By Leila Rafei, ACLU Content Strategist

One of the first and most fundamental safety precautions during the COVID-19 pandemic is to shelter in place. But that may soon become impossible for millions of people as eviction moratoriums begin to lift across the country. Tens of millions have lost their jobs due to the pandemic itself, and many are still unemployed.
 
Kansas City resident Tiana Caldwell is one of them. In March, she was laid off from her job teaching business skills at a local community college. Her husband, Derrick, lost his job around the same time. Both had dedicated years of hard work to their jobs, which they loved, but in the face of this global pandemic, that wasn’t enough.
 
The family would have lost their home if not for the Jackson County moratorium on evictions. The moratorium brought them some peace of mind, but that peace was limited. It expired on May 31, allowing landlords to resume evictions of those unable to afford their monthly rent. Now Tiana, Derrick, and their 13-year-old son A.J. may soon be without a roof over their heads. Nationally, many more families also face the possibility of eviction after the federal moratorium expired on July 25. 

https://www.youtube.com/embed/G9ELUWktarQ

Tiana and her family already know firsthand what it’s like to be unhoused. Last year, they were evicted and experienced homelessness for six months while Tiana underwent treatment for her second bout of cancer. As the bills and health care costs stacked up while Tiana was unable to work, her family couldn’t afford their rent.
 
“It was terrifying,” Tiana tells the ACLU. “With cancer, your chances are slim even if you have everything you need. I didn’t know what we were going to do, what I might be exposed to. I was afraid I wouldn’t make it.”
 
The prospect of being unhoused during the pandemic is even more terrifying. It’s impossible to practice social distancing in homeless shelters, and residents often lack access to facilities that would allow them to practice sufficient hygiene. On the other hand, those who seek shelter with family or friends must contend with the dangers of crowding more people into homes that are often already short on space. In either scenario, the risk of contracting COVID-19 is heightened. One infection in a home or shelter could easily spread exponentially in a matter of days.
 
For those who are immunocompromised, like Tiana, homelessness presents an insurmountable danger. After two bouts of cancer, a history of congestive heart failure, and decreased lung capacity, Tiana is at extremely high risk of serious illness if she contracts COVID-19. Contracting the virus could be fatal.
 
Tiana is taking CDC-recommended disease prevention measures, such as not leaving the house unless it’s absolutely necessary. “I have no peace of mind thinking about leaving the house, as vulnerable as I am,” she says. “I think about it every second.”
 
Her family members — including Derrick, A.J., and an older son who lives outside the home — have also adjusted their lives significantly to protect her.

“My son [A.J.] is very thoughtful about what he does,” says Tiana. “Even when I encourage him to get outside, he chooses to stay home because he understands the risks. He loves his mom.”
 
For Derrick, staying home is not an option now that he has found another job. “He’s happy to be employed,” explains Tiana. “But he’s terrified about what he might bring home.”

A nationwide crisis

Throughout the country, tens of millions of people face the same fears. Over 30 million people are currently unemployed and unable to pay for housing or basic utilities like water and electricity.

One in five renters will be at risk of eviction by the end of September. Tens of millions of people could lose their ability to shelter in place and to practice sufficient hygiene as the nation approaches what’s expected to be a second wave of COVID-19 infections.
 
Communities of color and low-income women are among the most vulnerable to the impending wave of evictions and utility shut-offs. On average, Black renters are nearly twice as likely to be evicted as white renters. Black women are evicted at an even higher rate — with evictions filed against them at double the rate (or more)compared to white renters in 17 out of 36 states. Those who face eviction must appear in court — sometimes in person — at a time when crowding into a courtroom poses unique health risks.
 
The dangers of eviction will last far beyond the pandemic. Landlords frequently discriminate against prospective tenants who have a prior eviction record, even when the eviction occurred many years ago or was ultimately dismissed. Often these renters are not even considered.
 
“They’ll tell you up front,” says Tiana. “There’s no need to apply.”
 
Because it’s more difficult to secure housing, renters who have been evicted often have to submit many applications before one is accepted. Applications often come with fees that many people who are out of work simply cannot afford.
 
