Crisis management, surveillance, and digital ethics in the COVID‐19 era

Abstract In this special issue, we reflect on the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) crisis and the containment measures put in place by formal authorities, combining both theoretically and empirically three different fields of study: crisis management, surveillance studies, and digital ethics. The special issue shows how the intersection of these fields provides a great opportunity to better understand challenges that are of critical importance to today's societies, as well as opening up new avenues for innovation. The focus of this special issue is to unpack and understand the debate on crisis management measures, surveillance, and ethical consequences during the ongoing, enduring COVID‐19 crisis. Building on crisis management literature, surveillance studies, and digital ethics research the articles included in this special issue reflect on issues of governance, space, as well as moral and ethical considerations, which were often overlooked in the public discourse in relation to the COVID‐19 pandemic. The special issue provides a deeper and clearer understanding of intended and unintended ethical and political consequences of crisis management practices, such as a politics of visibility that makes the operation of power invisible and fails to combat inequality, whilst ignoring the potential positive power of digital data and surveillance for empowerment and resilience

increased surveillance of citizens and responders alike, using location, health, and many other forms of data, amounting to a form of "datafication" (van Dijck, 2014) of crises. Surveillance studies scholars have shown that systematic collection of data for crisis management may provide some certainty and a sense of control, but also create "perilous transparency" (French & Monahan, 2020;Monahan, 2021).
Surveillance studies leverage insights from philosophies of governance from Carl Schmitt to Foucault to develop critiques of the social and societal consequences (see Adey et al., 2015 for an overview).
Most importantly, surveillance in crises enables new forms of social sorting and discrimination (Boersma & Fonio, 2018).
But these consequences are not inevitable, and the growing role of digital technologies in crisis management and surveillance has inspired a turn to digital ethics. Here, researchers study public perceptions, values, and intended and unintended consequences of digital innovation (Floridi et al., 2019). The age of big data has brought considerable public disquiet about the use of personal data even in efforts to control communicable diseases (Gilbert et al., 2019). Concerns often focus on the need to safeguard democratic and humanitarian values, from dignity and freedom to equality and nondiscrimination. Research can be normative, providing, for example, ethics and governance guidance for digital contact tracing for pandemic response (Kahn, 2020), as well as explore metaethical questions. For example, Morozov (2013) challenges the simplistic "solutionism" that characterizes some forms of digital innovation, and the European Data Protection Supervisor's academic Ethics Advisory Group examines foundational values as well as socio-cultural shifts such as the emergence of the digital subject and the move from a risk to a "scored" society (2018). Attention to the ethics of datafication in crises has prompted a turn to approaches of ethics-asaccompaniment (Verbeek, 2011(Verbeek, , 2020, and ethical impact assessment (Büscher et al., 2018).
The COVID-19 global crisis has been framed as a high impact and slow burning, creeping crisis (Boin et al., 2020(Boin et al., , 2021. It has disrupted societies around the globe in unprecedented ways, challenging social and political infrastructures, and it has given rise to unprecedented digital surveillance. Digital technologies such as health codes, temperature sensors, track and trace apps, have huge potential to support COVID pandemic crisis management, but they also intensify aspects of surveillance. Severe measures such as lockdowns, social distancing, testing, and contact tracing have been put in place globally in response to the pandemic. These containment measures are slowing down the spread of the virus, but an unfortunate consequence is that some measure expose citizens to invasive surveillance (Eck & Hatz, 2020), and societies to erosion of civic liberties and values, as well as deepening inequalities (Everts, 2020;Kitchin, 2020).
The contributions to this special issue explore examples from different countries and with different perspectives.
What makes slow-burning crises particularly difficult to deal with is that they (and the meanings attached to them) can change over time. The slow-burning COVID-19 crisis can be seen as a dynamic, nonlinear problem (Rothan & Byrareddy, 2020), and because there are no linear solutions to this nonlinear problem, the measures taken will have uncertain effects for the long run, and create a long-lasting impact on societies worldwide. By bringing crisis management, security, and digital ethics research together, we can deepen our understanding of the complex surveillance-related challenges and opportunities that arise in this context. Governments, authorities, and crisis management organizations were expected to "fight" the crisis and-often using the rhetoric of war-tried to get the situation back to some sort of "normal." This involved putting digital surveillance technologies in place that are intrusive and-often as an unintended consequence-not only have a huge impact on individuals' personal lives, constraining mobility, ability to work and earn a living, and social contacts, but also engender more wide-ranging societal consequences. The surge in digital surveillance has legitimized and normalized personal data collection (Ausma Bernot and Marcella Siqueira Cassiano, this issue) and the exclusion and invisibilisation of, for example, communities in deprived urban areas, the homeless, and undocumented migrants, undermining "trust and solidarity, agency, transparency along with the rights and values of citizens" (Isaac Oluoch, this issue. Mainly, but perhaps not always exclusively for the sake of public health, some emergency measures can remain in place for a long time, contributing to already well-equipped "surveillance societies" (Lyon, 2001). Moreover, this datafication of disasters can intensify the extraction and exploitation of personal data for commercial and political gain, what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) describes as "surveillance capitalism." Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism is "as significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was [and is] to the natural world" (Zuboff, 2019:v). Zuboff's warnings pre-date the pandemic, and while COVID control measures may have intensified it, surveillance capitalism was well underway before 2020. Zuboff argues that it is characterized by increased investments in bureaucracies and techniques to systematically-and over longer time-periods-collect, store and use information for the purpose of controlling behaviours and situations. In this regard, the COVID-19 pandemic, like other crisis situations, can be seen as a policy window in which advocates see the opportunity to define a problem as "ripe" for surveillance solutions they already have at hand (Boersma et al., 2014;Do Carmo Barriga et al., 2020;Wagenaar & Boersma, 2008). This allows a problematic confluence of surveillance with "disaster capitalism," described by Naomi Klein as "orchestrated raids on the public sphere, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities" (Klein, 2008:6;Perng et al., 2021).
