Tag Archives: civil liberties

California launches digital COVID-19 vaccine pass but won’t require it

By Paresh Dave

OAKLAND, Calif. (Reuters) – California officials on Friday unveiled a website to access a digital copy of COVID-19 immunization records, though they stressed the U.S. state would not make it mandatory to carry the vaccine credentials.

Businesses will be able to verify digital “vaccine cards” by scanning a QR code on them using an app expected to launch this month. The nearly 20 million immunized Californians can access their data at myvaccinerecord.cdph.ca.gov.

“This is no different from someone’s vaccine records,” said California State Epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan. “It’s an optional tool to use.”

California opened up from COVID-19 restrictions on Tuesday, with masks, social distancing and capacity limits no longer required at most venues for those who are vaccinated. But businesses are largely operating on the honor system and not “carding” people.

Other states have barred proof of vaccination as an entry requirement at shops and offices, calling such restrictions an intrusion on civil liberties including privacy.

California’s technology department developed the new website using technology known as Smart Health Cards, which originated at Boston Children’s Hospital. Walmart Inc this week also adopted Smart to enable people who got vaccinated at its stores to have an e-pass.

The approach contrasts with New York state, which paid IBM to develop a vaccine records app called Excelsior Pass as well as companion app for verifying passes. Over a million people had downloaded their records onto New York’s app, but few businesses have required it for entry.

California’s Los Angeles County has offered digital COVID-19 vaccine records for months through startup Healthvana. Millions of users have taken advantage, said Healthvana Chief Executive Ramin Bastani.

Users may experience glitches with California’s new systems, because names, birthdates or contact information could have been entered incorrectly at time of immunization.

(Reporting by Paresh Dave; Editing by David Gregorio)

Airport security app Clear looks to score with U.S. ‘vaccine passport’

By Paresh Dave

(Reuters) – Over 60 U.S. stadiums and other venues are deploying an app from Clear to verify people’s COVID-19 status, placing the New York company known for its airport security fast lanes at the forefront of a national debate over “vaccine passports.”

Major League Baseball’s San Francisco Giants and New York Mets are among the first big businesses to demand guests prove they tested negative for the virus or are immunized against it. While the teams welcome paper proof, they encourage downloading records onto Clear’s Health Pass feature for convenience.

As with mask mandates, such requirements are under attack from Republican politicians and anti-surveillance activists, as un-American intrusions on civil liberties. They fear businesses will discriminate against the unvaccinated and unnecessarily amass personal data.

Republican governors including in Florida and Texas last month moved to bar some establishments from asking about immunization status, though legal experts say door-checks are lawful to protect public health.

Privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation fears Clear and other passport apps will hold data indefinitely and morph into consumer trackers. Clear said users control their health records.

As a business based on replacing physical IDs, tickets and credit cards with facial or fingerprint recognition, Clear has a huge opportunity in emerging health-check rules that would familiarize more people with its technology.

“Those experiences where you have to prove something about you – if we can help empower the consumer to get through that more quickly – that is our core business,” said Catesby Perrin, Clear’s executive vice president of growth.

So far, Clear is among coronavirus health app frontrunners, with partners including United Airlines for its Los Angeles-to-Honolulu flights and the Venetian resort in Las Vegas for conventions it hosts.

With fans anxious to get back to live sports, the Giants said its promotion generated about 6,000 Clear downloads in April. Nationwide, over 70,000 Health Passes are used for venue admission weekly, Clear said, though the app is only starting to verify vaccination status.

Also gaining traction is Excelsior Pass, funded by New York state, which supports verification of tests and vaccinations within the state. The app generated 500,000 certificates in April, and a companion app for businesses to verify them had 40,000 installations, New York spokeswoman Jennifer Givner said.

Excelsior Pass developer IBM Corp is in discussions with additional states, vice president Eric Piscini said.

In Europe, several governments have introduced apps that may be required to access transport, gyms and restaurants, while the 27-nation European Union races to develop a “gateway” that will enable them to work across borders.

