A/HRC/44/49 seeking entrance into the COVID-19 surveillance field. 66 Such private actors should be subject to robust and transparent public oversight and should themselves adopt policies consistent with the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. 57. Several elements are key to ensuring that surveillance is conducted consistently with international human rights law. Principles that should govern surveillance in the pandemic are as follows:67 (a) Any authorization of surveillance should be contained in precise and publicly accessible laws and only be applied when necessary and proportionate to achieve a legitimate objective (such as protecting public health); (b) Authorization of surveillance of specified individuals should be based on independent evaluation, preferably by a judicial authority, with appropriate limitations on time, location, manner and scope; (c) Rigorous record-keeping should be required so that individuals and oversight bodies can ascertain that surveillance was conducted for legitimate public health purposes; (d) Any personal data collected should be subject to strict privacy protections to ensure against disclosure of personal information to anyone not authorized for public health purposes; (e) Some personal data should be expressly excluded from collection, such as the content of a person’s communications, and robust safeguards must be put in place to ensure against any government or third-party misuse of such data, including use for purposes unrelated to the public health emergency; (f) Where personal data is anonymized, the State and any third-party actor involved in collection must be able to demonstrate such anonymity. IV. Concluding remarks 58. “How can you have an opinion if you are not informed?”68 In 11 words, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt summed up the theory connecting article 19 (1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which protects everyone’s right to hold opinions without interference, with the guarantee, in article 19 (2), of everyone to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers and through any media.69 She also noted: “If everybody always lies ... nobody believes anything any longer. ... And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”70 59. Hannah Arendt knew of what she spoke. A scholar of totalitarianism forced to flee Nazi Germany, she presented intersecting and fundamental principles of human rights law – the rights to opinion, expression, access to information, autonomy, selfgovernance – in much the way that the Covenant and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promote democratic values and protect human life. While she had in mind the kind of propaganda that facilitates authoritarianism, her point extends to all nature of government practices that interfere with the individual’s ability to develop informed opinions and to take action consistent with those opinions. At this particular moment in history, we all can see exactly what she had in mind, and why the drafters 66 67 68 69 70 See, e.g., Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “We saw NSO Group’s Covid-19 software in action, and privacy experts are worried“, Vice, 2 April 2020. The principles are drawn from A/HRC/41/35, para. 50. See also the joint statement of several civil society organizations entitled “States use of digital surveillance technologies to fight pandemic must respect human rights“, 2 April 2020. “Hannah Arendt: from an interview“, New York Review of Books, 26 October 1978. See also Human Rights Committee, general comment No. 34, para. 2. “Hannah Arendt: from an interview“. 17