The coronavirus pandemic has brought into sharp focus the work of doctors, nurses, and delivery workers. Less obvious, but equally significant, is the work of those in an altogether different field: surveillance.

As they scramble to bring the pandemic under control, governments around the world are implementing or considering the use of sophisticated, and at times intrusive, monitoring techniques.

Technology – including surveillance drones, facial recognition algorithms, and smartphone geolocation trackers – has emerged as a powerful weapon in the battle against COVID-19. But its rapid deployment raises important ethical questions reminiscent of those raised by the war on terror.

Many observers are voicing the concern that extraordinary measures implemented today will become permanent.

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“The single largest, immediate challenge we are seeing is an explosion of emergency or exceptional laws across the globe,” says Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin, a law professor and the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism.

Emergency powers, once enacted, are rarely rolled back, she says. “Even if they are created on the basis of being temporary aberrations, they essentially become permanent additions to the legal architecture of the state,” she warns.

An opportunity seized?

International law makes provisions for states to limit citizens’ rights during a crisis, but the danger is overreach. Professor Ní Aoláin says it worries her that many of the legislative measures being adopted around the world have a “pre-cooked” quality.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán seized on the COVID-19 crisis to cement executive powers. In the United Kingdom, there are concerns that the government’s emergency powers under the Coronavirus Act – a document more than 300 pages long – will relax restrictions on mass surveillance. Israel wants its intelligence services to track those who have the virus. 

Emergency measures have spread from Europe, collectively the epicenter of the pandemic, to the United States, the country with the most confirmed cases. Governments are turning to telecommunications companies, social media platforms, and app developers for help monitoring individuals who contracted the virus and identifying at-risk clusters – with and without consent, with and without anonymizing personal data.

Human rights and privacy advocates say a cautionary tale on mass surveillance taken to the extreme can be found in China, which even before the pandemic had employed that measure to repress dissent in Xinjiang, home to the ethnic Uyghur minority.

Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in Hubei Province and the point of origin of the coronavirus outbreak, had been placed under full lockdown, and appears to be emerging from the crisis. But a phone app now determines whether Chinese citizens should remain in quarantine or have the right to move freely, all while sharing personal data with local authorities. 

“There are interests and obviously appetites for governments to take advantage of this opportunity to test out tracking and privacy-breaking technologies,” says Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation, a global nonprofit that focuses on authoritarian regimes. “Even in open societies, like Taiwan and South Korea, you are unfortunately seeing very aggressive surveillance tracing of people in quarantine or who are positive.” 

Health of the many

The practice of surveilling and restraining those believed to be contagious is nearly as old as civilization itself. Chapter 13 of Leviticus details which dermatological symptoms call for forcible isolation by public authorities. Writing in the first century B.C., the Roman statesman Cicero coined the motto “salus populi suprema lex esto” – “the health of the people should be the supreme law” – a phrase that John Locke, writing nearly 1,700 years later, would characterize as a foundational principle of government.

“There is an old-fashioned law that the health of the many outweighs the rights of the individual,” says Howard Markel, a physician and historian of medicine at the University of Michigan. “We’re all neighbors. We’re all responsible for one another.”

Our modern conception of quarantine dates to 14th-century Venice, Italy, when some arriving ships would be required to sit at anchor for 40 days – quaranta giorni in Italian – in an attempt to contain the bubonic plague. The rise of germ theory in the 19th century further cemented the ethos that broad police powers were justified in the face of infectious disease. By 1905, in response to a smallpox outbreak in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court established that the rights of the individual must be subordinate to reasonable public health measures.

Thomas Peter/Reuters

A software engineer works on a facial recognition program that identifies people when they wear a face mask, at the development lab of the Chinese electronics manufacturer Hanwang (Hanvon) Technology in Beijing, March 6, 2020.

Perhaps the most famous example of overreach by public health officials is the story of Irish immigrant Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary. A cook for wealthy families in the New York City area at the turn of the 20th century, she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever. After several members of the families she cooked for fell ill, authorities identified her and forcibly quarantined her on North Brother Island. Three years later, Ms. Mallon was released on the condition that she not work as a cook. But she returned to preparing food, and was placed back in quarantine for the rest of her life – all told, nearly three decades in isolation.

