Tech Won't Save Us - Vaccine Passports Are Not the Solution w/ Elizabeth Renieris

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Elizabeth Renieris to discuss why we should be concerned about proposals for vaccine passports and how they could create a precedent for a larger rollout of digital identity documents.Elizabeth Renieris is a practitioner fellow at Stanford University’s Digital Civil Society Lab and a tech + human rights fellow  at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Follow Elizabeth on Twitter as @hackylawyer.🎉 In April 2021, Tech Won’t Save Us celebrates its first birthday. If we get 30 new supporters at $5+ per month, we’ll start a weekly newsletter in addition to the weekly podcast to provide a new way for people to access critical perspectives on technology. If you like the show, become a supporter and help us reach our goal!Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Elizabeth wrote about what’s really at stake in the vaccine passport debate.The US federal government has talked about leaving this to the private sector, the EU is planning a “digital green pass” for travel, and Israel rolled out a “green passport” for vaccinated people to gain access to various public and private spaces.Contact tracing apps did not deliver on their big promises.New York’s vaccine passport has already been forged.Rolling out vaccine passports has high costs for businesses who will want to use that infrastructure in other ways.Parts of the Global South may not receive mass Covid vaccinations until 2024.The modern passport regime was created in the 1920s, with the goal being to eventually abolish it. Now borders are being equipped with facial recognition cameras and border guards can check your phone.Support the show

Now, when you layer on the technology, all it does is amplify that inequity because it becomes not just a passport at the borders, but it becomes a passport to access all these facets of life. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and I'm very happy to say that very soon after last week's episode, I think even before it aired, we hit the goal that I set for this month of getting 30 new supporters at $5 a month to help the show expand with a new weekly newsletter. The response to this campaign has been fantastic. And I want to thank everyone who signed up to become a supporter this month. There have been 44 new people who have joined to support the show.

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see if they want to have their name read out on the show. And with that said, I hope you'll forgive me for this episode being a day late than it usually is. But I think that you'll find it's worth the wait. This week, my guest is Elizabeth Renieris. Elizabeth is a practitioner fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University and a tech and human rights fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Elizabeth recently wrote a fantastic article called What's Really at Stake with Vaccine Passports. In recent weeks and months, there has been growing debate about vaccine passports in the global north as vaccines have been rolling out in the United States, Europe, Canada, Israel, among other countries. There are

people who want to get back to normal, whatever that normal is going to be, and especially powerful people in the private sector who want business to get back to normal. And so naturally, this proposal to have vaccine passports to reopen society and allow people to go back to living as normal as possible has been gaining traction. In the United States, some of this discussion has been caught up in the broader conspiracy theories around Bill Gates and the pandemic. And that has in some ways stifled the kind of critical conversations that should be happening over these vaccine passports, especially because many of them would be using digital

technologies and would be building a new kind of infrastructure for the use of these digital identity applications that could be expanded in the future if we are not aware of the potential implications that they hold right now. Naturally, I understand that a lot of people want their lives to go back to normal. I think we all do. But Elizabeth and I have a great conversation about why we should be really wary of embracing this kind of digital passport solution instead of waiting for the herd of unity that would deliver the kind of benefits that we're looking for. Now, before we get to this week's episode, I want to make a special request. As you know, this month is the first birthday of Tech Won't Save Us. It's officially later this month. But

if you listen every week, if you like the show, and if you feel that you learned from it, I want to ask you this week, if you are a Twitter user or of any other social network, if you could make a post about the show and explaining why you like it, or a post with your favorite episode and what you feel that you learned from it. The podcast is already growing really well,

but obviously the more people who share it, who tell the people who follow them that they like the show, there's a chance that even more people will then tune in and listen. And naturally, if you make a post on Twitter, make sure to tag at TechWon'tSaveUs, and I'll retweet it so more people will see it. Thanks so much, and please enjoy this week's conversation. Elizabeth, welcome to TechWon'tSaveUs. Hi, thank you for having me. You had this fantastic article the other day, really digging into this vaccine passport debate that I think is becoming ever more relevant as more and more vaccines roll out in the United States, Europe, Canada, and other developed countries. And I think that's a key piece of this.

