Pandemic Response and Civil Liberties

<p>Welcome back to another episode of Liberty Revealed, the show dedicated to revealing personal liberty to all who listen. I am your host, Mike Mahony, and today I want to talk to you about the lockdowns that have been caused by the pandemic.</p><p>First, thank you for bearing with me as it has been several months since an episode has been released. The show will get back to a regular frequency going forward.</p><p>On March 13, 2020, life changed as I knew it. That day, in particular, we were moving from one home to another. We got an automated call from my son’s school announcing that in-person instruction was suspended due to the coronavirus. From there, things just got worse.</p><p>The California state government installed lockdowns that have crushed the economy and taken away the rights of the people. The government has rushed to find a way to control the spread of the virus. </p><p>Across the world, a range of surveillance technologies are being deployed in an effort to find out more about who is sick. Although a crisis may make increased surveillance more palpable to the billions under some kind of lockdown civil libertarians shouldn’t be shy about highlighting the ineffective nature of many emergency measures and insisting that even those that are effective be strictly time-limited.</p><p>Tragedies, panics, and crises tend to result in extremely bad policy decisions. The 9/11 terrorist attacks prompted a wave of unnecessary and ineffective laws and policies. The establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Transportation Security Agency (TSA), the passage of the PATRIOT Act, and the rollout of a wide range of new surveillance programs are among the most notable domestic examples. The effectiveness of these measures should embarrass government officials. Post‐​9/​11 mass surveillance did not thwart large terrorist attacks, with a White House panel finding that one of the most famous mass surveillance programs — the snooping on telephony metadata — was “not essential in preventing atta