Her plight represents “the quintessential example of what happens when public health comes into conflict with civil rights,” says medical historian Judith Walzer Leavitt, author of the 1997 book “Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health.”

Most of the stringent public health laws remained intact through the rise of the civil rights and civil liberties movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was only with the HIV/AIDS epidemic near the end of the 20th century that the tension between privacy and public health came to the forefront. 

Reflecting on the lessons learned from that epidemic, UNAIDS Deputy Executive Director Shannon Hader argues that trust, engagement, and the cooperation of communities are indispensable to truly conquer COVID-19, as is the ready access to services for those who need them.  

With trust, she adds, comes the most reliable data.

“In the HIV response, we’ve seen effective surveillance systems with extremely private information put into place that have strict protections and have had no breaches of confidentialities,” says Dr. Hader. “Yes, there are absolutely ways – even with new technologies and artificial intelligence – to do sound and important public health surveillance that does not compromise the health and safety of individuals.”

Need for oversight

From the World Health Organization in Geneva to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, efforts are underway to develop apps that could help contain the pandemic. One challenge is that privacy laws around the world have struggled to keep pace with technological advances that have delivered facial recognition, biometrics, artificial intelligence, and big-data analysis.

But Joe Cannataci, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to privacy, says that a data-driven response to the coronavirus is possible while still adhering to ethical standards.

“We shouldn’t be surprised that in exceptional circumstances exceptional measures should be taken,” says Professor Cannataci from his home office in Malta, where he is adhering to a precautionary 14-day quarantine after extensive travel. “The problem is, however, do we have the right safeguards in place? Do we have the right oversight systems in place?” 

Roughly a third of countries worldwide have no privacy laws at all. Experts consider Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, which came into force in 2018, as the closest thing to an international gold standard. However, as Professor Cannataci points out, it does not apply to security services.

What does apply, at least in the context of the 47 states of the Council of Europe plus eight other ratifying nations, is Convention 108. This imposes the obligation to introduce surveillance that is necessary, proportional, and provided for by law in a democratic society.  

The right safeguards, in his view, would take the form of a supervising authority that is independent and set up by law, and includes both legal and technological experts in the authorization process for surveillance operations. “You have to have very clearly specified data searches, very clearly specified surveillance, and very clearly specified time periods,” says Professor Cannataci. “You can’t do this all the time.”

“The risks are that you leave the system in place, and instead of saying coronavirus, instead of flagging the people with coronavirus, you flag all those people who are critical of the government,” he adds. “The tools can be so misused that they would make 1984 look like kindergarten. Big Brother would become Little Brother compared with what the state can do.”

Self-censorship

As many countries explore surveillance options, Israel stands out for its explicit intention to repurpose technology designed to tackle suspected terrorists to instead track down information that is useful in fighting the coronavirus.

The Israeli government approved emergency powers for its internal security agency to do so, but met immediate pushback from private and civil rights advocates who find the measure too extreme. The Supreme Court stepped in, issuing an order to bar the use of such technology until a parliamentary committee can be set up to oversee its workings.  

But the parliament has not been functioning amid a power struggle between the caretaker government and the opposition following the most recent elections. In the meantime, the Shin Bet, Israel’s version of the FBI, continues to use cellphone data to trace where coronavirus-positive people have been and who they would have come into contact with. Israelis joke that if you have an extra blue check on your WhatsApp messaging app, that means Shin Bet has read the message as well. 

Critics of the policy worry it will put a damper on political expression and mobilization.

“When people know they are monitored, they regulate their behavior,” notes Michael Bar-Sinai, a computer science and privacy researcher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. “So if Big Brother is watching you, you always try to behave in a way that would not annoy Big Brother, especially when your democracy is very fragile as we see now. It could prevent people from self-organizing in their own self-interest.”

Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute and a former lawmaker, does not buy the slippery-slope argument of critics that tracking citizens in the age of the coronavirus necessarily marks a decline in Israel’s democracy.