And so I really wanted to dig into this conversation with you so we can understand a bit more about what is being proposed here and what the potential implications of that could be and whether we should be wary of these kind of plans to bring out these kind of digital identity documents to kind of mediate the way that we access spaces, whether or not we have a vaccine. And so I wanted to start by getting you to actually explain to people what a vaccine passport is, because I think that there have been a number of definitions going around. And so people might be a little bit confused as to what we are actually talking about if we just assume that they know what a vaccine passport is from the start. So what is a vaccine passport? What are we actually discussing here? Sure. So in some ways, we're starting with the hardest question,

because there's obviously no standardized definition of what we mean by the term. The term is sometimes used interchangeably with other terms like immunity passport or immunity certificate or vaccine certificate or credential. There are increasingly terms being used like green passes or digital passes. But fundamentally, what we're talking about is some kind of credential, traditionally a physical or analog credential, increasingly a digital credential that purports to demonstrate something about someone's health status and in the context of COVID with respect to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the COVID-19 disease. So that status may be when it's called a vaccination passport, a vaccine passport, whether or not a person has been vaccinated. There are other passes that purport to say something about whether someone has

recovered from the disease or whether they have tested negative. So there are a number of permutations, but there are also some commonalities, some of which I walk through in the piece that you referenced that I wrote for CG, which is that really there are typically three pieces of these things. One is exactly that health status. The other is something to do with identity. And that's the really complex piece, I think, that we can, you know, certainly dig into in great detail. And thirdly is the complex piece, I think, that we can, you know, certainly dig into in great detail. And thirdly, is the sort of, you know, the hardware or software or, you know, in lower tech cases, that sort of physical presentation of that credential.

Yeah, I think that's a great way to lay it out and to explain it, right? When I have been kind of observing these debates happening in the media and online, I feel like what is often being discussed is three specific implementations of this. And I'll lay them out and see if you agree. And so the first one that I see being discussed and the one that I think is actually discussed the least in like, I think the general public's discussion of these things is the notion of a digital passport where it would kind of be like an app on your phone or something that you have on your phone to prove that you are vaccinated so that you can gain

access to different parts of society to prove that you are vaccinated. And I guess the idea then is that you won't spread the virus or something like that, even though as far as I'm aware, we don't have confirmation that that is the case yet. And then the second one that I see discussed is the idea of a digital passport for travel. So this would also be kind of like a digital way to prove that you are vaccinated, but it would primarily be used for international and in some cases domestic travel. And then the third one that I see is a paper document that would also be proof of vaccination that would also only be used for travel. So I feel like those are the three main things that people are talking about when it comes to vaccine passports. Do you kind of agree with that? Or do you think it's a

little bit different? I think that's largely correct. I think the only other dimensions I would add is that it's not necessarily about vaccination. And I think that's particularly relevant when we talk about places where vaccines are not readily available and are still not being rolled out and aren't available to populations. So there's gonna be, and there is this impetus to introduce other forms

of digital health credentials under the context of the pandemic and COVID-19, even where vaccines aren't available. And I think what's interesting, perhaps I neglected to mention was the passport dimension, of course, as you're pointing out, comes from the notion of using these credentials at the borders. So, you know, one of the things we can talk about, and one of the things that's really, I think, has been misconstrued and misinterpreted in the sort of debate around this is, you know, what is the precedent for something

like a COVID-19 vaccine passport and using that term as an umbrella term to capture the different interpreted in the sort of debate around this is, you know, what is the precedent for something like a COVID-19 vaccine passport and using that term as an umbrella term to capture the different things that we're talking about? Absolutely. I think that's a really great point. It has been worrying to see how these discussions have evolved because there is this assumption that technology will be one of the ways that we kind of free ourselves from the restrictions that we have been under for the past year, right? Right. And so when we look at the proposals for the rollout of a vaccine passport, you know, I feel like a lot of the discussion is kind of couched in this kind of individualistic language in the

sense that I have received my vaccine. Personally, I have not, but just put it in this kind of language. So now that I have my vaccine, I should be able to go back to living in a semi-normal way, even if a lot of the people around me have not been vaccinated. Do you kind of see this in the discussion as well? And what do you think the implications of that then are for the way that we discuss these things the way that we see them and what implications they could have for health if we're driven by these individualistic concerns instead of the broader kind of goal of keeping the the population safe and healthy while this pandemic is still ongoing yeah there are so many dimensions of that. I mean, I think what's so interesting to me is seeing how many parallels there are between the conversation around vaccine

passports and the conversation we initially had at the start of the pandemic around the use of technology for things like contact tracing and exposure notification. And because so many of the owners, the creators, the proponents of those technologies continue to be largely Western and predominantly US companies in many cases, especially when we think about the market share of things like smartphones around the world, the conversation tends to be really, really driven by these highly individualistic, atomistic concerns around individual civil and political rights around things like privacy or data protection and privacy. And those are important concerns,

but they quickly narrow the conversation into one about sort of tweaking technology at the edges to protect the interest of the individual without thinking about the broader implications and consequences for communities, for societies, for equity, for things like discrimination and justice access. So we're seeing that happen again around the conversation with vaccine passports. So the initial big announcement from a government really came when the EU announced their intention for this digital green pass. And the first thing they said basically, right, was that, you know, not to worry, this thing will protect privacy and security. And that's great. But that's

