Pandemic Surveillance and Homophobia in South Korea

When the Covid-19 pandemic first hit South Korea, many around the world lauded the country’s quick response and innovative contact tracing techniques, including drive-thru testing, now a staple throughout the world. South Korea was able to contact trace and quarantine individuals without locking downtowns, cities, or the entire nation like other places. Indeed, much was to be learned from South Korea’s approach to the pandemic, especially following the former Park Geun-hye administration’s handling of the 2015 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) viral epidemic. A chief critique of the management of the MERS epidemic was transparency and the public sharing of information, which led to a change in policies and laws around pandemic response and a vow from the current Moon Jae-in administration to keep the public informed with regular press conferences coupled with text messages providing details on suspected Covid-19 patients. These messages were sent to all individuals with a cell phone, the rationale being that more information is better.

Transparency, however, can be a dangerous tool. Not only were Korean citizens finding the constant barrage of text message updates exhausting, but some began questioning why certain details were being shared by the government with the public. Then, in May 2020, after the government eased social distancing restrictions around clubs and bars, an outbreak hit the Itaewon district of Seoul on the first night of re-opening. When the media reported on the case, some included the names of the clubs while others labeled them specifically as gay clubs. As the number of cases increased, Korean citizens and news agencies targeted queer people and their so-called “hedonist lifestyles” and “immoral practices” as the latest viral vectors. Some citizens have even taken to publishing personal information and pictures of suspected queer patients online. While homosexuality is not illegal in South Korea, it is highly stigmatized—rooted in concerns over family, Christian ideals, and the security of the nation—and so most queer Koreans do not come out to family, friends, or coworkers.1→John (Song Pae) Cho, “The Wedding Banquet Revisited: ‘Contract Marriages’ between Korean Gays and Lesbians,” Anthropological Quarterly 82, no. 2 (2009): 401–22.
→Young-Jung Tari Na, “The South Korean Gender System: LGBTI in the Contexts of Family, Legal Identity, and the Military,” Journal of Korean Studies 19, no. 2 (2014): 357–77. Therefore, such transparency posed a conundrum for human rights advocates and a potential problem for queer folks trying to live under the radar. In response to pandemic discrimination, Korean queer and human rights activists quickly mobilized to denounce the miasma of homophobia spreading across the country, taking aim specifically at news reports and the sharing of personal information with the public.

Here, we outline the emergence of pandemic surveillance in South Korea and the queer activist response to the pandemic-triggered homophobia of the May 2020 outbreak. We contend that the activists’ critique of the extent of personal details shared with the public speaks to the broader discriminatory functions and mechanisms in South Korea’s surveillance assemblage—the mass surveillance technologies and techniques that target, intentionally or not, non-normative behaviors, lifestyles, and practices. These technologies and techniques include mandatory testing, collecting financial data, mapping social media data, tracking mobile phone GPS, and reporting the details of infected individuals to the public.

Pandemic surveillance in South Korea

South Korea is highly advanced in its institutional digitization of personal information. Even prior to digitization, the 1962 resident registration law and system (chumindŭngnokchedo) collected 140 different forms of individual information of residents, corresponding with a unique number assigned at birth, “to monitor the population’s movements for a wide range of purposes, including military service, taxation, criminal investigation, and […] social welfare.”2Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 28. Many of these identifying features are now digitized, easily accessible to the relevant government agencies at a moment’s notice. Yet, with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, South Korea formed the Epidemic Investigation Support System (EISS), created and operated by the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT), Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT), and the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC). The EISS is an “online system that can rapidly collect and analyze data from related agencies and quickly identify the movements of confirmed Covid-19 cases, using functions such as transmission route analysis and infection risk area analysis.”3Ministry of Science and ICT, How We Fought COVID-19: A Perspective from Science & ICT (Seoul: MSIT, 2020), 26.

