contributed to this report from Hyderabad, India. AP staffers Lori Hinnant contributed from Paris; Maria Verza from Mexico City; Astrid Suarez from Bogotá, Colombia; Edna Tarigan from Jakarta, Indonesia; Tong-hyung Kim from Seoul, South Korea; and Eileen Ng from Singapore. Daria Litvinova and retired Associated Press Afghanistan and Pakistan Bureau Chief Kathy Gannon also contributed. Deputy Editor of The Mail & Guardian Athandiwe Saba assisted from Johannesburg. Burke reported from San Francisco; Federman from Jerusalem; McGuirk from Canberra, Australia; Pathi from Hyderabad, India; and Wu from Taipei, Taiwan.
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This reporting was produced in collaboration with researcher Avani Yadav with support from the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. It was partially supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and by the Starling Lab for Digital Integrity, co-founded by the University of Southern California and Stanford University, where Burke was a journalism fellow.
from Beijing to Jerusalem to Hyderabad, India, and Perth, Australia, The Associated Press has found that authorities used these technologies and data to halt travel for activists and ordinary people, harass marginalized communities and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. In some cases, data was shared with spy agencies. The issue has taken on fresh urgency almost three years into the pandemic as China’s ultra-strict zero-COVID policies recently ignited the sharpest and largest public rebuke of the country’s authoritarian leadership since the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
For more than a year, AP journalists interviewed sources and pored over thousands of documents to trace how technologies marketed to “flatten the curve” were put to other uses. Just as the balance between privacy and national security shifted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, COVID-19 has given officials justification to embed tracking tools in society that have lasted long after lockdowns.
The AP found:
--Israel’s Shin Bet security agency repurposed phone surveillance technology it had previously used to monitor militants inside Palestinian territories to monitor people for COVID-19 contact tracing. Then, in 2021, the agency quietly began using the same technology to send threatening messages to Arab citizens and residents of Israel whom the agency suspected of participating in violent clashes with police. Some of the recipients, however, simply lived or worked in the area, or were mere passers-by.
China, the last major country in the world to enforce strict COVID-19 lockdowns, citizens have had to install cell-phone apps to move about freely in most cities. Drawing from telecommunications data and PCR test results, the apps produce individual QR codes that change from green to yellow or red, depending on a person’s health status. Now, as pandemic restrictions lessen, there is evidence that the health codes have been used to stifle dissent. Citizens who wanted to lodge complaints against the government suddenly found their codes turning red even though they hadn’t tested positive for COVID-19 or been near infected individuals.
--As early as May 2020 in India, the police chief of Telangana state tweeted about his department rolling out artificial intelligence-based software using CCTV to zero-in on people not wearing masks. S Q Masood, a social activist, was among the people stopped seemingly at random by police in a predominantly Muslim area of Hyderabad last year. Masood said officers told him to remove his mask so they could photograph him with a tablet. He’s now suing police to find out why. Although law enforcement denies using facial recognition in Masood’s case, the lawsuit is continuing and experts said it may set precedent for future policing activities.
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