Capacity Maintenance During Global Disruptions: Security, resilience and incentives matter

In an interconnected world, the challenge of maintaining interdependent systems during disasters and disruptive events, such as pandemics, bushfires, cyber-attacks and trade wars is imperative. The critical infrastructure capabilities to be sustained during disasters are many. COVID-19 has demonstrated how a public health threat can fracture the supply chains, including those that underpin digital systems, and degrade the capacity of software and hardware companies. Society must plan for such digital disruptions if it is to survive such shocks. We explore some of the reasons why this is necessary, including the issue of cascading failures, and examines how and in what form more resilient systems might take. This includes consideration of issues such as the need for incentives in order to drive and maintain adoption of resilient technologies, and how such incentives can be created as a natural property of well-conceived systems. We also briefly examine two initiatives that seek to solve some of the harder problems, including security, trustability, independence from energy and communications infrastructure, and the ability to sustain digital capabilities when digital supply chains fail. This remains an open area requiring attention, if society is to improve its resilience to significant shocks.

The Four Internets of COVID-19: the digital-political responses to COVID-19 and what this means for the post-crisis Internet

Digital responses around the world to the COVID-19 pandemic highlight the acceleration in Internet governance trend towards authoritarianism in the digital-political responses to crisis and false trade-off decisions made by governments between privacy and public health. This paper investigates the digital-political responses to COVID-19 in the global contexts of 'four internets';the authoritarian Internet, the bourgeois European Internet, the commercial American Internet, and the propaganda Internet of state and non-state actors. We then explore the possible responses to the post-COVID-19 Internet, as well as the implications of geo-political Internet trends for crisis response groups and organizations.

S4: Simple, Secure, Survivable Systems Human-first crisis technology design principles

Information technology has become embedded in almost every area of modern life. The many complex digital systems that support modern societies are now highly dependent on the correct function of complex and highly interdependent technological systems. Digital tools are increasingly becoming part of traditional crisis response efforts by government and non-government organisations. While digital tools have substantial capabilities to enhance crisis response efforts, they also pose significant risks to user communities when deployed in time-sensitive, vulnerable and fragile crisis contexts - as part of an already complex system. These risks and inefficiencies have been demonstrated in the contact-tracing application debate in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology must be intentionally designed and implemented, both to help solve the problem at hand and support end user communities. The principles of simple, secure and survivable systems (S4) offer a framework for technology that serves the interests of end-users and maintains human dignity, especially in crisis situations. The S4 principles are already evident in a number of technology projects, across research, design, build and deployment phases. Instead of high-risk, ad hoc, reactive digital solutions, crisis responders can pre-emptively share information, invest and work with existing technology design and development experts that reflect the S4 principles for efficient, effective solutions that enhance response capabilities both now and in future scenarios.

Identifying and Mitigating Humanitarian Challenges to COVID-19 Contact Tracing

COVID-19 contact tracing has rapidly emerged as a dynamic field of endeavor, with different countries taking different approaches, both politically and technologically. In this paper we examine the situation of Australia's development of a COVID-19 contact tracing application (which is in reality a proximity tracing application) as a case-study. Both technological and societal elements are considered, in particular, the delivery of poor protection, or the perception of poor protection, of privacy and civil liberties to negatively impact the adoption of such an application, and thus hamper its potential. The rest of the paper explores this digital-politic nexus and tensions within crisis response, and examines the trade-off can be improved through increasing public trust of such technologies by improving their actual and perceived privacy and human rights properties without reducing their medical effectiveness. Lessons for humanitarian organizations are extracted from this.