The long-term harms of eviction further entrench people in poverty, especially women of color, and exacerbate existing economic inequalities. That’s why Black women and others who are directly impacted are leading the fight against evictions.
 
“They are the experts on their situation,” says Tiana. “They don’t need people to come in and tell them what’s going on.”
 
Tiana herself is a grassroots leader with KC Tenants and the national campaign for a Homes Guarantee at People’s Action. She has volunteered with KC Tenants for almost two years, and describes it as a multiracial, anti-racist, multigenerational group working across lines of division in society. That groups like these are operating during the pandemic speaks volumes.
 
“When you’re standing on the front lines, taking these chances, it has to be bigger than you,” says Tiana. “We do this so we can be stronger together. It’s so important that we not only take care of ourselves and our loved ones, but everyone else, because this is a pandemic that knows no boundaries.”
 
Congress has the power to prevent the coming wave of mass evictions that would throw millions of people — disproportionately women and people of color — out of their homes during the pandemic. It must extend and expand the federal eviction moratorium that expired on July 25 to cover more people’s homes. The next COVID-19 relief bill must also include at least $100 billion in funding toward emergency rental assistance, which would ensure safety and stability for millions of the most vulnerable low-income renters who have lost their jobs, including those who were already struggling to pay rent before the pandemic.

Hope out of sorrow

The eviction crisis is about more than economics and health. All people should have access to safe and stable housing. Everybody deserves a home.

After struggling through last year’s eviction, Tiana and her family were ultimately able to move into a new place. Throughout the past several months of instability, they have made their house a home. She recently gave the ACLU a tour over Zoom, pointing out the artwork she’s hung since moving in, including a photograph of Amsterdam and a painting that a hospice patient gave her during her time as a nurse, which matches her orange couch. Also in the house is a protest sign she carried during a demonstration that shut down a local highway.
 
#CancelRent
#ProtectMOTenants
#ItsAProblem
 
And while 13-year-old A.J.’s room was too messy to show, she explained to us how he fills his days with dancing, and provides the family with hope through a period of significant strife.
 
“After my first bout of cancer, I wasn’t supposed to have him,” says Tiana. “So we named him Azariah Jabez, which means, ‘God has hope out of sorrow.’”

By Anton Marino, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU of Florida

Betty Riddle, a grandmother and university graduate, stood in line to vote for the first time in her life in Florida’s 2020 presidential primary. Marq Mitchell, a peer support specialist and advocate, also proudly voted for his first time in March. Jeff Gruver, a local activist for people experiencing homelessness, is yet another of our clients who cast his vote and finally had a say in our democracy earlier this year.
 
It is on their behalf, and on behalf of all returning citizens’ behalf across Florida, that we return to court this month to fight for their access to the ballot box in elections to come.
 
Nobody should be denied their voting rights because they lack sufficient wealth. Courts have repeatedly held wealth-based barriers to voting are unconstitutional. Yet Florida wrongly asks the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to permit the state to charge returning citizens money to vote and to reverse our clients’ latest victory before the trial court in May, which rejected Florida’s modern-day poll tax.
 
The case concerns Amendment 4, which restores voting rights to more than one million people with felony convictions who have completed their sentences. A resounding majority of Floridians voted to pass Amendment 4 in 2018. But soon after, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature enacted a poll tax requiring newly-eligible voters to pay off all outstanding fines, fees, costs, and restitution, or legal financial obligations (LFOs), to vote. They transparently attempted to undermine the wishes of Florida’s voters and to eliminate and silence disproportionately Black voters from exercising their fundamental right to vote.
 
The ACLU immediately sued Florida in partnership with the ACLU of Florida, the Brennan Center, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The district court issued a preliminary injunction in October of 2019. The Eleventh Circuit later affirmed the victory in February of 2020. The district court heard our clients’ claims during a remote trial in April and May 2020. In May, it ruled in our clients’ favor, saying SB 7066’s LFO requirements violate the U.S. Constitution by discriminating on the basis of wealth. The court also held requiring the payment of LFOs violates due process and the National Voter Registration Act. It also violates the 24th Amendment’s prohibition of poll taxes. Florida appealed.
 
