By: Carter Cox
The article I read this week, “COVID-19 surveillance in Israeli press: spatiality, mobility, and control”, investigated what happened when the Israeli government authorized internal security to track the mobile phone locations of its citizens. Not only did the article discuss what occurred, but how the situation was perceived by both the people and the press. A digital surveillance operation of this size was unheard of at the time, and the situation drew media attention from around the world. This article takes a look into what happens when the technologies that were supposed to gift us unprecedented freedom actually end up being what controls us.
To provide some context to the situation, the Israeli government gave permission to the Israel Security Agency to track the geolocations of its citizens through mobile phone surveillance. Tracking the reception of this policy is a little complex. Some news outlets actually praised the decision, particularly the fact that the operation had a low-cost and had many potential health benefits. However, much of the media was concerned about the ethics of tracking the location of citizens.
Besides the ethical implications of constant digital surveillance, there was another issue at hand – objectification. Similar to my previous blog post about the “Digital Divide”, this digital surveillance policy took preexisting inequalities from the pandemic and amplified them. What populations would be underrepresented because they did not own mobile phones? How would the Israeli government keep them safe through digital contact tracing? All these questions were fair points of criticism after Israel opened the floodgates of mobile surveillance.
After making the case for both sides, the article summarizes their study of how four different Israeli news outlets covered the surveillance. Two of the news outlets were more found to be more supportive and the other two news outlets were labeled as more critical. The article claims that the “supportive” news outlets tended to include direct quotes from lawmakers and health professionals to boost the credibility of their story. The “critical” news outlets focused on depicting the policy as “invasive” and “undemocratic”. These news outlets also defined mobile phones as deeply intimate pieces of technology and that the tracking of them would equal to the tracking of physical human bodies.
This issue of surveillance had many different moving parts. At first, those involved had to define the role of the mobile phone. Then, priorities regarding privacy had to also be established. This article significantly dealt with the influence of the press on popular opinion. The way the press framed this story influenced how people saw this surveillance policy, both positively and negatively. Another aspect that was discussed were the preexisting values of said news outlets. The two news outlets that supported mobile surveillance were perceived as highly-commercialized outlets, so they did not want to shake up the status quo. The critical outlets went as far as saying that Israeli citizens were viewed more as “dissidents” than victims of a pandemic.
I believe issues of public surveillance will only be amplified in the future. As mobile technology evolves each day to blur the line between reality and virtual reality, mobility does not equal freedom.
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