The EISS emerged from both the MERS viral epidemic in 2015 and the 2017 Data Flagship Project. In the wake of the government’s perceived mishandling of the MERS epidemic, it amended the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act (IDCP Act) to allow relevant public health agencies to request certain personal information for public health and scientific purposes. Under Article 76-2, the KCDC was allowed to make requests through the National Police Agency (NPA) for personal information and for location-based data from telecommunication companies, along with financial data (such as credit card transactions). The information would then be sent back through the NPA to the KCDC.4However, a 2020 Presidential Decree amended the IDCP Act again to enable the KCDC to receive the relevant data directly from the telecommunications and credit card companies after passing the request through the NPA and relevant finance association via the EISS. Ministry of Economy and Finance et al., Flattening the Curve on COVID-19: How Korea Responded to a Pandemic Using ICT (Seoul: The Government of the Republic of Korea, 2020), 45.

Much of the development of the EISS also stems from a collaboration between MSIT and MOLIT.5MSIT, How We Fought COVID-19, 27. The 2017 Data Flagship Project led then to the 2018 Act on the Promotion of Smart City Development and Industry, which encouraged the creation of new technologies and modes of datafication to be deployed in urban areas.6Intralink, Smart Cities South Korea Market Intelligence Report (Glasgow City, Scotland: UK Department of International Trade, 2019), 7–8. Thus the ministries chiefly responsible for the development, deployment, and operation of EISS are the same ministries involved in the development of datafying cities across South Korea. They retooled the technologies being developed to make cities smart for nationwide pandemic surveillance.

As MSIT writes, an epidemiological investigation begins with the transmission route, “location data gathered from a variety of sources, including cellular base stations, credit card transaction records, public transportation use history, arrival and departure history, and medical institutional visitation history.”7MSIT, How We Fought COVID-19, 27. This requires, then, institutions across South Korea—including immigration, hospitals, police, financial institutions, telecommunication companies, and the KCDC—to regularly input information into the EISS. While CCTV footage is not yet incorporated into the EISS, it is easily accessible and often used to corroborate EISS analysis. The collection of such detailed information is done under the auspices of public health protection and limiting viral infection, yet large amounts of personal data are passing through the hands of many individuals. Furthermore, some of this data is required to be disclosed to the public under Article 34-2 of the IDCP Act, which includes “movement paths, transportation means, medical treatment institutions, and contacts of patients of the infectious disease.” The rationale for such public disclosure again dates back to the government’s perceived mishandling of the MERS outbreak, the lack of transparency in government procedures, and the lack of public information around which medical institutions were treating MERS patients.

Yet the National Human Rights Commission of Korea has criticized the government’s disclosure of personal information, finding that “authorities are currently providing more information than is necessary…leading to a violation of privacy and human rights of an infected person.” For queer folks trying to live under the radar (or in the closet), such public sharing of information can be potentially catastrophic for their livelihoods, family life, and well-being. As we detail in the next section, the government’s disclosure of personal details led to immense backlash against queer individuals more broadly, and not just those infected.

Queer activist response

Almost immediately following the May 2020 outbreak and media reporting, queer activists gathered and formed the Queer Action Against Covid-19, comprised of 23 organizations, and moved at a speed that nearly matched the spread of both the virus and discrimination. As they write in their white paper detailing their immediate and prolonged response to both the May 2020 outbreak and the pandemic more broadly, “the infrastructure to live safely is not equally provided to all. Social minorities, those vulnerable in disasters, are susceptible to disease, and so they are often morally attacked as the cause of the disease.”8Queer Action Against Covid-19, “Corona 19 LGBTQ Emergency Response Headquarters Activity White Paper” (Seoul, December 2020), 1. Those made most vulnerable by disease and pandemics, then, are made doubly so with pandemic surveillance systems like the EISS but coupled with the data released to the public and subsequent media reporting, vulnerable populations like queer people are discursively represented as contributing to the spread of the pandemic itself.

This pandemic is not the first instance in which public health concerns were weaponized against the LGBT+ community in South Korea. The MERS viral epidemic also led to an uptick in homophobia. Anti-LGBT organizations claimed during the outbreak in 2015 that MERS and AIDS would combine to form a supposed “super virus” that would then devastate South Korea. While an epidemiological and microbiological falsity, the claim still taps into a whole host of medical and scientific inaccuracies and inequalities surrounding HIV/AIDS and queer folks. This includes equating HIV/AIDS to homosexuality and HIV/AIDS to death.9Timothy Gitzen, “Viral Entanglements: Biosecurity, Sexuality, and HIV/AIDS in South Korea,” Current Anthropology (forthcoming).