Now, we return to court to defend our clients’ victory. If the appeals court affirms the lower court’s judgment, it may enable hundreds of thousands of returning citizens to register to vote in time for the November election.
 
Florida’s illegal poll tax has left voters hanging through several election cycles and confused about their voting eligibility. To this day, Florida still has no centralized database where returning citizens can determine how much they owe, and what records exist are often inaccurate, conflicting, or scattered across the state.
 
Many returning citizens, like our client Betty Riddle, have convictions dating back decades. It took Betty many calls, visits, and letters to learn she owed over $1,000, which she could not afford to pay. She explained to the ACLU the unfairness did not hit her right away: “I didn’t realize that it wasn’t right until I asked myself, ‘Why are we paying to vote?’”
 
What’s worse, Florida requires returning citizens seeking to register to swear under penalty of perjury they are eligible to vote. If they cannot determine their eligibility, they risk criminal prosecution for registering. Given how difficult — even impossible — it is for returning citizens to determine if they have any outstanding LFOs, policies like these undoubtedly prevent countless people from even registering out of fear of prosecution.
 
Florida has proven incapable of administering its poll tax. Voters should not have to pay the price for Florida’s unworkable system. SB 7066’s system is irrational, cruel, and unfair. It is also unconstitutional.
 
Before Amendment 4, Florida was one of four states that permanently revoked the right to vote for all people with past felony convictions. One in 10 voting-age Floridians could not vote for life, including one in five Black Floridians. Amendment 4 is historic for Florida and the entire nation. It is the single largest expansion of voting rights in the United States since the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18 almost 50 years ago. Without Amendment 4, Florida would be the only remaining state with lifetime disenfranchisement.
 
Conditioning voting rights on the ability to pay is simply unconstitutional. We proudly fight for our clients against Florida’s attempt to put a price tag on voting. 

By Jay Stanley, ACLU Senior Policy Analyst & Jon Callas, ACLU Senior Technology Fellow

Proposals to use the tracking capabilities of our cell phones to help fight COVID-19 have probably received more attention than any other technology issue during the pandemic. Here at the ACLU, we have been skeptical of schemes to use apps for contact tracing or exposure warnings from the beginning, but it is clearer than ever that such tools are unlikely to work, and that the debate over such tracking is largely a sideshow to the principal coronavirus health needs.
 
We have said from the outset that location-based contact tracing was untenable, but that the concept of “proximity tracking” — in which Bluetooth signals emitted by phones are used to notify people who may have been exposed — seemed both more plausible and less of a threat to privacy. Indeed, a number of serious institutions began working on this concept early in the pandemic, most notably Apple and Google, which have already implemented a version of the concept in their mobile operating systems.
 
Some of the problems with tech-assisted contact tracing have been apparent from the beginning, such as the social dimensions of the challenge. Smartphone ownership is not evenly distributed by income, race, or age, threatening to create disparate effects from such schemes. And even the most comprehensive, all-seeing contact tracing system is of little use without social and medical systems in place to help those who may have the virus — including access to medical care, testing, and support for those who are quarantined. Those systems are all inadequate in the United States today.
 
Other problems with technology-assisted contact tracing have become more apparent as the pandemic has played out. Specifically, such tracing appears to be squeezed from two directions. On the one hand, a tool shouldn’t pick up every fleeting encounter and swamp users with too many meaningless notifications. On the other, if it is confined to reporting sustained close contacts of the kind that are most likely to result in transmission, the tool is not likely to improve upon old-fashioned human contact tracing. Those are the kinds of contacts that people are likely to remember. And those memories, relayed to human contact tracers, are more likely to identify a patient’s significant past exposures than an automated app that can’t determine, for example, whether two people were separated by glass or a wall.
 
A difficult disease to trace
 
The first problem — the danger of generating far too many “exposure notifications” — is considerable. As one commentator put it, “actual transmission events are rare compared to the number of interactions people have.” Swamping users with false notifications would be useless and annoying at best, and seriously disruptive and counterproductive at worst. Ultimately, people will stop taking the notifications seriously, or just uninstall the app.
 
That problem is made worse by the fact that COVID-19 is a more difficult disease to trace than many. As a group of prominent epidemiologists from the University of Minnesota explained in a report on contact tracing, contact tracing is less effective when:
 
1. Contacts are difficult to trace, such as when a disease is transmitted through the air. Respiratory transmission appears to be the primary way COVID-19 is transmitted. Compared to the kind of contact tracing that has long been done with HIV, where transmission takes place through sex or blood, the virus that causes COVID-19 is much harder to track. One cough or sneeze from a stranger may be enough to infect an unlucky passerby — as can sharing an interior space with a “super-spreader” who is on the other side of a large room.

2. The infection rate in a community is high. In the United States, as of this writing (July 2020), there are currently around 50,000 new coronavirus cases being identified every day. As the Minnesota report puts it, “contact tracing is most effective either early in the course of an outbreak or much later in the outbreak when other measures have reduced disease incidence to low levels.” The U.S. may someday reach the point where cases are once again sporadic rather than widespread, but for now experts recommend concentrating contact tracing on contacts within households, healthcare and other high-risk settings, and case clusters — an approach much more amenable to manual contact tracing.
 
3. A large proportion of transmissible infections are from people without symptoms. In May the CDC estimated that 40 percent of new COVID-19 infections come from asymptomatic carriers.
 
The Technology is Not Reliable Enough
 
These factors increase the risk of generating too many exposure notifications to be useful. Serious technical challenges with using smartphones for contact tracing also increase that risk. One of the biggest questions has always been how to use Bluetooth to judge which encounters are worthy of being recorded as potential transmission events. Judgments have to be made about how close a person needs to be, and for how much time, to meet the warning threshold. That becomes even trickier since Bluetooth can’t reliably measure distances. The strength of a Bluetooth signal varies not only with distance, but also from phone to phone, and from owner to owner. The frequency at which Bluetooth operates (2.4 GHz) is one that is easily absorbed by water, including the water in the human body, which means that signal strength can vary significantly depending upon whether a person has their phone in their front or back pocket, and how much that person weighs.
 
Complicating matters is the fact that existing contact-tracing apps are being thrown together very quickly. Google and Apple moved from concept to a finalized product in less than 12 weeks. They should be commended for stepping up in an emergency, but we shouldn’t expect it to work well anytime soon. As is clear to any experienced software developer, their product is basically an early prototype that’s being pushed into production. In a normal world, they would be testing their app on groups of hundreds and then thousands of people in cities and a variety of other real-world situations. Through no fault of Apple and Google, there simply hasn’t been the opportunity to do the kind of engineering development and refinement that a project like this really needs.
 
And of course, what is true of software developed by Apple and Google is even more true of apps developed in a rush by state governments like North Dakota and Rhode Island, or other nations like South Korea. South Korea has been lauded for its high-tech coronavirus response. But the quarantine app the country has been using put people’s names, locations, and other private information at risk by failing to follow basic cybersecurity practices.
 
Compliance
 
While effective technology-assisted contact tracing apps must avoid generating too many exposure notifications, they must also establish that they can improve upon or significantly augment old-fashioned human contact tracing.
 
Epidemiologists emphasize that contact tracing has always been a tricky and sensitive job. Getting people to trust any official enough to open up about their potentially privacy-sensitive whereabouts and contacts is a skill — one that requires “training and development of a specialized skill set” as well as “consideration of local contexts, communities, and cultures.”
 
That is especially true since those who are identified as having been exposed to the coronavirus are asked to self-quarantine for two weeks — putting much or all of their life on hold, and possibly risking the loss of a job or income, necessitating the finding of new caregivers for dependents, and imposing various other costs. That’s something that a friend will be reluctant to impose upon another friend by giving their name — especially where no social support is provided to those asked to self-quarantine. As the Minnesota report warned, “If people perceive the economic, social, or other costs of compliance with contact tracing are greater than its value, it won’t be successful.”
 
There are many reasons to doubt that these tricky issues can be navigated better through technology. As report co-author Michael Osterholm put it, “Having been in public health for 45 years, and having cut my teeth in surveillance in many different ways — I don’t think most people would comply. If I got notifications that I’d been exposed to [someone] with COVID, would I self-isolate for 14 days at home, because I got a text on my phone?”
 
The sensitive privacy and trust issues that human contact tracers face are likely to be amplified in the technology realm. People who are reluctant to tell contact tracers where they’ve been are likely to be even more reluctant to let an app carry such information. By building tools with very strong, cleverly constructed privacy protections, Apple, Google, and others have created the best possible chance of engendering trust in those apps, but those protections still have gaps. People who refuse to wear a mask are unlikely to deliberately install tracking software on their phone, whatever privacy assurances they are given. Nor are many members of Black, Brown, and immigrant communities for whom “trust in the authorities is non-existent.”
 
Some experts have estimated that at least 60 percent of a population would have to run an app for it to become effective. Others think apps can be modestly helpful even with much smaller adoption rates. But aside from trust issues, the number of people willing to participate seems to have gone down since the first months of the outbreak, as “social distancing fatigue” has set in and public panic over the virus has given way to a more measured caution (and in too many cases, an abandonment of all caution whatsoever).
 
The bottom line is that there are too few reasons to think that apps will prove more helpful than human memories elicited by experienced contact tracers. The promise of exposure notifications lies in the space between the large pool of incidental contacts that people have, and the smaller number of significant contacts that they remember. The apps promise to track contacts that are close and sustained enough to pose a serious risk of exposure yet beyond the subject’s memory. For most people, that space may simply not be large enough to be useful.
 
Real-World Experiences in States and Other Countries
 
Unsurprisingly, given these problems, the states and countries that have experimented with using technology-assisted contact tracing have not met with much success. The use of technology by China and some other Asian countries has received a lot of attention, but as the Minnesota epidemiologists point out, “we don’t know exactly what methods were used, how many cases were involved, and what the estimated impact was in reducing transmission since other mitigation strategies were employed at the same time” in those countries.
 
That lack of measurement is true throughout the world. An MIT survey of global digital contact-tracing efforts found 43 countries in some stage of offering a product. Ten of those countries are relying on the privacy-preserving Apple/Google protocol, with the rest a jumble of different architectures and policies. It may not be quite true, as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared on June 24, that “No country in the world has a working contact tracing app” — Germany has launched an app that has been downloaded over 14 million times so far, and India claims 131 million downloads for its app and 900,000 users who have been contacted and told to self-isolate. But we don’t know if those numbers represent a high enough proportion of the populations to actually have an impact on slowing the disease in Germany and India, let alone in countries with lower adoption rates. We also don’t know how effective it is to simply tell people to self-isolate, in the absence of social support for them to do so.
 
It’s also worth noting that in some countries such as China and India, digital tracking is imposed in authoritarian ways that would cause most people who value civil liberties to recoil.
 
In the U.S., a few states have attempted to launch apps, including Utah, where things went so badly that one program was shut down within 72 hours of its launch, and another one had not led to any contract tracing a month after its launch. An app in North and South Dakota ran into trouble quickly when it was revealed to be sharing data with a private location-data company. Overall, state efforts so far have been plagued by “technical glitches and a general lack of interest by their residents.” A survey by Business Insider found that only three states planned to use the Apple/Google technology. Others had not decided, but 17 states reported that they had no plans to use smartphone-based contact tracing at all.
 
Those who have worked on privacy-preserving exposure notification apps should be commended for stepping up. They have dedicated their skills toward trying to save lives and restore people’s freedom, and they did a very good job creating a privacy-preserving approach that was not only the most likely to be trusted and effective, but also the least likely to permanently change our world for the worse. 
 
Nevertheless, it does not appear to be working out. “A lot of this is just distraction,” Osterholm concluded of all the talk over digital contact tracing. “I just don’t see any of this materializing.” Given what we know about the technology, we are inclined to agree.