He sees it as an innovative and possibly effective tool for safeguarding public health, provided it is used for a limited time and with parliamentary oversight.

“I don’t think privacy is an absolute value, and public health is also an important goal. Since every individual has a cellphone, we can make good use of this to save lives.”

Staff writer Eoin O’Carroll in Amherst, Massachusetts, and correspondent Dina Kraft in Tel Aviv, Israel, contributed reporting.

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The grocer gets up at 5 a.m., and washes his hands.

In the dark he dresses, eats something, tries “to clear [his] mind,” and opens his email. He begins.

On another day, in other times, this is when he would have looked at numbers – order sizes maybe, sales by hour, prior-year traffic. He would have been planning, imagining innovations, thinking hard about customer demands and employee needs and competitor strategies. He would have been thinking hard about how he might make his store better, as he loves to do.

Editor’s note: As a public service, we’ve removed the paywall for all our coronavirus coverage. It’s free.

But today the grocer will do none of that.

The grocer’s name is Mark Mignosa. And right now his grocery store – Fruit Center Marketplace, in Hingham, Massachusetts – could be almost any grocery store in locked-down America, and his story almost any grocer’s story. Except that his store isn’t any store.

It’s mine.

And like anybody, I need it to keep getting me food.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Mark Mignosa, co-owner and president of the Fruit Center Marketplace, an independently owned grocery store, poses in front of the fully stocked produce aisle in his store on March 25, 2020, in Hingham, Massachusetts. Grocery stores are considered essential businesses during the coronavirus crisis.

Will there be groceries?

By 6:30 a.m., after the emailing from home about health department updates, tactical questions from managers, and the day’s “directives” (“Even more handwashing!”), he’s in the Fruit Center’s aisles. “And from the moment you hit the store, you’re on,” he says. The doors will open at 7, instead of 8, for a newly added hour restricted to “60-and-over” shoppers, and away the day will race.

Agenda: Get enough goods on the emptying shelves, keep customers safe and calm, keep employees healthy and committed, and keep himself from getting sick. Ready, set, go.

Mr. Mignosa knows what I’m thinking, because he knows everybody’s thinking it. Will our food keep showing up?

Sometime in the past few weeks, as coronavirus cases and social lockdowns spread, Mr. Mignosa watched Americans decide they could no longer trust groceries to be available when they needed them. Hence the hoarding. Almost half the stores responding to a national Progressive Grocer poll likened their customers to frantic prospectors in a river running out of gold. The Fruit Center was no exception; foot traffic rose between 100% and 200%, and average checkout tallies doubled. Business still remains at “holiday levels,” says Mr. Mignosa, which is hard to manage in the best of times, and brutally hard when the “holiday” refuses to end.

Of course his customers, like shoppers everywhere, have questions: How can we expect the food system to keep working when it seems like most people don’t go to work? Will we ever actually see toilet paper again?

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Customers shop at the Fruit Center Marketplace during the coronavirus crisis, on March 25, 2020, in Hingham, Massachusetts. The store is limiting the number of people allowed inside at one time to allow for social distancing.

According to supply chain analysts and grocery industry insiders – as well as Mr. Mignosa’s own instincts and experience – the answers are easy:

Yes, there will be toilet paper; in fact there were a few rolls yesterday. (“Fred found some from an industrial paper distributor. The crew we have, they’re veterans. They can find things.”) It sold out. More’s coming.

And yes, the U.S. food supply chain will keep getting us food. Just not everything we’re used to.

The Fruit Center and its sister location in nearby Milton – both co-owned and co-managed by Mr. Mignosa and his brother, Michael – are about half the size of average supermarkets but still need deliveries from 30 distributors and some 200 vendors. Supply isn’t perfect, Mr. Mignosa says. “But honestly, I’m impressed by the product flow.”

He wishes product flow were his biggest worry.

On the front lines

The morning goes both fast and slow. Fast because of so much work, “and with very short staff. We’re down a few people in every department.” Employees have begged off due to illness, or discomfort with the exposure, or the need to care for others at home. (“Which is absolutely understandable, and what you expect,” Mr. Mignosa says. “We need people to do what’s right for them.”)

