Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed our government's mass surveillance programs, has warned that measures introduced by a variety of governments to combat Covid-19 will facilitate an "architecture of oppression" in which the new powers granted might not be rescinded and may eventually be abused.
My opinion is that for the most part, these new measures are well-intentioned efforts to limit the spread of the virus. However, I agree with Mr. Snowden that once in place, these measures will be difficult to remove. And even if they are removed, the precedent for their usage will have been established, meaning that it will be easier to institute similar policies in the future in situations where the rationale is not so clear.
From an interview with Vice TV:
As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world. Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept?
Will those capabilities begin to be applied to small-time criminality, for political analysis, for doing things like performing a census, political polling.
No matter how it is being used, what is being built is the architecture of oppression. And you might trust who is dealing with it today. You might trust who runs it. You don't care about Mark Zuckerberg. But someone else will have this data eventually, some other country. In your country, a different president will have this data eventually. And someone will abuse it.
Edward Snowden: Governments Using Coronavirus To Build Global "Architecture Of Oppression" | Video | RealClearPolitics
From article regarding Snowden's interview for the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival
During a video-conference interview for the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival, Snowden said that, theoretically, new powers introduced by states to combat the coronavirus outbreak could remain in place after the crisis has subsided.
Fear of the virus and its spread to potentially could mean governments "send an order to every fitness tracker that can get something like pulse or heart rate," and demand access to that data, Snowden said.
"Five years later the coronavirus is gone, this data's still available to them — they start looking for new things," Snowden said. "They already know what you're looking at on the internet, they already know where your phone is moving, now they know what your heart rate is. What happens when they start to intermix these and apply artificial intelligence to them?" Snowden added.
The article goes on to cite examples of government policies that represent new levels of surveillance.
Numerous European countries including Italy, the UK, and Germany have struck up deals with telecoms companies to use anonymous, aggregated data to create virtual heat maps of people's movements.
Israel granted its spy services emergency powers to hack citizens' phones without a warrant, South Korea has been sending out text alerts to warn people when they may have been in contact with a coronavirus patient including personal details like age and gender. Singapore is using a smartphone app to monitor the spread of the coronavirus by tracking people who may have been exposed.
In Poland citizens under quarantine have to download a government app that mandates they respond to periodic requests for selfies, and Taiwan has introduced an "electronic fence" system which alerts the police if quarantined patients move outside their house.
Edward Snowden warns COVID-19 could give governments invasive new data collection powers that will last long after the pandemic | Markets Insider