Airline-backed Travel Pass and the nonprofit CommonPass, which was installed an estimated 20,000 times over the last two months in the United States, are being tested for international flight checks.

It remains unclear whether high-tech options to prove health status will be widely required. At their best, apps would combat fake records by validating information against public health databases, but that is no small task.

Piscini said it requires accessing at least 64 separate databases in the United States. But California, for example, has yet to specify whether and when it will share records with apps.

Clear has started testing access to vaccination records but declined to disclose details.

New online tools that have gained a few thousand users, including VaxYes and ConfirmD, are attesting to the veracity of vaccine certificate uploads by having medical professionals weed out forgeries.

“The demand (to automate) is there. There’s just a myriad different hoops to get through,” said Mohammad Gaber, chief executive of VaxYes developer GoGet.

AIRPORTS TO BALLPARKS

Clear users upload a driver’s license or other identity document and take a selfie, which the system checks to make sure they match before connecting to COVID-19 test results from hundreds of labs or the proof of vaccination.

Some venues also require a symptom survey on Clear or an automated temperature check at a Clear kiosk.

Users get a “green” pass with their headshot and a QR code to show staff or scan at entrances. Venues pay for the system.

Texas music festival Electric Cookout adopted Health Pass to reduce chances of an outbreak, said co-founder Pooja Shah. About 50 out of 1,200 attendees used it at an April event and received access to special areas, she said.

Clear’s primary service, priced at $179 annually, enables customers to use biometric scans to skip ID card inspections at nearly 40 U.S. airports. It also offers a free service enabling registered users to jet through “Clear lanes” to access entertainment venues.

Combining subscribers and non-paying users, Clear, whose services also go by Alclear and Secure Identity, said it has about 5.7 million members.

The company will not disclose financial results, but announced in February a $100 million funding round with investors including growth firm General Atlantic and the National Football League’s 32 Equity fund.

Clear still has hurdles to become accepted and get people comfortable with using it.

The Seattle Mariners baseball team promoted Clear’s technology for ID-less beer purchases from 2018 through 2019. The team said the effort did not generate “meaningful” usage data.

Washington state’s alcohol regulator said Clear cannot be the “sole methodology for ascertaining legal age.”

Clear said it was pleased with results and continues to educate regulators.

The Giants aim to enable card-less concession sales this year, and its chief business development officer, Jason Pearl, is enthusiastic about Clear’s technology. “I don’t think anyone else comes close.”

(Reporting by Paresh Dave; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Bill Berkrot)

In global war on coronavirus, some fear civil rights are collateral damage

By Luke Baker, Matthew Tostevin and Devjyot Ghoshal

LONDON/BANGKOK/DELHI (Reuters) – In Armenia, journalists must by law include information from the government in their stories about COVID-19. In the Philippines, the president has told security forces that if anyone violates the lockdown they should “shoot them dead”. In Hungary, the premier can rule by decree indefinitely.

Across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the Americas, governments have introduced states of emergency to combat the spread of the new coronavirus, imposing some of the most stringent restrictions on civil liberties since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, lawyers and human rights campaigners said.

While such experts agree extraordinary measures are needed to tackle the deadliest pandemic in a century, some are worried about an erosion of core rights, and the risk that sweeping measures will not be rolled back afterwards.

“In many ways, the virus risks replicating the reaction to Sept. 11,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, referring to the welter of security and surveillance legislation imposed around the world after the al Qaeda attacks on the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people.

“People were fearful and asked governments to protect them. Many governments took advantage of that to undermine rights in ways that far outlasted the terrorist threat,” he told Reuters.

Roth was speaking about legislation in countries including the United States, Britain and EU states which increased collection of visa and immigrant data and counter-terrorism powers.

Some measures imposed in response to a crisis can become normalised, such as longer security queues at airports as a trade-off for feeling safer flying. In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, similar trade-offs may become widely acceptable around issues such as surveillance, according to some political and social commentators.

South Korea’s use of mobile phone and other data to track potential carriers of the virus and impose quarantines has been a successful strategy and is a model that could be replicated around the world to guard against pandemics, they say.

Political consultant Bruno Macaes, a former Portuguese minister, said people’s obsession with privacy had made it harder to combat threats like pandemics, when technology to trace the virus could help.

“I am more and more convinced the greatest battle of our time is against the ‘religion of privacy’. It literally could get us all killed,” he added.

EXTRAORDINARY CRISIS

As the virus has spread from China across the world, with more than 1.4 million people infected and 82,000 dead, governments have passed laws and issued executive orders.

The first priority of the measures is to protect public health and limit the spread of the disease.

“It’s quite an extraordinary crisis, and I don’t really have trouble with a government doing sensible if extraordinary things to protect people,” said Clive Stafford-Smith, a leading civil rights lawyer.

The U.S.-headquartered International Center for Not-For-Profit Law has set up a database to track legislation and how it impinges on civic freedoms and human rights.

By its count, 68 countries have so far made emergency declarations, while nine have introduced measures that affect expression, 11 have ratcheted up surveillance and a total of 72 have imposed restrictions on assembly.

EXTRAORDINARY POWERS

In Hungary for example, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose party dominates parliament, has been granted the right to rule by decree in order to fight the epidemic, with no time-limit on those powers and the ability to jail people for up to five years if they spread false information or hinder efforts to quell the virus.

The Hungarian government said the law empowered it to adopt only measures for “preventing, controlling and eliminating” the coronavirus. Spokesman Zolan Kovacs said nobody knew how long the pandemic would persist, but that parliament could revoke the extra powers.

In Cambodia, meanwhile, an emergency law has been drafted to give additional powers to Hun Sen, who has been in office for 35 years and has been condemned by Western countries for a crackdown on opponents, civil rights groups and the media. The law is for three months and can be extended if needed.

The Cambodian government did not respond to a request for comment. Hun Sen defended the law at a news conference this week, saying it was only required so that he could declare a state of emergency, if needed, to stop the virus and saving the economy.

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, a former coup leader who kept power after a disputed election last year, has invoked emergency powers that allow him to return to governing by decree. The powers run to the end of the month, but also can be extended.

“The government is only using emergency power where it is necessary to contain the spread of the coronavirus,” said Thai government spokeswoman Narumon Pinyosinwat.

In the Philippines, the head of police said President Rodrigo Duterte’s order to shoot lockdown violators was a sign of his seriousness rather than indicating people would be shot.

Neither the presidential spokesman nor the cabinet secretary responded to a request for comment.

PUBLIC HEALTH

For Roth and other human rights advocates, the dangers are not only to fundamental freedoms but to public health. They say restrictions on the media could limit the dissemination of information helpful in curbing the virus’s spread, for instance.

Indian premier Narendra Modi, criticised in the media for a lack of preparedness including inadequate protective gear for health workers, has been accused by opponents of trying to muzzle the press by demanding that it get government clearance before publishing coronavirus news, a request rejected by India’s supreme court.

The Indian government did not respond to a request for comment, while the Armenian government said it had no immediate comment. Both have said they want to prevent the spread of misinformation, which could hamper efforts to control the outbreak.

Carl Dolan, head of advocacy at the Open Society European Policy Institute, warned about the tendency for some governments to keep extraordinary powers on their books long after the threat they were introduced to tackle has passed.

Dolan proposed a mandatory review of such measures at least every six months, warning otherwise of a risk of “a gradual slide into authoritarianism”.

(Additional reporting by Josh Smith in Seoul, Prak Chan Thul in Phnom Penh, Krisztina Than in Budapest, Nvard Hovhannisyan in Yerevan, Neil Jerome Morales in Manila, Panu Wongcha-Um in Bangkok, Linda Sieg in Tokyo, John Mair in Sydney, Ben Blanchard in Taipei, Aleksandar Vasovic in Belgrade and Tsvetelia Tsolova in Sofia; Editing by Pravin Char)