Edward Snowden warned that government surveillance infrastructure and techniques used to track the spread of the coronavirus will likely stay in place long after the disease is managed.
Snowden, a former CIA subcontractor who was charged with violating the Espionage Act after leaking classified National Security Agency information on global surveillance programs, fled the United States in 2013 and eventually received asylum in Russia. The whistleblower warned of the government’s expanding powers in an interview with the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival last week.
“When is the last time you remember a brief suspension of civil liberties?” Snowden asked rhetorically, adding, “This is the question that everybody should consider. When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky.
“The emergency tends to be expanded. Then the authorities become comfortable with some new power. They start to like it, and the original emergency passes,” he continued, later adding, “They find new applications, new uses for this new power they gained.”
Reports have circulated indicating that the federal government and the tech industry are working on ways to use location data from users’ phones to track the spread of the coronavirus. Such partnerships could also include allowing the government to send orders to smartphones and fitness trackers for information about pulses and heart rates.
“They already know what you’re looking at on the internet,” Snowden said. “They already know where your phone is moving. Now they know what your heart rate is, what your pulse is. What happens when they start to intermix these and apply artificial intelligence to it?”
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