Government Surveillance in the United States and COVID

The fear of government surveillance in the United States has been dated to as early as 1949 when the infamous book 1984 came out, popularizing the slogan “Big Brother is watching”. Since then, such fear has only risen, especially due to the suspicious and downright illegal policies implemented by NSA that was exposed by Snowden. In fact, it is shown that billions of private conversations and phone calls are intercepted by the government every day.

However, as wrong as government surveillance is, I contend that there is an ethical way and an ethical reason to do it, namely in a time of pandemic when making sure that everyone is following the proper guidelines. For example, countries like China and Spain have implemented surveillance drones to monitor people’s activity in public spaces.

As dystopian as it sounds, due to such measures, they have the least cases when it comes to COVID numbers and they have been the most successful in containing the virus. However, in the United States, due to the extreme aversion to such kinds of surveillance and patrolling, there have been millions of cases and an uncountable number of deaths.

If we are discussing the ethics of given policies, should we not look at the end results?