South Korea's Orwellian high-tech surveillance. Moon Jay-in has become Big Brother

HEALTH CARECOMMENTARY
South Korea Provides Lessons, Good and Bad, on Coronavirus Response
Bruce Klingner / @BruceKlingner / March 27, 2020

while South Korea's testing program has become the global gold standard, it comes at a potential cost in civil liberties that other nations may not seek (or be able) to emulate.


South Korea's effective testing program comes at a cost of Orwellian high-tech surveillance.
After the 2015 MERS outbreak, South Korea developed new procedures and revised laws to enable more aggressive contact-tracing. The government was given the ability to access citizens' credit card records, cellphone GPS data, bank records, and the wide-ranging network of security cameras.
South Korea has the highest proportion of cashless transactions in the world and one of the world's highest rates of cellphone ownership, along with millions of security cameras.
During dangerous epidemics, authorities have warrantless access to the private data.


Once someone is confirmed with COVID-19, the government can retrace their movements and alert, notify, and if necessary, quarantine others who may have come into contact with them. Quarantined people are required to download a monitoring app that alerts authorities if they break isolation.
As South Koreans move about the country, they receive new geographically linked alerts about those who have been infected.
The granularity of the information is impressive, if not intimidating. An individual's movements, purchases, and images can be minutely detailed, including whether they were wearing a mask or not at a given time.


Finally, the South Korean government's warrantless access to personal data enabled effective epidemic response, but with a Big Brother invasiveness that would be anathema to American standards of personal privacy.

韓国の大量検査が感染、死者減少にどれだけ役立ったかは今後の研究によると思っているのだが、いずれにせよ、韓国はジョージ・オーウェル的監視社会を確立していったようである。

本来なら、この手の監視社会は、町山氏が徹底的に批判すべきところであるのに、韓国ナショナリズムで、かけている眼鏡のレンズがかなり曇ってしまったようだ。