Slow because it’s just a few weeks since the national emergency declaration and already you can see the accumulating weariness among the staff – the wish for the days to hurry up and the bad dream to be over. Massachusetts is among the worst-hit states so far, with more than 5,700 confirmed cases of COVID-19. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Liam Carey stocks produce at the Fruit Center Marketplace during the coronavirus crisis, on March 25, 2020, in Hingham, Massachusetts. He says he is happy to still have a job.

In the store, Mr. Mignosa likes to move – constantly circulating with short quick steps. When he stops to talk, his torso tilts forward a little, as though to catch any words that might fall between you. He’s the kind of boss who wears the same outfit the clerks and stockers do. If there’s a sudden need for baggers at the checkout, he’s the kind of boss who bags.

Before all this, says Mr. Mignosa, “everything about our days was completely different. The whole focus would have been customer service, quality, freshness, the personal development" of employees. (The Fruit Center has 300.)  

Then there’s the scramble to keep up with orders and find new sources of must-have items. Cleaning goods and paper products remain hard to get, along with backroom store supplies like bathroom soaps and sanitizers, and sometimes deli meats and water, “like before a storm.” The other day there wasn’t any canola oil or dried black beans. “A lot of comfort food is going on,” Mr. Mignosa says.

Meanwhile, the store’s processes and tactics are changed almost daily. The salad bar is closed. The soup table is closed. To facilitate safe social distancing, the store is metered now; 50 or 60 shoppers are allowed in; after that it's one in, one out. Plastic glass barriers have been erected at checkouts, and hourly wages have been hiked $2 (as has become increasingly common industrywide). In front of the fish counter and deli counter and checkout stations, there’s blue tape on the floor to keep people at a distance. There are signs up.

By lunchtime Mr. Mignosa has no idea how many times he has washed his hands. Nor how many conversations he has had – with staffers, with customers. “All centered on the same issue.” Sometimes it feels like the conversations are all he does.

“We’re all a little frightened, because we’re all on the front line. I don’t even want to say that because I don’t want to scare anybody, but it’s the truth.” In Italy, an infected grocery clerk has died; the news reports are everywhere.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Signs at the Rocky Neck Fish counter instruct customers to stay behind a line at the Fruit Center Marketplace during the coronavirus crisis, on March 25, 2020, in Hingham, Massachusetts.

So he circulates and he talks. “It’s the time you have with every individual that matters. They need it, they’re sacrificing so much, they’re such pros,” says Mr. Mignosa. He tries to reach everybody. “Could be three minutes, 10 minutes. Could be a couple people, could be one at a time.”

Customers, too, seem hungry to talk. All day they ask Mr. Mignosa and his Fruit Center colleagues, “How are you? You guys doing OK?” The questions are repeated so often that one might imagine they grow stale when there’s so much work to do. “No!” Mr. Mignosa says. “No, no, we need people to ask us that. We need to ask them how they’re doing, too. With customers there’s more of a connection now than ever – because we’re all going through this together. It helps everyone.

“It helps me.”

When normal is a gift

Afternoon. Mr. Mignosa is in the parking lot, where there are too many cars. He’s traffic-copping, smiling – directing people in his simultaneously decisive and self-effacing way.

Outside the main door, shoppers are lined up in the manner we’ve all now learned – spread out like fence posts that got abandoned before the actual fencing went up.

I recognize some of them by sight if not name; 20 years of patronage among others just as loyal will do that. They seem calm. I ask them how they’re doing.

Good, they each say. Considering.

One couple – Christine and Alden – tell me, “This is nice.” Nice?

“Yeah, I feel better here,” explains Christine. “I mean this is our store. At home, the news – it can seem like nothing is working. Anywhere. And the isolation ...” She looks around; the sky is gray but it’s not too cold.

“Here feels ... normal.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Customers leave with their purchases from the Fruit Center Marketplace.

“Well, normal-ish,” Alden revises. He changes the subject. “I seriously want to thank these guys for their service. Is that weird?” I say I know what he means.