really narrowing in on a sort of micro point in the conversation way too quickly, in my view, without taking a step back and considering what the implications are at a much broader level. And it's also presuming a lot of things about the technology. So what we saw with the apps in the context of contact tracing and exposure notification, well, we saw a number of things that are playing out again. One is that companies were moving faster than governments, and they were sort of cornering governments, boxing governments into a corner to accept the terms that the private sector was setting. So ultimately, we saw that Google and Apple, again, through their market share of devices around the world, was able to dictate the terms of all the other apps and tools that the public sector was trying to implement in various contexts,

with very different considerations in mind. So, you know, there were these trade-offs between things like individual privacy, or, you know, collective public health and other concerns, but ultimately the private sector was able to dictate those terms. And then another thing that's played out in both scenarios is the sort of really limited evidence that this technology really has any effect. Nevertheless, one of the points that I've been making in the conversation around vaccine passports is that the infrastructure most likely remains. So pretty much all of us now that have a smartphone have a feature for some time because, well, for many reasons, but also sort of who's going to make the effort to remove it and, you know, but the next pandemic

and the next pandemic. And so I think a similar thing is going to happen with vaccine passports, which is we see this playing out in terms of the dynamic between the public and private sector, where we've even had governments say, you know, we have to do this before the private sector gets to it. The private sector, as you know, as you pointed out, is already doing this. And so we have governments lagging behind and then having the terms dictated to them, which also means framing the terms of the debate. And then we see that the infrastructure, for example, you know, the types of apps that you're referring to, the digital wallets that would store these credentials, that infrastructure is not just going to disappear. You know, even if and when the whole world is vaccinated, which is very unlikely to happen for many, many years,

because of all the issues around vaccine distribution and equity. But even if the pandemic were to, you know, sort of end at some point, which again, also based on the nature of this particular SARS-CoV-2 and the nature of coronaviruses is very unlikely to happen anytime soon, the infrastructure is still going to be there. And so that's the point that I've been trying to make, to get across, to get people to consider is we can't think about this as an isolated tool in the context of a short-term emergency response to something like SARS-CoV-2 and the resulting disease. But we need to think about this as what is the infrastructure that we're embedding and what are the consequences, not only for individuals, but for communities, for societies, for, you know, the distribution of power amongst countries, and particularly

the distribution of power as between the public and the private sector? Yeah, I am just nodding my head over here. I think there are so many great points that you made in that answer. And so I want to kind of dig into a few different aspects of what you were talking about. When you talked about contact tracing apps and how we already have this experience of being promised that a technology will, you know, address these issues that are coming from this health crisis. And then I think we can see, you know, with a year of hindsight that that did not produce the benefits that we were promised.

You know, what we really needed was health workers who could do contact tracing, good public health measures, and investments in the healthcare system to be able to provide those resources when people need them, right? But when we are talking about these vaccine passports, I think one of the really key things that comes to mind for me is how we know that the rollout of the vaccines has not been an equitable process. And now, obviously, I'm in Canada, I don't know all the specifics about the rollout in the United States. But I have seen a number of stories that suggested that, you know,

certain communities were not receiving the vaccines to the same degree of others, there was inequity in the rollout. And we have also seen that in parts of Canada. But then also when we kind of zoom out to the global level, if we're talking about using a vaccine passport, not as just something that is used in the day-to-day life to gain access to different parts of the city or community that you live in, but something that's needed for travel to other countries, we know that the rollout has also been incredibly unequal, where we have had countries in the global north buying up almost all the supply of the vaccines that have been available, whereas the global south is getting very few vaccines so far.

And there's even discussions that they might not be fully vaccinated until 2023 or 2024. So what is the concern about the equity of these systems when the vaccines are not being equitably rolled out themselves? This is why it's really important to think about the scope of these things. So just taking a step back, going back to this notion of a vaccine passport and to the original question you asked me. So the term passport, the genesis of that was around borders, right? So literally the term passport is to pass at the port. So historically term passport, the genesis of that was around borders, right? So literally, the term passport is to pass at the port. So historically, etymologically, it's about borders. And borders are unique from many standpoints, especially from a legal standpoint, right? There are things that

are acceptable from a legal standpoint at the border that are typically not acceptable in other contexts. There are different trade-offs that are made in that context at the borders. And so the reason this is important from an inequity standpoint is that what we're seeing happen very quickly is in places where vaccines are readily available, which as you pointed out, is typically in wealthier countries, typically in the global North, these passes are being quickly rolled out in many domestic settings. So they're being rolled out in context of school and employment and entertainment and hospitality and all these other sectors and domains of life that have nothing to do with a traditional notion of vaccine passports. Or when we think about something like the yellow card or the carte de union, they're not being used in that sort of narrowly unique legal context. They're being used in all

