I spent hours trying to convince my contacts in the Middle East that the US is not behind coronavirus – and I failed

Conspiracy theories are spreading faster than the virus, providing fertile ground for extremists seeking new acts of terrorism while the world shelters at home

The coronavirus pandemic might have deeply changed our daily lives, but we are not alone. Terrorism is changing too – and, with it, an increase in surveillance measures and infringements of our privacy.

In the age of deserted cities, self-isolation and the constant appeal to almost everyone in the West to stay at home, it’s very difficult for extremists engaged in terrorism to find ways of killing as many people as possible. Nevertheless, that is not quenching the terrorists’ thirst for blood; they are simply looking for new ways to maximise impact.

Quarantine has created new “soft” and tempting targets: care homes and hospitals, the only locations where large numbers people are now likely to spend their days – and where every country’s ability to protect its citizens is currently being tested.

Coronavirus has also potentially provided extremists with a cheap weapon at their disposal: the virus itself. Bioterrorism, or at least the threat of it, is the latest trend in the terror war. When the pandemic first began to spread, some extremists in the Middle East turned to social media to promote the hashtag “corona for every repressor”, urging any of their followers who might have contracted the virus already to attempt to transmit it intentionally to Egyptian officials and pro-regime media zealots. In the US, intelligence agencies are already treating any deliberate attempt to spread the coronavirus as a terrorist attack.

Security services in the UK, the US and Europe know that once-typical foreign terrorists coming from conflict-torn countries in the Middle East are no longer an urgent or credible threat. But closing the borders across the Global North will inevitably result in the rise of the domestic radicalisation and lone-wolf attacks. Last week, a man was shot in the US after FBI agents tried to arrest him on charges of attempting to carry out an attack on a hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, where he believed patients might be treated there for Covid-19. Meanwhile, Isis called on its supporters to take advantage of the pandemic by freeing radicals from the “prisons of polytheists and the camps of humiliation.” That leaves a lot of scope for interpretation from radicalised supporters.

To stop the modern terror threat, intelligence officers are now relying on digital information, since physical surveillance or stop-and-search methods are no longer available for now. It’s fertile ground.

In the past weeks, we have witnessed a spike in the conspiracy theory, especially against the US. Religious and ideological radicals drew on Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns which promote the US to be behind the spread of the coronavirus. This “biggest hoax” conspiracy theory managed to spread faster than coronavirus. Their twisted narratives find their ways to far-right groups and among the Muslim community as well.

Last week, I spent two hours in a Zoom meeting with a group of people in the Middle East – please prepare yourself for what’s coming – trying to convince them that the US intelligence services are not behind the spread of the virus. And I failed, miserably.

The intelligence services didn’t create the coronavirus, but they will certainly benefit from it. Just as quarantine is turning out to be a recruitment tool for extremist groups, it’s a huge source of data for security services. With people staying at and working from home, digital surveillance units see a window of opportunity to cultivate the most significant amount of personal data on all of us. In their battle against coronavirus, many governments revealed they are tracking the infected to prevent the spread of the virus. China, South Korea, Israel, Italy and others are tracking their citizens’ phones; monitoring their movements via CCTV video and credit card records. They are doing so by applying emergency measures – with major infringes of personal privacy, and without any time limits.

The UK is considering tracking our movements with the help of location data and is in talks with telecoms networks and Google to help.

This means when the coronavirus crisis is finally over we might find ourselves faced with yet a far more dangerous threat which is likely to change our lives for good: a society where surveillance and spying on ordinary citizens are justified and tolerated and where it’s up to the tech giants to decide how much privacy we should have.

The dilemma of new terrorism and novel security spying measures all over the world shouldn’t, by any means, confuse us about whose side we are on. We must do whatever it takes to support our security services in their new battle to protect us from any threat that might arise in the coming weeks and months.

Yet we must protect our freedom and privacy and defend them with everything we have. Coronavirus mustn't obliterate those too.