Inside the store a fully masked customer at the checkout waves his arm to indicate his filled cart and gives me a muffled, “This is great,” the skin around his eyes crinkling with a smile you can’t see. Meanwhile people keep floating slowly through the aisles, nodding to one another as they calculate just what 6 feet looks like. There’s still no toilet paper. “Or flour or chicken stock,” Mr. Mignosa says. It troubles him.

Because normal is exactly what he’s going for.

It isn’t normal, though. The shelves may look serene but the duck’s feet are windmilling frantically below the surface, just as they are behind the scenes at other supermarkets and food distributors and loading docks across the country. Mr. Mignosa can’t get his staff to leave on time. “It’s overwhelming, the amount of load coming in [for restocking],” he tells me. The store closes at 6 p.m. instead of its previous 8 p.m. to allocate hours for sanitizing and stock handling, but there’s still not enough time to get the work done, “and they don’t wanna leave.”

Mr. Mignosa adds, “I keep insisting it’s important to leave. You have to get rest. You have to take care of yourselves.”

Does Mr. Mignosa take his own advice?

Sometime between 5:30 and 6 p.m., he goes home. He has been at the store for 11 hours.

Tomorrow he’ll do it again.

“Reset”

Maybe you feel about some store that’s local to you the way I feel about the Fruit Center. Especially now.

On occasion over the past two decades I feared for it, as a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe’s and a Fresh Market came to town (joining two other supermarkets already here). But the Fruit Center just kept getting better, and thrived. It’s the kind of store where if you ask a stocker for the location of the capers, he doesn’t tell you or point; he drops what he’s doing and takes you to them, no matter how many aisles away.

The store is good, is the thing. Flagrantly competent, delightful to be in, easy to count on. You can count on it without even thinking about it. You can take it for granted.

Over the phone, I tell Mr. Mignosa about the customers who wanted to thank him and his people for their service, and I hear him exhale.

“You know,” he says, “we get a lot of that now. Seems ridiculous but I almost feel like a first responder, or a fireman, whatever. It’s not like we’re depended on for survival or anything.”

Yet you kind of are, I remind him, because: food.

“People are so grateful. It keeps you going. And when we get that support, in an email or a conversation, we immediately try to blast it around the store to everyone. It’s like: This is it. This is why. We can do this.”

And of course, I know they can. I know they will. It’s a grocery store, but right about now it feels a little heroic.

Mr. Mignosa is home for the night, his phone on (“always”) but his computer off. He and his wife have three kids – two in college and a high school freshman – and now the whole family is back together in the lockdown. “My family’s great; they’re very balanced,” he says, his voice making it sound as though “balanced” might be the hardest and most precious thing in the world. “It’s a good reset for me.”

So, he resets. Does he worry about how long he and his crew can keep going? “No. I’m just not at that point; I don’t think about that. Nothing past tomorrow matters.

“There’s no doubt that we can keep this going for our community.”

So tomorrow, like today, he’ll do the best thing he can think to do, which is to do his job as well as he can do it.

But first, he needs some rest. So he’ll go to bed.

Right after he washes his hands.

Editor’s note: As a public service, we’ve removed the paywall for all our coronavirus coverage. It’s free.

Russian Defense Ministry Press Service/AP/File

In this undated photo distributed by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service, an intercontinental ballistic missile lifts off from a truck-mounted launcher in Russia. Russia has developed a hypersonic weapon, joining China and the U.S. in a race to modernize missile capabilities.

Humans love things that go fast: race cars, speedboats, and cheetahs. Then there’s hypersonic, which leaves plain old fast blinking in the dust.

On March 19, the United States launched its first successful hypersonic test missile from a naval base in Kauai, Hawaii. The unarmed missile tore through the idyllic Pacific skies at Mach 5, five times faster than the speed of sound. 

The Pentagon aims to test a full hypersonic weapon system by 2023, seeking to draw level with Russia and China, which have touted their own development of hypersonic weapons technology and say they have the hardware to prove it.

Hypersonic missiles are not just very fast, they are maneuverable and stealthy. This combination of speed and furtiveness means they can surprise an adversary in ways that conventional missiles cannot, while also evading radar detection. And they have injected an additional level of risk and ambiguity into what was already an accelerating arms race between nuclear-armed rivals.  

