Earlier this week, the Elizabeth, New Jersey police department gave residents a look at one of the drones officials there will use to help monitor residents and enforce social distancing measures aimed at slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus. “These drones will be around the City with an automated message from the Mayor telling you to STOP gathering, disperse and go home,” the department said.

The city, which has seen close to 1,500 confirmed COVID cases, is one of a growing number of communities in the United States that is either deploying or considering the use of unmanned drones to support their shelter-in-place directives—a practice that has been used, seemingly with success, in countries like France and China. But on Wednesday, the Elizabeth police department was forced to clarify in a second video emphasizing that the drones were only there to spread “an automated notice about keeping your social distance.”

“We are just trying to save lives, not trying to be big brother,” the department said on Facebook. “There is no recording and no pictures being taken, it is a tool of encouragement to follow the rules.”

The episode underscores the looming tensions for federal and local governments between civil liberties and efforts to combat a deadly pandemic that has paralyzed the country. The U.S. government was caught flat-footed by the public health crisis, thanks to Donald Trump ignoring months of warnings and relying on wishful thinking rather than action. But with America now the epicenter of the pandemic, the administration is trying to play catch-up, with Jared Kushner—the president’s unqualified son-in-law and senior adviser—leading a coronavirus response team that has floated a number of potential measures, including a national surveillance system to monitor outbreaks. That has raised privacy concerns, with critics likening it to the Patriot Act put into place following 9/11. “This is a genuine crisis—we have to work through it and do our best to protect people’s health,” Jessica Rich, a former director of the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection bureau, told Politico. “But doing that doesn’t mean we have to destroy privacy.”

Within the federal government itself, there has been a clumsy acknowledgement that there are limits to what the U.S. can do in its efforts to contain the virus. “We are not an authoritarian nation,” Surgeon General Jerome Adams said on Fox News last month, soon after the World Health Organization declared coronavirus a pandemic. “So we have to be careful when we say, ‘Let’s do what China did, let’s do what South Korea did.’” (South Korea is a democracy.) Still, actions by the Trump administration to loosen data sharing rules around healthcare and the national coronavirus surveillance proposal from Kushner’s team have raised concerns from privacy advocates—particularly given the longstanding fears about how the Trump administration has used surveillance and technology in its immigration enforcement and other controversial policies, along with the president’s erosion of democratic norms.