An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vice: Snowden is the first guest in the new ‘Shelter in Place’ series debuting on VICE TV on Thursday at 10 p.m. EST, which looks at the global response to COVID-19 and its lasting impact around the world. VICE co-founder Shane Smith will discuss these themes, as well as how to survive quarantine, with a host of thinkers from science, entertainment, economics, and journalism. In the premiere episode, Smith talks to Snowden, who blew the lid off of the National Security Agency’s surveillance of the American people in 2012. In the interview conducted from Smith’s home in Santa Monica over video chat, the two tackle topics including the lack of preparedness in the face of a global pandemic, how long this will be a threat to humanity, and whether the power we’re handing to global leaders will come back and bite us in the ass.
[…]
It seems that [coronavirus] may be the greatest question of the modern era around civil liberties, around the right to privacy. Yet no one’s asking this question. 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? No matter how it is being used, what’ is being built is the architecture of oppression. Snowden said intelligence agencies knew a pandemic like this was coming “because they used to read the reports had been planning for pandemics.”
Asked about if we can trust the numbers coming from China, Snowden says “I don’t think we can,” adding that autocratic regimes like China aren’t doing things better than democratic ones. “I mean, there are arguments being made that China can do things that the United States can’t. That doesn’t mean that what these autocratic countries are doing is actually more effective.”
You can watch Shane Smith’s full interview with Snowden here.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot