Commandeer

The newest from South Australia: all citizens will have to carry a digital monitoring device at all times, and be subject to random orders from police to submit face-scanned and geo-tagged location data to prove they aren't violating house arrest.

People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”

You might say, "Look, these laws might not be constitutional in America, but this is Australia. The police clearly seem to have the power to forcibly quarantine / place the entire population under indefinite house arrest whether they are sick or not. So why, if that is already off the table, quibble about the means of the quarantine/imprisonment?"

There's still a point to be made even there about the mode of action, to whit, the government seizing your private property to use against you. This is called 'commandeering,' and in America is most famously a police power used in Hollywood movies where The Heroic Detective needs to borrow a citizen's car to chase a criminal. Those movie scenes always struck me as crazy: some guy runs up waving what might be a badge, if you had time to examine it, and orders you to immediately surrender your car (which he then drives off with rapidly). 

Here the government is commandeering everyone's property in order to enforce extraordinary restrictions upon them, and they are supposed to be subject to compliance checks at whim. The police aren't usually supposed to stop you -- certainly not to frisk you -- in the absence of evidence of illegal activity. Now you owe them an immediate response proving your innocence at any time of day or night they should choose to demand one. Not only has your phone been commandeered, you are ordered to attend to it in case you might be signaled to report compliance at any 15 minute interval of the day. Not only are they commandeering your property, they're commandeering 100% of your time. In a sense they are commandeering your whole life, then, insofar as 'life' means 'the time you have to spend alive.' 

A government that can commandeer your property is dangerous; one that can commandeer your life moreso. Occasionally it is a power that is used, as for example to compel jury duty; of old it was used to compel service at war (and perhaps shall be again, for who would now enlist but the youngest and least wise?). It has even been used this way in compelling your attendance at internment camps, though that action by FDR is now generally regarded as having been improper and tyrannical in the extreme. 

I wonder how many policemen South Australia has. It's a big territory. (UPDATE: fewer than six thousand for a territory of almost four hundred thousand square miles, though 77% of the population lives within the metro area of the capital city.) I know cell service here is very spotty, and a policy like this would compel many officers to spend a lot of time on the road. Cell service may be better there, but they'll log a lot of hours 'following up' on those calls. The point is to keep people from encountering each other, so why not send hundreds of officers driving up and down a wide territory every day?