To dampen the rising homophobia triggered by Covid-19, queer activists mobilized around three primary areas: the queer community, press coverage, and local and national government. Queer Action Against Covid-19 believed that it was necessary, above all else, “to inform LGBTQ colleagues to voluntarily get tested and to inform them that it is working to protect us and to protect society.”10Queer Action Against Covid-19, “Corona 19 LGBTQ Emergency Response,” 2. Following the May 2020 outbreak and media reporting that associated homosexuality with the latest outbreak, thousands of club and bar-goers refused testing for fear of public outing. Given that most of the individuals tested following the May 2020 outbreak were likely patrons of gay bars and clubs, simply receiving a Covid-19 test was potentially outing oneself. Queer Action Against Covid-19 was able to convince the government to institute anonymous testing, and once the government did, queer activists encouraged their community to get tested.

Since much of the backlash against queer people and communities resulted from biased and discriminatory media reporting, Queer Action Against Covid-19 also focused their efforts on press coverage. One important method undertaken by the group was to monitor media outlets that had both initially reported on the gay clubs and bars and that have a history of being anti-LGBTQ and discriminatory toward queer peoples and communities.11Queer Action Against Covid-19, “Corona 19 LGBTQ Emergency Response,” 21. As one activist with Queer Action Against Covid-19 wrote for the National Solidarity for the Elimination of Unstable Labor website, “The media seemed to examine the personalities of these [queer] cultures, bringing a strange logic that ‘in order to prevent diseases, we need to properly know LGBT peoples.’ The only thing that has changed, compared to the past, is that LGBT people are seen as neighbors living in a community. This was seen as a threat rather than information.”12Woong Nam, “From the Weak Link of Disaster to the Age of Change,” National Solidarity to Abolish Unstable Labor, July 20, 2020.

While the discriminatory and homophobic reporting by some media outlets is certainly troubling, part of this results from the government’s public disclosure of details related to confirmed and suspected cases. Queer activists spoke with local and national governments and agencies to try and mitigate resulting discrimination by addressing the extent of personal information being disclosed. When meeting with the Seoul City Government, for instance, members of Queer Action Against Covid-19 raised the issue of health workers inquiring about an individual’s HIV status when getting Covid tested, finding the question irrelevant and discriminatory. As a result, the city issued revised guidelines for health workers.13Queer Action Against Covid-19, “Corona 19 LGBTQ Emergency Response,” 57–58. Similarly, when meeting with the central headquarters for pandemic response, the group raised concerns around the disclosure of certain personal information, resulting in updated contact-tracing guidelines that no longer include gender, age, place of residency, and nationality.14Queer Action Against Covid-19, “Corona 19 LGBTQ Emergency Response,” 57. However, some local governments have chosen to ignore these updated contact tracing guidelines.

Conclusion

Recognizing the importance of pandemic surveillance, the KCDC was promoted to a national agency, tasked as a control tower for infectious diseases and a “smart quarantine information system.” Pandemic surveillance is inherently biased, predicated on the data that enters through its systems and algorithms,15→Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
→Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet, “Feminist Surveillance Studies: Critical Interventions,” in Feminist Surveillance Studies, eds. Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 1–17.
→Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). and thus it is not built to adequately or properly engage with gender and sexual minorities. Surveillance, more broadly, is dependent on the assumption that individuals have nothing to hide, whereby pandemic surveillance correlates such transparency to health and biosecurity. For gender and sexual minorities who rely on the shadows to stay safe, pandemic surveillance upends the very spaces necessary for their survival. Alternatively, given the rampant homophobia that pervades South Korea, these surveillance technologies could be described as engaging with gender and sexual minorities in the exact way that they were designed: discriminatorily. Yet, the work of Queer Action Against Covid-19 has had lasting effects, including the KCDC announcing that homophobia and discrimination are counterproductive during these pandemic times.

Banner photo: Michael Aleo/Unsplash.