Digital ethics research provides insight into some of the challenges and opportunities arising at this juncture. Concerns with ethics have accompanied digital technology development from its inception (Floridi, 1999;Weizenbaum, 1976;Wiener, 1950), and European scholars, in particular, have built on foundational values of dignity, freedom, autonomy, solidarity, equality, democracy, justice, and trust to develop a framework that sees digital innovation as an inherently ethical process and a key part of responsible research and innovation (EDPS European Data Protection Supervisor, 2018;Floridi et al., 2019). This recognizes that the design and use of digital technologies is deeply entangled with society and that digital ethics cannot simply BOERSMA ET AL. | 3 tell designers and users what (not) to do. Instead, attention to ethics has to anticipate and evaluate intended and unintended wider societal consequences and be part of the innovation process, as an accompaniment (Verbeek, 2011). It must be focused on articulating critique as well as constructive responses to complex challenges. The Expert Ethics Advisory Group to the European Data Protection Supervisor, for example, highlights that the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) stipulates purpose binding in ways that "may be at odds with some premises and applications of big data," such as discovery of invisible patterns in large collections of data (EDPS European Data Protection Supervisor, 2018:7). The challenge of digital ethics research is to drive the ambition of sociotechnical innovation to address such complex contradictions. This may include normative endeavours such as value-sensitive design (Friedman et al., 2006) and creative ethical impact assessment (Büscher et al., 2018) as well as more metaethical arguments, for example about the inherent "solutionism" of technocratic responses to complex problems (Morozov, 2013).
Particularly exciting recent developments in the field of digital ethics include Timothy Wu's critique of corporate power over digital platforms (Wu, 2018) and Morozov and Bria's (2018)  In this context, the COVID-19 crisis should not be considered an isolated crisis, as the climate crisis further challenges notions of "normal" at an even deeper existential level. As far as crisis management is concerned, Malm observes that the COVID-19 and the climate change crises have provoked antithetical reactions (Malm, 2020). While the COVID crisis has triggered drastic measures on a global scale, the climate crisis still suffers from discourses of delay again, allowing for a loosening of lockdowns, despite the fact that the effectiveness of some of those measures (e.g., contact tracing apps) remains unclear and/or would require more comprehensive assessments (Grekousis & Liu, 2021;Kitchin, 2020). In this way, the COVID-19 crisis provides legitimation for authorities, often in coalition with the private sector, to use existing and collect new citizens' data on a large scale (including mobility, contact, health, and social media data). A "Schmittian" emergency discourse perpetuates the false justification that extensive surveillance is a necessary "trade-off" between public health and security in exchange for a certain loss of privacy and civil liberties (Kerr, 2008;Kitchin, 2020).  (Lyon, 2001, Zuboff, 2019. As argued by Martin (2021) in relation to Aadhar, the world's largest biometric identification system, "these trends grew before 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic has provided advocates of digital identity with a new crisis through which to promote and legitimize identification systems, particularly in low and middle-income countries." While ethical considerations as well the governance of digital technologies existed before the pandemics, the growing reliance of digital technology to tackle crises has exacerbated the need to address the problems arising from this datafication of crises (Taddeo, 2020). Furthermore, surveillance for public health purposes-indirectly-led to an increase in surveillance in other areas, for instance, surveillance of employees working from home, and commercial mental health monitoring apps (Cosgrove et al., 2020). It should also be considered that COVID-19 related surveillance measures did not happen in a vacuum and will not evaporate after the crisis. Major crises can in fact habituate people to, and normalize, mass surveillance, as in the case of 9/11 in the United States (Pilkinton, 2021).
Mass surveillance is often triggered by a command-and-controlstyle of governing during crises. However, a high degree of centralization in governing the pandemics, for instance in the UK, did not lead-especially in the first wave of the virus-to increased capacity to manage the COVID-19 crisis in an effective way (Joyce, 2021). from "social ends" to divide and rule, and to claim as common sense a logic of causal inevitability. Solove (2011) shows that this inevitability is false, as there are many ways to balance privacy and security by but it also paves the way for "social surveillance" of the government's response to disasters through social media, allowing citizens to hold the government to account (Noesselt, 2014). And a focus on mental health surveillance and service provision reveals a strong element of (paternalistic) "care" at the heart of the Chinese approach to COVID surveillance (c.f. Kim et al., 2021, for  research agenda that has as its core issue of power and deals with the policy-making, the executive, and the citizen levels. This is a highly timely call for more attention to pandemic biopolitics through mobility. As Lorenzini (2020:S43) points out, biopolitics is "crucially, a matter of governing mobility-and immobility." Making the link between the COVID pandemic and other crises, including the climate emergency, Lorenzini asks whether the experience of COVID surveillance.