To understand why, consider the falcon and the albatross. 

The Peregrine falcon is the fastest animal on Earth. From a cruise altitude of more than 3,000 feet, it drills down through the air at 200 mph to snag its prey. Fast.

The sea-faring albatross can soar effortlessly for thousands of miles without a flap of its massive wings, hugging the water’s surface until it abruptly leans into the wind to gain altitude so it can alter its course and swoop down once more. And it does this again and again and again. Maneuverable.

If you could put the two birds together you would have one formidable bird of prey: fast and maneuverable. And that is what hypersonic weapon systems developers have done. There will soon be the capability to launch weapons – conventional or nuclear – that travel faster than the speed of sound and can change course unpredictably and very quickly, making them much harder to track and intercept.

“They (our adversaries) have systems that try to deny our domain dominance,” Mike White, assistant director for hypersonics in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, told a recent Pentagon press conference. “It really is those threats and those targets that’s driving our investment in hypersonic strike capabilities.” The Defense Department has requested $3.2 billion for hypersonic-related research in the 2021 fiscal budget.  

Crucial role for AI

As the hypersonics race heats up, a long stream of legal, ethical, and diplomatic questions trail in its swift wake, particularly about the critical role that artificial intelligence (AI) plays. This is because of how these systems work together to deliver hypersonic missiles precisely, in theory, to any point on the globe.

Unlike conventional missiles, these rockets don’t follow a predictable trajectory. Only complex AI-based sensor systems are capable of detecting and intercepting them. And as the demands on the weaponry grow, so do the concerns about how much humans will have to rely on the AI’s set of ethics – trained by the developer – that inform the system’s “moral” choices.

One of these concerns is the ambiguity factor. In other words, what kind of warhead might be on that incoming hypersonic weapon: nuclear or conventional?

Added to that uncertainty is the short response time, which means that “AI or certainly at the very least automation comes into play” in defending against such missiles, says Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Even if it’s not all dictated by AI and machine-based learning, he says, “there is going to be an awful lot of automation and that kind of decision chain to deal with these kinds of systems.”

Since AI plays a pivotal role in sensor detection systems, it is central to any ethical debate. Right now, the likelihood of a completely autonomous response to an incoming hypersonic missile seems remote. But that could change, say analysts. For an incoming conventional missile, military commanders may have 30 minutes to detect and respond; a hypersonic missile could arrive at that same destination in 10 minutes or less, forcing a decision faster than seems possible without AI. 

SOURCE:

The Economist

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

“Those time frames have sped up which would put more pressure on a person,” says Dr. Gordon Cooke, director of research and strategy at West Point. As a society, he adds, we should be thinking about how to view these systems in the future. “What kind of society do we want to have, especially in regards to warfare?”

‘Technology will always fail’

And of course, the question of warfare itself raises its own massive ethical quandary. Some, like ethicist Patrick Lin, view it as a social problem, not a technological one.

“Technology will always fail,” says Dr. Lin, a professor of philosophy at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. “That is the nature of technology.” Ethical guidelines, he adds, should be built within the design of the architecture itself so that they’re integral to the system, not an item added on later.

The Sandia National Laboratories is home to Autonomy New Mexico, a network of academics working on autonomy research for national security missions, including hypersonic weapons. What they try to do, says a senior manager, is to make sure that AI systems help the human operators know what the best courses of action to take are in fast-paced scenarios. As to the ethics used, “it’s up to the Department of Defense to come up with how to employ that,” the manager says.

Photo: NASA/Reuters/File

The Kodiak Launch Complex in Kodiak, Alaska is pictured in an undated handout photo from NASA. The U.S. military tested a hypersonic weapon at Kodiak on August 25, 2014, but the mission was aborted after controllers detected a problem with the system, the Pentagon said.

The Pentagon recently released its own ethical guidelines regarding AI research. Its five headings are: Responsible, Equitable, Traceable, Reliable, and Governable. The last makes clear that humans must be able to override an intended AI decision. AI should keep humans “in the loop” by “possessing the ability ... to disengage or deactivate deployed systems that demonstrate unintended behavior,” the guidelines read.

