This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 15th, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's a pattern that plays out pretty regularly when police or a government agency is given new powers to address a narrow problem,

those powers somehow get used to address other problems.

In the case of contact tracing to attempt to limit the spread of the coronavirus, police agencies are already

chomping at the bit to use that information for other purposes.

Cato's Matthew Feeney and Patrick Edington comment.

Many listeners will be familiar with contact tracing in the context of the ongoing pandemic as

primarily a public health endeavor.

The idea here being that in the middle of the pandemic it's good to know where people are, where they've been.

And in pursuing a effective contact tracing regime,

governments all across the world have adopted different methods.

Here in the US we've seen lawmakers and officials talking about traditional contact tracing,

which is using human beings to track down people and interview them to find out information.

There have been other discussions about Bluetooth technology as well as old-fashioned surveillance and

the worry is and what Patrick's done a great job of doing at Cato with his big brother timeline is showing how time and time again the technology is deployed and methods deployed are never reserved for the event or the catastrophe for which they're

originally deployed. So whether that's a terrorist attack or a war or a natural

disaster, we shouldn't expect for the surveillance technologies to go back in the box they came from and I don't view

COVID-19 as any different and unfortunately the confluence of the pandemic with

protests about the murder of George Floyd offer I think a depressing example of how law enforcement could use the ongoing pandemic as an

excuse to gather up more information principally aimed at protesters.

It is natural for law enforcement agencies to want to make use of information that exists, that could be useful to deal with some problem, to suddenly apply it to help solve a different problem right that has been the history of

uh... law enforcement and and intelligence activities

...