Will help us realize that the ordinary way in which "borders" are more or less porous for people of different colors, nationalities, and social extractions deserves to be considered as one of the main forms in which power is exercised in our contemporary world (ibid).
Klauser and Pauschinger trace the spatial and mobility politics of pandemic surveillance, arguing that scrutiny of the digital ethics of social sorting, informational freedom, and digitized mobility management must be a critical part of investigations of social and spatial justice.
Such concerns with justice draw attention to how "biopolitics is always a politics of differential vulnerability" (Lorenzini, 2020:S43), which brings challenges as well as opportunities. Isaac Oluoch's contribution to this special issue is an analysis of "vectors of vulnerability" in deprived urban areas (slums, favelas, and informal settlements). He explores the ethical, moral, and political dangers and transformative potential of geoinformation for managing risk and governmentality. He studies how individuals and communities experiencing marginality are often in a state of "permanent emergency," citing Bankoff (2004), and how having to cope with COVID has added complexity. The use of geoinformation in COVID crisis management can endanger "ethical values such as trust and solidarity, agency, transparency along with the rights and values of citizens." For example, maps are not objective representations of reality. It really matters "who is doing the representing and mapping," because "maps are arguments about existence" (Wood et al., 2010:34, cited in Oluoch, this volume). Many deprived urban areas are not mapped, and as such, they are made invisible and often not considered for support. They are, however, very much considered when it comes to controlling mobility, as we also saw in Villar and Magnawa's findings of increased surveillance, policing, and militarization of COVID control in the Philippines.
Oluoch examines the mapping practices that underpin-and challenge-this selective politics of visibility. He identifies four different approaches to digital mapping, each with their own ethical challenges and opportunities. While aggregated approaches, such as the UN-Habitat's mapping of areas against definitions of "slums," can make people's needs in these areas visible, the abstract measures used often gloss over-and may miss-important aspects of the lived experience of living in deprived urban areas. Non-governmental Organisations (NGO)-led community mapping projects such as Slum Dwellers International or the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team can enable inhabitants themselves to map their spaces in ways that capture data that matter to them, but they are not always considered in state census efforts. The third and fourth approaches combine public and commercial satellite and drone imagery with semiautomatic image classification approaches to categorize city spaces based on the degree of building density and layout patterns, again enhancing visibility, but often based on highly selective and opaque algorithmic and artificial intelligence-based classification mechanisms.
Oluoch stresses that digital maps and charts comparing the rate of infections in countries are turning bodies, cities, and countries into points of exposure in the fight against the virus. He shows that the integration of multiple different systems of mapping may allow governments to "do things at a distance," without engaging with vulnerable and marginalized populations and how this may "cumulatively pose a threat to civil liberties." However, community mapping also opens up opportunities for just and participatory governance of crises and empowered governmentality. In this landscape, the ethical costs of using geo-data-driven decisions must be taken into account and Oluoch argues that community mapping projects can help "make the invisible" visible and lend "moral weight" to geoinformation as a method for empowerment and resilience. Discussing the use of ethics-as-accompaniment approaches (Verbeek, 2011) and citizen panels (Verbeek, 2020), the article shows that technical readiness is not sufficient to promote trust, social acceptance, or acceptability of surveillance measures, such as contact tracing apps.
Van Brakel et al. show that even when ethics is a prominent concern throughout the design process, acceptance may stay low, and unintended negative consequences can arise. For example, in both examples from the Netherlands and Belgium, great emphasis was placed on privacy protection and voluntary uptake. This was important "to prevent societal division and to ensure that nobody would be discriminated against if they chose not to use" the track and trace app. This stands in stark contrast to the way in which the uptake of health code apps in China was also "not enforced individually, but without it, living in the pandemic was severely restricted"-a form of compulsion by stealth (Bernot and Siqueira Cassiano, this issue) that is very common in surveillance capitalism worldwide. While the more genuinely voluntary approach in the Netherlands and Belgium reassured prospective users, it also com- Overall, this special issue develops novel insight at the intersection of crisis management, surveillance studies, and digital ethics research. The convergence of surveillance society, surveillance, and disaster capitalism has accelerated in the wake of the ongoing COVID pandemic and is highly likely to deepen and broaden in the unfolding climate emergency. We argue that joining forces at this interdisciplinary juncture could be very powerful. Such a joining can provide novel analytical and practical policy traction. It allows a deeper and clearer understanding of intended and unintended ethical and political consequences, such as a politics of visibility that makes the operation of power invisible and fails to combat inequality, whilst ignoring the potentially positive power of digital data and surveillance for empowerment and resilience. By bringing different disciplines and different perspectives from different countries into dialog, we can strengthen responsible and circumspect socio-technical innovation for crisis governance.