Under surveillance: (mis)use of technologies in emergency responses

In the months following the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than half the world’s countries enacted emergency measures. Within this broader context, we have seen a rapid scaling up of governments’ use of technologies to enable widespread surveillance.

How has this impacted civil society groups globally?

Surveillance technologies exacerbated the impacts of COVID-19 emergency measures on civic space by allowing governments to collect fine-grained data about individuals, while also working across large scales of information, in a way that has been unprecedented in the history of global pandemics.

ECNL, the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations and Privacy International joined together to track the negative impacts of surveillance technology and measures deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic on activist movements and organisations in collaboration with local organisations and researchers in 6 countries.

With Daniel Ospina Celis, Lucia Camacho, Juan Carlos Upegui (Dejusticia), Bastien Le Querrec (La Quadrature du Net), Amber Sinha (Pollicy), Nadine Sherani, Rozy Sodik, Auliya Rayyan (KontraS), Martin Mavenjina (Kenya Human Rights Commission), and Sherylle Dass, Devon Turner (Legal Resources Centre) ECNL also took a closer look at actions civil society took in Colombia, France, India, Indonesia, Kenya and South Africa.

European Center for Not-for-Profit Law propose recommendations for state actors, private companies and CSOs to ensure more human rights-centered technological responses to future emergencies. This report is part of the efforts of the Emergency Powers Coalition, a collective of civil society organisations globally, taking action to resist and roll back emergency powers in national laws and strengthen standards in international fora.

The article was first published by European Center for Not-for-Profit Law here.

Contribution by: EDRi affiliate, European Center for Not-for-Profit Law