Not just weapons

Dan DeLaurentis, an aeronautics professor who directs the Institute for Global Security and Defense Innovation at Purdue University in Indiana, says AI plays an integral part in the hypersonic system by helping militaries to piece together lots of information about incoming missiles. But any concerns about robots running amok are unfounded, he adds. The Pentagon isn’t out to create “the unsupervised automated killing machines” of Hollywood dystopias.

Then there are thorny questions about the potential weaponization of space, such as the absence of binding treaties to ensure some measure of stability. What arms treaties currently exist between the U.S. and Russia don’t cover hypersonic missiles; legal experts say the U.S. may propose adding them in the future.

“If we were in a situation where the arms control community and a number of treaties were still in place, this would be less troublesome than it is,” says Mr. Barrie. 

Dr. Lin argues that the benefits of hypersonic weapons compared to the risk they create are “widely unclear,” as well as the benefits of the AI systems that inform them.

“I think it’s important to remember that diplomacy works and policy solutions work. ... I think another tool in our toolbox isn’t just to invest in more weapons, but it’s also to invest in diplomacy to develop community.” 

Some of the world’s great collaborators just might live in your backyard.

They are part fungus and part algae or cyanobacteria, living in symbiosis. And they can be found on every continent in the world. In Canada, many residents may recognize lichen from local parks or favorite hiking trails, but they’d be hard-pressed to name them – until now.

A group of enthusiasts is pushing forward with a plan to get Canada to adopt a “national lichen.” And more than 18,000 Canadians weighed in on a vote organized by the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. The star-tipped reindeer lichen, which resembles a mat of soft tufted cauliflower, emerged victorious, with 26.6% of the vote. Now the results will be handed to the Department of Canadian Heritage to consider.

This all may seem a frivolous venture during the coronavirus pandemic. But Toby Spribille, who studies lichen symbioses at the University of Alberta, says on the contrary it’s come at a time when people are reconnecting with nature. It’s also a time when people, confronting a universal vulnerability that calls for global cooperation to beat it, are rethinking complex systems.

“There’s something about lichens that forces people to think about working together,” he says. “because as soon as people realize that it’s a symbiosis ... it gets them thinking about organisms that work together with each other.” 

What’s more, lichens exemplify a kind of natural stability that has endured for millions of years, he adds. “A lichen is basically a looking glass into another way of being.”

Troy McMullin

Elegant sunburst lichen (Xanthoria elegans) is most common on shoreline rocks throughout Canada and on bones and rocks in the Arctic. The presence of this species is used by hunters to locate nests and burrows.

If adopted, Canada would become the first country in the world to recognize the composite organism (only California has gone so far, when it chose for the state the lace lichen in 2015).

Canada has among the highest lichen biomass in the world, competing only with Russia. They are most abundant in boreal forests and across the Arctic. It is the primary winter food source for one of Canada’s most beloved animals, the caribou, which graces the Canadian quarter, and provides nesting and camouflage for other species. It has been used by First Nations in dyes and medicine. Some fix atmospheric nitrogen for the soil and prevent erosion. They are also indicators of air pollution.

The project has aimed to generate “a greater awareness of this pretty important group that’s everywhere that nobody seems to know about,” says Troy McMullin, a research scientist and lichenologist with the Canadian Museum of Nature.

For many in Canada and around the world, nature has become one of the only escapes from full or near lockdown, as residents have been asked to stay at home to slow the spread of COVID-19. Many people are finding comfort in new connections to the natural world, either in their own backyards or area parks. 

This reporter was prompted by the vote to take her daughter on a lichen hunt in Toronto’s High Park, where candle flame lichen became the subject of an impromptu science class.

Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

The reporter's 9-year-old daughter investigates a crop of candle flame lichen growing on a tree in High Park, Toronto, March 27, 2020.

The race, whose results were released today, stirred passion about lichens that took even the organizers, and some voters themselves, by surprise. Choosing among seven lichens (narrowed down from more than 2,500 species in Canada) with names like common freckle pelt, horsehair, elegant sunburst, and of course the winning star-tipped reindeer, there was no lack of interest or division.

