Turning to this industry isn't the solution: it's a symptom of the problem.
But as people around the world feel the fear generated by this crisis, it is becoming painfully obvious that our security priorities leading up to this moment have been not just wasteful, but a dangerous distraction. Existential threats posed by health crises, the climate disaster, ecological breakdown, and nuclear weapons are not new; they've just been ignored.
This fear must now become the basis for a more realistic and just understanding of what it means for our societies to be secure.
Learning the right lessons
The measures currently being imposed are unprecedented in their global scale and restrictions on liberties.
Residents in China are colour-coded according to their risk of spreading the virus and their movement controlled via an app directly connected to the police. Israel has turned to NSO Group, a hacking company currently embroiled in multiple law suits: one filed by WhatsApp for helping authorities target human rights activists, and another by Saudi activist and friend of Jamal Khasshogi who charges that they were similarly targeted. It will reportedly now help the Defense Ministry rank everyone in Israel on a scale of 1-10 based on their movements and other data to assign their risk of transmitting the virus. Substitute the risk of transmitting Covid-19 with the risk they pose to ill-defined interpretations of 'national security', and it's easy to see how these systems - deployed in what are already two of the most watched countries in the world - can be used after this crisis for political control.
The NHS in the UK and Centre for Disease Control in the US have turned to Palantir, a CIA-funded data analytics company instrumental in helping Trump's administration target people for deportation, including family members of unaccompanied children. Its tools empower law enforcement in the US drawing on intimate access to details about a person's family relations, financial information, contact details, and physical attributes, and drive the work of intelligence agencies, including one of the "widest reaching" programmes of the world's most sophisticated spy agency, the NSA.
While there is little appetite for anyone championing individual freedoms in the face of an overwhelming need for restrictions in the cause of community safety, it would be an epic mistake to look to authoritarian measures and surveillance companies as the solution.
Authoritarians who stoked this crisis in the first place by punishing those trying to prevent it are not a model. In the same way, we should not look to those for answers who have spent the last decades miserably failing to prepare for them, despite no lack of warnings, and an industry which has managed to cash-in.
One estimate puts the financial cost of the US war on terror since 9/11 at $6.4 trillion - much more will have been spent by the other global powers and swallowed up by intelligence agencies and private companies who fuel them. And that's ignoring the cost in lives, time, research, laws, and energy of some of our society's greatest minds.