Surveillance, police, and quarantining COVID-19 in Canada and Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The global surveillance of the COVID-19 pandemic has seen most countries imposing traditional quarantine of populations supported by police surveillance and underpinned by obscure legal instruments. This chapter explores these strategies in two advanced democracies, Canada and Australia, that are emblematic of global patterns. The analysis reveals a peculiar amalgam of premodern strategies of quarantine coupled with cutting-edge police administered surveillance technologies involving enactments of legal instruments consistent with notions of 'counter-law' and 'exception'. The components of global surveillance involving police here are not especially unique but become so in emergency contexts when rapidly combined with new socio-technical capabilities. Here traditional quarantine becomes reconfigured, partially supported through police deployment, as a mobile, ever-shifting, mostly lateral form called 'social distancing'. The broader implications of our analysis for understanding current governing logics and global surveillance, the old strategy of quarantine involving police, and the dangers these surveillance-legal arrangements pose for a post-pandemic world are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".