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The Dangers of Moving All of Democracy Online:
To protect governments as well as people's rights from coronavirus, we need to use tech as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
[...] Governments around the world are struggling to deal with the public health and economic challenges of coronavirus. While many have pointed to how authoritarian regimes exacerbated the pandemic, we've so far paid dangerously little attention to coronavirus's challenge to democracy.
In a democracy, citizens need to be able to vote, politicians to deliberate, and people to move about, meet, and act collectively. Democratic politics is a mixture of mass involvement and endless meetings. All this is hard when people can be infected with a potentially deadly virus if someone simply coughs nearby. The obvious answer might seem to be to move democracy to the internet, but some parts of democracy translate badly to an online world, while others are already being undermined by emergency powers (for example, Hungary's parliament just passed a law that allows the prime minister to rule by decree) and by the rise of digital surveillance.
[...] Democratic politics also happens in the streets, at political rallies, public meetings, and demonstrations. It is hard to see how such mass gatherings will return any time soon if they continue to be dangerous, or even banned, on grounds of public health.
[...] state efforts to fight the virus by tracking citizens might undermine democracy by concentrating power in the hands of an unaccountable authority. This might even happen from the bottom up. Citizens in fear of contagion might start liking the idea of ubiquitous and decentralized surveillance as a service, as evidenced by the popularity of coronavirus symptom-tracking apps in the UK and elsewhere.
[...] Some pundits argue that information technology is the answer to democracy's problems. There would be no risk of catching coronavirus if physical democracy became virtual.
[...] online voting systems, such as Voatz, which was used in the 2018 midterms in West Virginia, have critical security vulnerabilities. As cryptographer Matt Blaze says, many experts believe internet voting is a bad idea.
Online voting may one day provide the illusion of democracy while actually destroying it.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @06:30AM (1 child)
You must be really old if you remember when the Boomers were saying that.
Just between you and me, how did you beat the Spanish Flu?
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Friday April 03 2020, @09:56PM
"You must be really old if you remember when the Boomers were saying that."
Not surprising at all, because I'm technically one of them.
I was born in 1962, which means I'm the last year of most definitions of the Boomers. I still remember things like Bobby Kennedy's funeral (I was disconcerted my Saturday morning cartoons were pre-empted. What else would you expect from a 6 year old?) and the first moon landing when I was 7, it's not terribly surprising that I remember things from the late 1960s. I'm all of 57 years old. My oldest brother is 68. though I doubt he ever said that, save as a joke.
I know that must seem only slightly less than the pyramids to you. I also had older parents who were both in WW2, dad as a medic in Europe and mom as a War Department employee first in the US and then in Japan during the occupation. So, my outlook is pretty long. Things like when my father's medical battalion setting up outside Dachau just after it was liberated to treat the prisoners are as real to me as things your parents talked about.
To those today, the Vietnam War, which I remember the body counts from, the blockade Nixon implemented, etc. must be as far back as the Spanish American War was to me, let alone the 1918 Spanish flu which was 4 years before my parents were born.