Edward Snowden warns that high-tech surveillance measures governments use to struggle the outbreak of COVID-19, the illness attributable to the newly recognized coronavirus, could have long-lasting impression, in line with a Monday interview with the Copenhagen Worldwide Documentary Movie Pageant.

The US government, as an illustration, is reportedly in talks with tech corporations like Fb and Google to use anonymized location information from telephones to assist observe the unfold of COVID-19. Whereas some say the measure could be a useful instrument for well being authorities to trace the virus, others have expressed considerations about their info being shared with the government. 

Snowden, a former Nationwide Safety Company contractor and whistleblower, stated governments can prolong the entry they need to folks’s private info throughout a disaster and use it to observe their actions. Throughout this pandemic, for instance, governments may say they’re fearful about public well being and could ship an order to each health tracker to take a look at measures like pulse and coronary heart price, after which demand entry to that sort of exercise, he stated. 

After the virus is gone and the info remains to be out there to them, governments can use new causes like terrorist threats to justify regularly gathering and analyzing folks’s information, he stated. 

“They already know what you are on the web,” Snowden stated through the interview. “They already know the place your cellphone is shifting. Now they know what your coronary heart price is, what your pulse is. What occurs once they begin to intermix these and apply synthetic intelligence to it?”

In 2013, Snowden revealed particulars of NSA surveillance packages to journalists, which led to heightened considerations about privateness within the digital period. He faces expenses of espionage and theft of government property within the US, and has been residing in Russia since 2013.