#Big Brother at the airport and other commentary

An airport worker at the Bagdogra airport in India checks the body temperature of a passenger.
AFP via Getty Images

Coronavirus fears are bringing a whole new wave of surveillance for air travelers, warns Natasha Frost at Slate. But are the measures — from mandatory tracking apps to biometric scanning — worth it? “Between the hospital-grade air filters and extremely dry air, a plane in flight ­actually seems to be a fairly inhospitable environment for the virus. Indeed, much of the tech seems “little more than health-security theater” to reassure worriers. Notably, the Transportation Security Administration may soon start doing airport temperature checks, though agents are woefully undertrained for the task. And tracing apps are even more intrusive — and resented even in high-surveillance areas like Singapore. Nonetheless, “like many post-9/11 security measures,” the new steps “may remain in place in perpetuity, or at least long after the initial justification ceases to be relevant.”

Libertarian: A Huge Contact-Tracing Mistake

Despite Apple’s and Google’s efforts to develop software to allow “state public-health authorities to trace those who have come into contact” with the coronavirus, most authorities would rather use “government-created systems,” reports Reason’s Max Dunat — even though those systems “often require far more manual tracking of contacts” and “do a worse job of protecting people’s privacy.” Privacy advocates prefer the Apple-Google approach, but “just three states” plan to use it. Instead, “many cities and states have decided to hire platoons of contact tracers,” to whom many Americans are reluctant to talk, or “develop their own apps,” which may display “your location to other residents of your city.” No surprise, then, that “so few people are opting in to the states’ contact-tracing apps.”

Ethicist: Facts the Protesters Ignore

Coleman Hughes writes at City Journal of why he fell away from the Black Lives Matter movement. He still agrees that “police departments too often have tolerated and even enabled corruption” — but no longer believes that “cops disproportionately kill unarmed black Americans.” That’s because of both “stories and data”: For “every black person killed by the police,” after all, “there is at least one white person (usually many) killed in a similar way.” Of the “four careful studies” that have looked at “the effect of a suspect’s race on a cop’s decision to pull the trigger,” none has “found a racial bias in deadly shootings.” That’s why we should reduce the number of Americans of all races killed by police — rather than accepting a false premise that will only lead to even more “large protests and destructive riots.”

Pandemic journal: Don Did Have a Testing Plan

While the media and leading Democrats were insisting Team Trump had no COVID-19 testing plan, the administration ­ executed a strong one, reports National Review’s Rich Lowry. After some “bad initial stumbles” from important agencies, the administration decided to “catalyze and support the private sector while working with the states.” That prompted complaints that President Trump lacked a “centralized” plan, yet the focus on working with private enterprise and the states allowed the United States to rapidly go “from nothing to more than half a million COVID tests on some days.” We are “in a much better place on testing” now, thanks to “a Trump-administration strategy that the press scorned or said didn’t exist.”

Corruption watch: WHO’s Odd Green Agenda

If you thought the World Health Organization’s job was to “direct and coordinate authority on global pandemics,” Rupert Darwall scoffs at The Hill, you’d better forget it: Instead of “addressing its own lamentable failure to halt the spread of the virus,” last month WHO released a “demand for a global Green New Deal” under the guise of a “manifesto for a healthy recovery from COVID-19.” The document urges us to “lessen our impact on the environment” and invest in renewable energy, two causes that have nothing to do with global pandemics. Why? “WHO’s recovery manifesto isn’t about science and rationality” — it’s about playing anti-industrialization Western elites “like a Stradivarius, so the lessons from the pandemic go unexamined.”

— Compiled by Karl Salzman & Mark Cunningham