of these other domains. And when you think about the context of vaccine distribution and how inequitable that rollout is and how there are entire countries that don't have access to vaccines, there are countries asking organizations like the WTO to come up with ways to find more equitable distribution to weigh things like IP rights, patent rights. When we have vaccines that are not considered sufficient in one country that are in another, so we have the kind of vaccine nationalism emerging around, are China's vaccines meeting the same standards? We have countries that, as you mentioned, won't have access until 2023, 2024, potentially. And even then within those countries, you know, who's going to have access? And there will still be

groups of, you know, individuals, communities who are left out and equally in the United States, as you pointed out. Then you have other dimensions of things like vaccine hesitancy, and a lot of that having to do with historical injustices and historical lack of access and discrimination and mistreatment of certain groups and communities. And so there are all these complicated factors that mean that there's inequity in the baseline distribution. So now when you layer on the technology, all it does is amplify that inequity because it becomes not just a passport at the borders, but it becomes a passport to access all these facets of life and things that are really,

really fundamental, like education and work and the right to work and to partake in, you know, in the cultural life. And what's so interesting about that from a human rights standpoint, you know, I'm a technology and human rights fellow at the Carr Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. And my whole project and my research there is about recalibrating human rights in a digital age, because typically in the digital context, we really focus on individual civil and political rights, like the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression. And we neglect this entire body of international human rights law having to do with more economic, social, and cultural rights that are not as individualistic, but are really, really important, particularly in the context of something like public health and a global pandemic.

And so that sort of imbalance in the way we think about what's fundamental and what rights are relevant is so distorted that when you layer on something like a technology, like a vaccine passport or vaccine pass, in the context of something like this, that is so deeply flawed from the bottom up, not only do you exacerbate the situation, but as I mentioned at the outset of our conversation, you know, you risk kind of baking these path dependencies in that are going to be much more permanent than we might be appreciating in the conversation right now. I think what you're saying about the technology serving to amplify inequity, because we're not

fully considering, you know, everything else that is going on around the rollout of this potential digital passport is so essential. And it's just a repeat of, I think, what we see with a lot of technologies when we're not considering the social circumstances that kind of surround them. You know, going back to the contact tracing exposure notification apps, and the reason I keep going back to that is because to me, it's frustrating that we're not learning from situations that have something to teach us about how this works. And it feels as though we're not learning lessons from the debate that transpired at the start of the pandemic.

And people will selectively point to certain apps in some countries and contexts and say that they were instrumental. And I've surveyed a lot of those apps in a lot of the countries. And often what you see is that it has very little to do with the technology. It's, as you pointed out,

there's an underlying public health infrastructure. There are different social and cultural attitudes. The cultures are perhaps less individualistic. So there are all these other factors that are very easy to ignore when you just hone in on an app and you sort of are comparing apps to apps. But that is really turning a blind eye to all of these underlying conditions that, as we know, impact its ultimate implications for society because technology is not implemented in a vacuum and cannot be sort of assessed on its own without thinking about that broader context. Yeah, I completely agree. So the next point that I wanted to ask you about was really about the kind of broader implications of this that you brought up

in your previous answer, because you were saying how we kind of have this relationship on the border that we're used to having, and which I think a lot of people forget is still like a product of the post World War Two era, passports did not work in the same way before that, right. And so now we're talking about using these technologies in a way that brings this kind of relationship into more aspects of our urban lives and domestic lives in a way that we're not used to seeing in the past. A few months ago, I spoke to David Banks, who is, you know, a scholar on some of these kind of technologies and how they're being implemented in the urban context. And I think there's this broader concern about how using more of these applications to

mediate our access to different parts of society is creating more inequities that often is not being considered when those things roll out. So in your first answer, when you described the vaccine passport, you were talking about how by creating these applications and technologies now, there's the potential that they could be entrenched because they're going to become a permanent feature of the smartphone and be rolled out in more areas. So what is your concern there about what we could be setting up for the future of how we relate to different parts of the city and our lives by starting these things with vaccine passports now and using the pandemic to justify it?

Yeah, so there are a lot of pieces that I haven't mentioned, which is that there is the embedding of the sort of technical infrastructure, you know, the apps and the smartphone, that sort of thing. There's also a really important piece that's not been part of the conversation around commercial incentives. So as these things are rolled out in different domains of life, you know, in workplaces and schools, in venues, in all kinds of contexts, the infrastructure to set that up is expensive. There was an article recently in the Guardian about a pub owner in the UK talking about just the cost, you know, for a small business owner to implement the technology to read the QR codes on these apps.