On one Reddit thread before voting wrapped up, one user wrote: “This is something I had no idea would be important to me. Voted.”

Another: “I am glad for this opportunity to fulfill my national duty.”

One user gunning for the winner wrote it was obviously superior “to all other lichen. Anyone who says otherwise is a fool.” And a dissenting voice: “Common freckle pelt, or die.”

Troy McMullin

Common freckle pelt lichen (Peltigera aphthosa) blankets moss, soil, and low shrubs in exposed moist areas across Canada and into the High Arctic. Nearly half of all known occurrences worldwide are in Canada.

This all illustrates a certain fervor in the world of lichens, even if lichenologists insist they're not as fanatical as birders. In 2015, a similar vote in Canada turned divisive over the rival merits of the loon and the grey jay; in the end, no national bird was selected.

Still Dr. McMullin talks in tones that match lichens’ colorful names. “All throughout the boreal forest, they’re dripping from the trees,” he says. “I call them the corals of the forest with these bright, brilliant colors, amazing shapes and forms.”

Whether a national lichen could ever be as universally recognizable as the maple, the country’s national tree, remains to be seen. But Dr. McMullin puts heart into his defense. “Why is a tree more important than a lichen? Because it’s big?” he says. “We should appreciate the small things in life, because they’re all part of an ecological system that we are part of.”

AP

A Chicago police officer notifies a cyclist that the trails in Promontory Park, along Lake Michigan, are closed in an effort to limit the spread of COVID-19.

As the weather warms, Americans will want to spend more time outdoors, perhaps pushing government limits on access to public spaces. Crowds jamming into parks and beaches have caused authorities to close many popular gathering spots. Outdoor team sports like soccer are being discouraged or banned.

As of last week, about a quarter of national park sites were closed, according to The Washington Post, including the Statue of Liberty, Yellowstone, and Yosemite. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy is urging people to stay off the winding path between Maine and Georgia. Wilderness hikes might seem like the perfect getaway. But campsites can get crowded. And getting into trouble on a trail and needing to be rescued could pull responders away from other important work.

Escaping self-isolation for the outdoors remains a great idea. Yet it needs to be pursued close to home with all the safeguards of personal distancing. A local park or nature trail may not bring gasps of amazement like the Grand Canyon. But exploring any sort of nature can bring delights of its own.

Joggers, lost to their headsets, or bicyclists whizzing past have their own aims and claims to open spaces, of course. But others who set aside their earbuds and slow their pace will find special joys. “In times of crisis, the natural world is a source of both joy and solace,” famed naturalist Sir David Attenborough recently told The Big Issue magazine.

For those in the Northeast, a walk through woods and wetlands – preferably on a wide trail – can yield sightings of red-bellied woodpeckers, kingfishers, blue herons, bluebirds, and red-winged blackbirds. Skunk cabbage is bursting from muddy banks. Rosy flowers are brightening the awakening red maples. A sleepy painted turtle, emerging from hibernation, might wander across the path. Human contact is left to a friendly “hello” and a brief sharing of what’s been spotted.

What if it’s a rainy day? A few quiet minutes gazing out a window onto trees or a budding garden can reveal a world of beauty and activity. Where is that bird headed with a twig? Is that a hawk overhead, forcing other wildlife to hide?

At night, the stars now shine a bit brighter with less human-caused air pollution. Venus is shining ultrabright in parts of the world. In coastal areas, if a beach is open and people obey rules against clustering, riding the waves is an ideal activity, allowing one to be enveloped by the ocean’s power. Others may like “forest bathing,” the Japanese practice of lying, sitting, or walking among trees to soak in their cleansing magnificence.

The founder of the Monitor, Mary Baker Eddy, once wrote: “Mine is an obstinate penchant for nature in all her moods and forms, a satisfaction with whatever is hers.”

Shakespeare found that “our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

Each person locked down in wintry fear of a disease can be lifted by a close encounter with the outdoors. Even if not with each other for now.