Batman vs. Pandemic

There’s a scene in “The Dark Knight” when Batman instructs Lucius Fox to use a new tool to locate the Joker. Our villain has rigged timed explosives to two ships, but each boat of hostages has the opportunity to detonate the bombs on the other ship to save themselves. The science is dubious at best, but in essence, Batman has repurposed Fox’s sonar technology to forcibly and secretly use everybody’s cell phone in Gotham as a mapping device, essentially allowing him to triangulate the Joker’s position. The ends justify the means, as it were.

As he stares at his creation, Batman asks, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Fox counters, “Beautiful. Unethical. Dangerous…This is wrong.”

As the coronavirus continues to rage across the world, I think back to how prescient this scene from a silly superhero movie came to be.

Governments and its citizens are struggling to find a balance between public health and privacy concerns. There are real tradeoffs and stakes in deciding where along the spectrum we should settle. If we focus solely on public health at the expense of all other considerations (privacy chief among them), we may ultimately save more lives. On the other hand, protecting our civil liberties in the face of a pandemic will ensure we preserve individual privacy: although we may not die on this hill, our most vulnerable populations may.

We are already seeing this scenario play out in realtime across the globe. On one end of the spectrum, we are seeing countries like China taking unilateral government action to monitor, track, and quarantine their citizens¹. China is using big data, drone surveillance, and biometrics, to name a few methods, to carefully capture granular data that can be attributable on an individual level. The results (if they are to be believed), speak for themselves in terms of curbing the progression of the disease in China. Authoritarian governments like China, by definition, fully embrace the tradeoff of sacrificing personal freedom for government control.

However, this centralized government intrusion is anathema to most Westerners. The government is beholden to the people, not the other way around. Information (and misinformation) flows freely in the United States. The argument being that although countries like China may be able to stage drastic government interventions in an instant, it is merely a reaction to the main problem with authoritarianism. That is, the CCP’s insistence on stifling and jailing doctors who first discovered the virus and suppressing damaging information led to the initial outbreak and consequent pandemic². On the other hand, other countries such as the United States and its citizens were made aware of the disease as soon as news escaped China.

Yet, democracy, freedom of information, and privacy also comes with its tradeoffs. As we currently stand, the United States and its early awareness of the coronavirus did not, in fact, help us stem the tide of the pandemic. We have eclipsed 311,000 confirmed cases³, leading the world by far. Much can be traced to lack of testing, mass misinformation, and slow reaction at the state and federal level. Undeniably, the current administration can shoulder much of that blame⁴, but in an ideal scenario with all the right pieces in place, how much more effectively could this have been dealt with? Washington is notoriously bureaucratic and lined with red tape, and I’d suspect the Chinese government would argue that it would have been slow to react regardless of how well-prepared we thought we were.

Can we strike the right balance between privacy and public health? I believe Hu Yong, a prominent critic in China, put it most concisely. “You might as well ask yourself, has history ever shown that once the government has surveillance tools, it will maintain modesty and caution when using them?” asked Yong⁴. The prevailing idea being that, regardless of intentions, the more power you grant the government, the harder it is to ever take it back. People such as Yong and Edward Snowden have warned about democratic governments teetering towards authoritarianism as politicians use the pandemic as a front to wrest more privacy concessions⁵. Indeed, if the post-9/11 government expansion of mass surveillance is any indicator, the answer to Yong’s question is “no.”⁶

In the end, Batman uses the spy tool to find the Joker. Surprisingly however, he actually isn’t able to stop the timer on the ships from running out. In fact, there never was a timer: it was merely a litmus test for how people (and metaphorically “We The People”) react in times of crisis. The hostages would not sacrifice the other ship to save themselves, refusing to let the Joker corrupt their morals. Could we say the same for Batman?

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-and-europe-turn-to-phone-tracking-strategies-to-halt-spread-of-coronavirus-11585906203
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/17/china-cared-more-about-suppressing-information-than-suppressing-virus-thats-why-were-here/
3. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/upshot/coronavirus-metro-area-tracker.html
4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/04/coronavirus-government-dysfunction/?arc404=true
5. https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/judicial/489599-covid-19-bill-barr-and-the-american-authoritarian-tradition
6. https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/privacy-and-surveillance/nsa-surveillance