And it wasn't a small, you know, it was well over £1,000 a week per venue. You know, in other contexts, it's really expensive, and it requires this big overhaul of infrastructure. And so you can imagine that once that infrastructure is implemented, and, you know, that investment is made, there's often this feedback loop that sets in, which is that, okay, well, now we have to demonstrate that this was worthwhile. And this is especially true when we're talking about public sector procurement of these privately developed technologies where there's all the more incentive to be able to justify that expense. And so even where a technology may not be effective or may not really be part of a public health response, there are now these really strong

commercial incentives to use them and to keep them and to try and portray them as really having a meaningful effect. So, you know, some scholars refer to this as a kind of technology theater. We've seen a lot of pushback again, and looking at even from the start of the pandemic, you know, this notion of installing things like thermal cameras and readers in different places. We see this playing out with payments technology and the pandemic being used to push through a lot of sort of contactless or touchless payments where we know that there's very little evidence that the disease is passed through surfaces or through, you know, contact. So there are a lot of dimensions of this kind of technology theater, but it's not just the technology, it's the commercial incentives around it. And also

this relationship between the public and private sector. So that really embeds certain decisions and makes them hard sometimes to unwind. And then what happens typically is that, okay, well, now we have this thing in place, how else do we squeeze sort of value out of it? And then you can see quickly how that incentivizes uses that weren't initially anticipated. And we're certainly not negotiated or, you know, subject to any kind of public consultation. I feel like that description you provided provides a really good segue into another piece of your article, but something that I think is a much larger piece of your work as well. And that's this growing kind of digital identity industry that these vaccine passports are really a part of, and that they could serve as kind of like a beachhead to

further grow this kind of industry. So, you know, as these technologies are implemented in more places, and there's kind of this expectation then that you could have this kind of digital document or digital identity application to verify different aspects of yourself for whatever different purposes. What is your concern about what that would mean for this digital identity industry that you're talking about and what implications that could have for us as people who will then be subject to that technology. Yeah, so I think this is a point that can be really hard to convey in a very accessible way. And I struggle with it because, you know, I personally have a lot of expertise in digital identity. And I've worked in house at a number of digital identity companies, I've been in sort of

industry bodies and multi stakeholder groups around this type of work and organizations and digital identity sort of coming at us like a big tidal wave in the sense that it's been around for so long. But until very recently, digital identity was kind of this back office, IT, very technical thing that lived in very technical standards bodies and just wasn't something visible or kind of visceral for people. So it was things to authenticate access in the background, more familiarly, things like our credentials to log into different products and services. But in the last couple of years, as things are increasingly digital,

the more things that are digital, the more that there's this sort of visible, visceral touchpoint for digital identity where we're asked to log into more things and to authenticate ourselves. And so I think it's becoming a little bit more visible. But I think the pandemic has the potential, as I tried to point out in my article, to really push this past a tipping point, where the way I think about the risks is that even with the most invasive contact tracing or exposure notification, or again, going back to that initial debate, you know, you sort of had the option to just leave your phone at home, right? And go for a walk. You could still separate the sort of notion of, you know, the digital tools and technologies that could expose your location, but just more generally, conceptually, kind of your privacy, put your risk in that way.

But you literally could just leave the thing at home, right? The concern I have now is that we're moving into a world where as there's a digital component to everything, that scenario of leaving your phone at home and sort of anonymously going out for a walk is becoming harder and harder to conceive of. And equally, the risk is that there aren't things like public spaces. So again, this is something that can be hard to articulate, but the way that I'm thinking about it in my work, for example, with the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford is that when I go to a park right now, nobody asks to see my ID. And it's not to say that someone will ask to see your ID in the future when you go to a park. It's just that if we start to embed the types of digital identity technologies that are emerging in the industry, things that are like, you know, Amazon One's Palm biometrics technology, things that are not in a device, but, you know, biometrics on you.

As we move in that direction, you know, you're kind of in a scenario where it doesn't actually matter where you are, this commercial imperative is sort of with you everywhere you go. And so in this way, even sort of public spaces become privatized in a sense. And again, I know that can sound very theoretical and academic. And so I keep going back to, you know, I don't want to enter a world where I can't leave my device at home and go for a walk. And that's one way to think about it. But I appreciate that that can feel a bit distant for people. I think it can be difficult to imagine how things would change in the future with the implementation of these technologies. You know, one thing that I think about when I think it can be difficult to imagine how things would change in the future with the implementation of these technologies.

