VICE TV sprak met Edward Snowden over de Coronacrisis en de gevolgen voor onze vrijheden. Of, in de woorden van VICE TV: “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.