ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the surveillance methods used by states in an effort to stop the pandemic and discuss the ethical implications of those efforts, drawing on literature in the field of ethics of surveillance and bio-surveillance. Israel was not alone in deploying existing national security surveillance tools for pandemic surveillance. In Pakistan, a secret surveillance system that was used to track terrorist suspects by the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) was deployed to combat the pandemic. The use of closed-circuit cameras and facial recognition software was also deployed in the early stages of the pandemic. In China, facial recognition technologies that can detect elevated temperatures in a crowd were deployed and cameras were used to flag and identify citizens not wearing a mask. The use of national security surveillance technologies and tools for pandemic surveillance has been relatively constrained to a small number of countries.