You know, one thing that I think about when I think about these things is kind of the Amazon Go or Amazon Fresh stores, where the idea is this kind of contactless shopping experience where you walk in, pick up what you want, and then leave without going to a cashier. But actually, in order to engage in that, you need to have the app on your phone. You need to have an Amazon account. You need to have a method of payment connected to that. And so then anyone who doesn't have all those things are then automatically excluded from that space. I saw a tweet the other day say like, it's basically the store where you don't need to deal with poor people, you don't need to deal with cashiers, no one with food stamps, like all these sorts of things, because they are denied entry at the door, right? Absolutely. And I think that is a huge concern with the way that these vaccine passports, again, using that term broadly as an umbrella term are being rolled out is that, you know, you have, I think, an underappreciation for the conversation we're having right now,

because the urgency is so pronounced in the context of the pandemic that you have governments desperately needing to appear like they have the situation under control. We saw this again with the contact tracing debate, and then the private sector ready for the massive commercial opportunity and combined, you know, this kind of cascading impact that we don't have a chance to think about as the individuals, the communities, the societies were ultimately impacted and going to live with this stuff for a really long time. Absolutely. I'm wondering then about the government response to this. You talked about how Europe is proposing, I believe it was a green pass that would be a

travel document as I understand it. The Biden administration has said that vaccine passports would be a private sector initiative and that they wouldn't be taking the lead on it. But I believe some states have been rolling out vaccine passports of their own. And then I think one of the most notable examples that we've seen discussed is the example of Israel, where they have rolled out kind of like a digital passport to confirm people's vaccine status. So what do you make of these kind of different responses to the idea of a vaccine passport by different governments? Yeah, it has been really interesting to watch. So the contrast between the sort of EU and the US is particularly pronounced, but we can talk about, you know, the other examples as well.

So they seem really different on the surface in the sense that, you know, the EU is sort of leading the charge in many ways. And they're trying to go about this from the public sector sort of dictating terms to the private sector. Now, that being said, actually, at the start of the conversation, a lot of the countries in the EU were very vocally opposed to the notion of a green pass or vaccine passport. And there was this kind of sudden shift when particularly some of the Southern European countries, Greece in particular, right, who are really dependent on tourism, started to realize that the pandemic might not be over by the summer, and were, you know, legitimately very concerned for their economies,

and started putting pressure on Brussels and some of the, you know, law and policymakers to consider this more thoroughly. However, you did also hear at the start of the pandemic references to the private sector and saying that we need to get ahead of them. You know, we need to do this before we're forced into this by Apple and Google. I think that was largely a product of the experience that Europe had with contact tracing and exposure notification, although there was actually no basis for that because at the time those statements were made, you know, there was no evidence that the companies like Apple and Google were working on a vaccine passport. So it's just really interesting to see how the conversation shifted and then how quickly, you know, it went from a lot of countries opposed

to suddenly, you know, the EU kind of doing this singular effort to introduce their green pass. So that's how the dynamic sort of played out there. And then, you know, in the US, you've had, as you mentioned, the Biden administration saying, you know, there will absolutely not be a federal plan around this, you know, we're going to leave this to the private sector. More recently, they've sort of said, well, we appreciate that's going to create a lot of confusion and tensions, and there'll be all these conflicting different systems and states will have their own tools in place. And that's going to be complicated domestically. And so they have alluded to potentially introducing some type

of guidance around some of these initiatives, but not actually doing any of the implementation themselves. And it's kind of easy to look at those two and say, you know, Europe has it right. It's a little bit unclear to me, just because it's not always what it seems. And as I mentioned, even though there is this kind of collective effort in the EU, a lot of it is still being driven ultimately by the private sector and by commercial interests. And also that ultimately, the technology deployed is heavily influenced by that. So it sort of remains to be seen. I mean, I think the problem I see in the conversation in the US is how partisan this conversation is becoming and how it's seemingly along these political lines when in reality, when we think about what's at stake, it doesn't cut so neatly on either side.

So if you think about the equity concerns, the partisan sort of nature, the, you know, you've got governors in red states coming out and saying, you know, we're not going to allow these things. We're even going to go so far as to ban them in some cases. But then again, when you get more nuanced in the conversation and you think about how these could play out and what's at stake, it doesn't really fall along those partisan lines. I've been really frustrated by the sort of really binary conversation that we're seeing in the U.S. context. I think what you're saying there about the EU and the U.S. is really fascinating, right? And I think the partisanship of the debate in the US has actually kind, you know, in the way that the conspiracy theories

around Bill Gates and vaccines has poisoned some of the kind of criticism of Bill Gates's role in, you know, IP protections of vaccines and things like that. And it's made that seem like a conspiracy when it's kind of like a legitimate criticism of what's been going on, right. But I wanted to shift a little bit, you talked about the EU and the US's approach there. And I feel like the Israeli approach is the one that most closely mirrors the kind of thing that you are particularly worried about with these digital apps, digital passports kind of rolling out in a sense that it mediates your ability to access different parts of society. And obviously in Israel, we have seen that the vaccine rollout has been quick for the Israeli population, but not for the Palestinian population. And I believe you noted before we were talking that the app that they're using for this is only in Hebrew. So that kind of builds in some of these inequities into the system. So what do you make of the Israeli approach? And I would imagine that you think that's something that we should really be trying to avoid. Yeah, I mean, you've got so much of it, right? I was

