively seeking to make their emergency powers permanent and using broader surveillance tools over their people. The Patriot Act introduced in the US, which granted extensive powers temporarily has now been made permanent. China is also using their collected data from surveillance during the outbreak of Covid-19, to monitor their population, as studies have revealed. The "health code" which was used to monitor Covid-19 symptoms requiring identity verification and QR code scans, was deployed by many countries and is still in use despite the recession of the pandemic.

Technology introduced during the pandemic is being used for other targets, relating to a phenomenon known as "function creep". Police are using their contact tracing data for unrelated investigations, and fake news is being harnessed to make unlawful arrests of government critics.

A senior fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Marcel Fafchamps, is expecting the freedoms granted to people, to decrease over time. He says, "These tools will be used by totalitarian regimes to control their population better… Covid-19 has justified the loss of the last bit of privacy we had left, namely, our health data and who we meet in the park."