Kushner's COVID Task Force Is Looking To Expand The Government's Surveillance Of Private Healthcare Companies

from the move-fast-and-break-privacy dept

Jared Kushner's shadowy coronavirus task force is still at work behind the scenes, bringing this country back to health by leveraging Kushner's innate ability to marry into the right family. Very little is known about it and very little will be known about thanks to the task force's decision to run communications through private email accounts.

Kushner's focus appears to be the private sector -- the same area his father-in-law appears to be most worried about. The curve has yet to flatten, but Trump and Kushner want to make sure companies remain healthy even if their employees aren't.

It appears Kushner is now branching out into the public sector. The private sector will be involved, but as the target for a new strain of surveillance, as Adam Cancryn reports for Politico.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating a national coronavirus surveillance system to give the government a near real-time view of where patients are seeking treatment and for what, and whether hospitals can accommodate them, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions.

This information will be used to determine where resources might need to be allocated. It will also be used to make judgment calls for social distancing and "stay at home" orders, with an eye on getting companies back up and running as quickly as possible.

What the task force is pushing for is relaxed rules on data sharing by private health companies.

[T]he Trump administration has sought to ease data-sharing rules and assure health data companies they won’t be penalized for sharing information with state and federal officials — a move driven in part by Kushner’s push to assemble the national network, according to an individual with knowledge of the decision.

To do this, the administration is likely to lean on its favorite weapon against privacy: national security. There are exceptions built into health privacy laws that make it easier for the federal government to demand access to this data. If the task force can sell the pandemic as a national security crisis, the government will be able to peer into multiple databases and do whatever it wants with that data. And it will be able to do so for as long as it wants, so long as it can claim the threat is still present.

The thing is there's no need to reinvent the surveillance wheel… unless the additional layer of surveillance is actually what the administration wants, rather than a targeted response to health care needs.

Some public health experts, meanwhile, suggested that the administration might instead build out and reorient an existing surveillance system housed within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that aided the response to prior epidemics. The system, called the National Syndromic Surveillance Program, is a voluntary collaboration between the CDC and various state and local health departments that draws data from more than 4,000 health care facilities.

While there may be some short-terms gains from adding another level of health care surveillance, the inherent problem is rolling back that surveillance once it's no longer needed. Americans may be more agreeable to additional government snooping during a short-term crisis, but they're less willing to look the other way when the threat to the nation has passed. The government, however, generally doesn't care what the people want. If it has found some self-serving uses for this increased access, it will keep the access and say enough stuff about national security threats to defeat attempts to scale things back to their pre-COVID levels. We saw this with the 9/11 attacks. And we may see it again with this unprecedented pandemic.

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Filed Under: covid-19, healthcare, jared kushner, surveillance