when I was trying to do some research, you know, to dig deeper into some of the technology and some of the apps being used in Israel, I came up against that wall really quickly, where a lot of the documentation, a lot of the websites and the information was only accessible in Hebrew, and I'm not a I'm not a Hebrew speaker. And so it was, you know, so apparent to me how limiting that could be and how much that could exclude certain people. And as you mentioned, we've also seen how Palestinians are definitely lagging behind in terms of vaccination in Israel. And so, you know, that's deeply concerning as well. I think that what we we've seen is because Israel was kind of quick and early with vaccinations

of certain parts of the population, and because they implemented the pass very quickly, we saw sort of a lot of early takes on, you know, is this a glimpse of post-pandemic life? And we saw, you know, depictions of people out at bars and restaurants and that sort of thing on the basis of presenting their app. And so it was apparent that there were these parallel lives being led by people who were seemingly free to carry on as they please, and then other people who really couldn't access any of these things. And then the other thing that's really interesting is that a lot of public health experts are saying that Israel is actually going to be quick to reach herd immunity because they were so quick and early with their vaccine

rollout. And then that's another piece of this that's really been kind of unsettling. And Ada Lovelace has done some really great work around this in the UK with their experts that they've convened to look at vaccine passports in the sense that the utility, if you just think about this as a vaccine passport in the sense of proof of vaccination and particularly use at the border, it appears like when you look at what's the actual utility of this, which is really relevant to a human rights assessment, when you think about things like whether they're legitimate or justified or not, there's this narrow window, right? That's kind of, you have enough of the population vaccinated and included. So you don't have a scenario where you have this deep inequity, but then shortly

thereafter, you get to a point where you reach a critical mass of vaccinated individuals and or herd immunity, which can be simultaneous, and then seemingly no need for the vaccine passport as such. So when I think about the risks, and when I think about the tremendous potential for just really severe impacts on people on communities, and then you have to think about it from the standpoint of what are the trade-offs? Well, it's really hard to look at what's on the other side. So it's like maybe this small window from a public health standpoint. And then, you know, when I hear the other arguments for these things, there are very few compelling arguments. You know, it's kind of, okay, well, we need these because the paper credentials are really subject to fraud. Well, that's interesting. Again, as someone who's worked in the digital identity space for quite some time, when I think about something like

social security cards, which, you know, in the US are not only still paper, but really low grade paper, that, you know, is actually potentially easy to replicate fraudulently. When we think about social security fraud, it's not come from the physical paper cards, right? It's come from social security numbers that have been leaked online, because once they're online or digital, they're much more vulnerable and much more subject to security breaches and things like that. So I just don't find given the really significant risks and what's at stake, particularly in terms of the permanent infrastructure we might be embedding, and the way that we're normalizing things like demonstrating your health status. I mean, that's a whole nother piece of

this conversation that I'm not really comfortable with normalizing in all of these contexts. But when we think about all of that, and then we ask, okay, but what's the trade-off? Maybe it's worth it. Maybe there really is a lot to be gained. Maybe we really do combat things like fraud. Well, the evidence is really thin on that other side when you think about the trade-off. So for me, on a whole, when I look at this, it's just not compelling. So that's sort of where I arrive at the position that I'm at, which is that these things are really dangerous. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And I think that gives us so many additional important points to consider when we think about whether these things should be being rolled out. And so I wanted to end by asking you where you think things will go from

here and where you think they should go from here. And before I get you an answer that I kind of want to just give my view on these documents. For me, like after hearing all that you've described, and you know, after doing the other research that I've done, I just don't see a reason why we should have these digital passports, certainly for domestic use, but I would say even for use at the border. I think that not even in recent years, but I think it's an ongoing critique of the kind of border regime that we have set up and especially how that regime is becoming increasingly digitized with e-passports and other forms of facial recognition and things like that at the borders that we oppose in general society. But I even think that the talk of a paper card or something to prove vaccination at the border to give easier travel is also kind of an issue when we have such an unequal global distribution of vaccines, right? Like I know that there's the yellow pass for yellow fever vaccines,

but the big difference is that there's not kind of a global procurement war to get yellow fever vaccines as there is with COVID vaccines. And so, you know, I feel like we are potentially going down a really dangerous route, the more that we look to use these kind of vaccines and means of identifying health status or other forms of identity as you've been talking about more broadly to access travel, but also just different parts of society. So I touched on a lot of different things, but I think just generally, where do you think things go from here? And how do you think we should be reacting to these proposals? And I would imagine trying to stop them. Yeah, I mean, responding to what you've

just said, as much as I'm one of the first people to say that the sort of myth of technology inevitability is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we've seen this play out over and over and over again. And so you have people that could otherwise be really effective advocates to push back against some of these things, sort of throw in the towel quickly and then start tweaking at the edges and making sure, you know, those systems are private and secure and all the things I mentioned at the outset, rather than really questioning the legitimacy and the necessity and all of those things about these systems in the first place. As much as I'm the first to admit that the inevitability piece is a really momentous

force and really problematic in this conversation, you know, I even recognize in this conversation how I'm starting to rank these in terms of, okay, at the border, they're, you know, a little bit more acceptable, but I'm actually, and I've written about this before that a lot of the public health experts I have spoken to, and again, that is not my particular expertise, but I've been in conversation with public health experts for a couple of years now around this, which is that the yellow card, which is typically the only precedent pointed to, and it's so interesting, it's pointed to say, oh, we do this all the time. We've done this before. It's such a narrow precedent. And yellow fever is endemic versus something like SARS-CoV-2, which is pandemic. And so when you have something endemic, which means it doesn't exist in a lot of places, this idea that you can kind of control the spread

by controlling it at the borders makes a lot more sense than when you think about something that's widespread and everywhere, pandemic, where it's a lot harder to justify and explain that context. Again, pointing to that precedent is really misleading. The yellow card is not digital, as you know. There are zero commercial incentives around its use, right? So basically none. So there are just so many frustrating pieces about pointing to that. And so I think we need to appreciate how unprecedented this is, even in the context at the borders. And as you say, there has been this sort of scope creep, mission creep at the borders in the context of digital things like, you know, asking to see people's social media feeds and all of that. So the borders tend to be a kind of more permissive

context in some ways. And we do see that happening. But even in that context, I would say there's very limited precedent for this. So where I see this going is that I think the commercial incentives are so powerful. And the narratives around technology kind of inevitability are so powerful, and the desperation and kind of urgency and emergency climate around the pandemic and people's frustration after a year of global lockdown. I think all of these factors coming together probably mean that this stuff, and again, I don't want to say it because it feels self-perpetuating, but that, you know, it will roll out in many contexts and it will go beyond proof of vaccination

and it will, it will in many ways, normalize kind of the use of digital health credentials in many contexts. You know, it could be wrong as these things do roll out. It could be that there is tremendous backlash and we might see something like we've seen around facial recognition technologies where there is sufficient collective organizing and pushback and resistance to the kind of myth of technological inevitability where, you know, we can do something about it. My concern is that, you know, even in this conversation, I think we've demonstrated how the identity piece is kind of subtle, but at the same time, like a tidal wave. And so it might make it harder to have that kind

of collective organizing. You know, where I would like to see this go is I would like to see some lessons learned from prior context. So certainly from the start of the pandemic, but also from, you know, countless examples in history where a lot of this technology has been, you know, I point this out in my CG piece around how much was introduced after 9-11. Again, particularly starting at the borders, the borders always being this kind of very vulnerable, very precarious situation that legitimates a lot of things that we would otherwise find objectionable, that is all still in place. You know, my first job out of law school was at the Department of Homeland Security. And I was astonished. This was well over a decade after 9-11. And, you know, all of the

infrastructure was still in place. And a lot of that has to do with many of the things I've been pointing to in this conversation, a combination of commercial incentives, of a need to demonstrate that these things are useful, scope creep, a challenge in public oversight and difficulty to pinpoint and to articulate what some of the risks are until it's too late. So we see a lot of that playing out again. And I just want to say that because it's so difficult to have this conversation without, as you mentioned, falling into falling into the sort of, you know, 5G Bill Gates conspiracy theory realm. I think there are actually probably many more people who have these concerns, who feel this way, who are really concerned about speaking out because of that dynamic we see playing out. And then in the U.S. because of the sort of highly charged partisan nature of the conversation. So part of what I'm trying to do is sort of encourage people who have these concerns to

have a more nuanced conversation to sort of appreciate that there is the risk of being portrayed in that way. But, you know, I'm sort of well known in this field. I've been in this conversation for a long time. And so I'm hoping that I can, as I said, sort of give people, you know, I don't want to say the courage because that sounds really self-righteous, but, you know, just add to the voices who can legitimately raise these concerns and speak out and hopefully add to a more balanced conversation around vaccine passports. Yeah, I think that's an essential point. And I completely agree. You know, I really

appreciate your kind of intervention into this discussion. And hopefully, with this episode, we can get more people seeing that being critical and skeptical of vaccine passports isn't just a conspiracy theory, but there's actually legitimate issues here to be concerned about. So Elizabeth, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today and digging into this with me. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for having me. This is great. Elizabeth Renieris is a practitioner fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University and a tech and human rights fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. You can follow her on Twitter at at Hackey Lawyer. You can follow me at at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network and you can find out more about

that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.