Edward Snowden, the man who exposed the breadth of spying at the US's National Security Agency, has warned that an uptick in surveillance amid the coronavirus crisis could lead to long-lasting effects on civil liberties.

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 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?"

While no reports appear to have surfaced so far of states demanding access to health data from wearables like the Apple Watch, many countries are fast introducing new methods of surveillance to better understand and curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Numerous European countries, including Italy, the UK, and Germany, have struck 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 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. Taiwan has introduced an "electronic fence" system that alerts the police if quarantined patients move outside their homes.

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Edward Snowden warns coronavirus surveillance could lead to ...

According to the IbsenStage project in Oslo, the play is "more popular than ever". It is about truth, freedom and tyranny. It deals with the loner versus the group, the role of the elite and the power of the majority.

Those themes again resonate everywhere. Apparently, very few changes are needed for the text to sound 'fresh' - in the United States, in Europe, in Egypt, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe.

The main character of the play is Dr Stockmann, a doctor working in a newly developed spa in a small, poor Norwegian village.

This spa is the pride the villagers, as well as their main hope of getting out of poverty. One day Dr Stockmann discovers that the waters have been poisoned. Without telling anyone he sends samples to a laboratory.

His suspicion is soon confirmed: this water makes people sick. As a good citizen Dr Stockmann immediately warns the authorities. But the mayor of the village, who happens to be his own brother, is not very grateful.

On the contrary: he fears that if the lab results become known, the spa must close for a while. This would ruin the village. Detoxification would require investments the village doesn't have. In short, the mayor wants Dr Stockmann to remain silent and pretend all is fine.

But the doctor doesn't intend to. He writes an article for the newspaper and plans to inform villagers at a public meeting. The mayor, meanwhile, starts a smear campaign against Dr. Stockmann, putting pressure on the newspaper and others not to give him a podium.

That campaign works.

Many villagers soon believe Dr. Stockmann is a jealous schemer who discredits the spa in order to get his brother's job. The editor-in-chief reverses his decision to publish Dr Stockmann's article: "I'm not an expert. If everyone disagrees, who am I to believe you?"

The planned village meeting turns into a public tribunal with Stockmann, not the mayor, as the accused party. The doctor believed he was a hero. Instead, he's become the most hated man in the village.

During that village meeting, Dr Stockmann loses his patience. He bitterly laments the pettiness of the majority and the ignorance of the uneducated. He is an educated man, he has the facts, hasn't he?

From there all goes downhill.

The villagers get to their feet and call him "an enemy of the people". That night, the doctor's windows are smashed. He loses his job. His daughter, teacher, is also fired. He refuses to leave because "morality and justice are turned upside down".

In the last scene, Dr Stockmann declares that he is the strongest in the world, because he fights for the truth and dares to stand alone.

Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People shortly after Ghosts, a play about adultery, siphilis and hypocrisy in Norwegian society. Ghosts infuriated many. Ibsen was called "immoral" and "degenerate". This is how he got the idea to write a play about someone telling the truth and being punished for it.

In the early 1950s, the playwright Arthur Miller rediscovered An Enemy of the People. He left it intact for the most part, and just made Dr Stockmann a little more modern and sympathetic in the 1950s society would not dismiss "uneducated people" as easily as in 1882.

Miller's adaptation, which was recently republished as a paperback too, became a huge success.

No wonder: these were the days of Joseph McCarthy and his witch-hunts of anyone suspected of sympathy for the Soviet Union. A perfect moment for a thorough exploration of truth and tyranny.

Yet again the balance between public health and economic loss is a major theme. It is not at all difficult to understand why the play has once more regained popularity.

The US president fires respected scientists who disagree with his own home-made assessments of the Covid-19 virus. On Monday he lashed out against newspapers on Twitter: "FAKE NEWS, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"

In Europe, too, scientific research institutes are dismissed as "left-wing" and "elitist". As soon as borders were closed in March European countries started a fight for masks.

Foreign cars are treated with suspicion. French nurses working in a German hospital near Freiburg were insulted to such an extent that one French mayor gave them explicatory signs to put on the dashboard ("Medical personnel - I am working for your health").

A bitter diplomatic fight has broken out between Budapest and Bucharest about Hungary's delivery of masks to the Hungarian minority in Romania.

Dutch and Italians are doing battle about the costs of prolonged lockdowns, with extreme generalisations flying around. A Dutch professor correcting her fellow countrymen on some points received death threats.

History never repeats itself, Voltaire once said, but the behaviour of people clearly does.

Edward Snowden and Mohammed Morsi have recently been compared with Dr Stockmann, and the mayor with Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

Each performance of An Enemy of the People has its own local emphasis and raises slightly different questions.

Is someone clinging to facts and truth a naive utopian? Is the majority always wrong? The fact that questions that were topical 150 years ago come up now with the same intensity, shows that citizens fall into the same traps, over and over again.

It also shows how each generation must take very good care of democracy. And above all, protect the individual from the masses.

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Some lessons from Ibsen's An Enemy of the People - EUobserver

Steve Shaw reports on how concerns are already being raised about the introduction of new intrusive surveillance regimes being installed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

First the excuse was terrorism. In the years following 9/11, governments around the world capitalised on fear like never before and it became the excuse for the introduction of some of the most draconian surveillance systems the world had ever seen.

Even the citizens of democratic countries rolled over and accepted it because they were told by their governments that these systems would keep them safe. But behind the scenes, the metadata of their phone conversations was being recorded, text messages logged and smart devices tracked. Even members of the United Nations were bugged by the US Government and human rights groups such as Amnesty International had their communications intercepted by the British.

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden explained that these mass surveillance systems, many of which have been found to be illegal, did not discriminate between wrongdoers and do-gooders they simply collected and recorded data and hoped that one day it will become useful.

Today, as the spectre of terrorism has faded, a new threat has emerged in COVID-19. Once again, the solution being touted is to hand governments powers that would normally be out of the question in liberal democracies.

People say it is just an emergency and when the emergency is over we will dismantle this new surveillance system but it usually doesnt happen like that.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change argues that policy-makers should be given the power to track what is happening in granular detail and in real-time, explaining that the intrusion into the lives of the public would be a price worth paying. The think tank completely ignores historic evidence that shows that, when such power is given, it is almost always abused.

Mass surveillance has now become contact tracing and, rather than spy agencies taking the legally murky route of secretly tapping into phones and finding back-doors into operating systems, the public is being asked to willingly install tracking apps. These apps will log an individuals every movement on a government server and, when the owner of a smartphone is diagnosed with COVID-19, those who have been monitored nearby will be notified and told to self-isolate.

In an effort to protect privacy, tech giants Apple and Google came together and proposed a decentralised version of the technology, capable of logging contact between devices only on the phones themselves and not on a government server. The companies also said the technology would stop being available once the pandemic has ended. Several countries expressed a willingness to adopt it but the UK Government didnt. Instead, it favours a system developed with UK spy agency GCHQ the same agency an Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled in 2016 had spent seven years illegally building a detailed database of the entire countrys communications, including all emails and text messages.

The UK Government has also claimed that the system will log the data anonymously but a draft memo reportedly shows ministers could be given the ability to de-anonymise the data if it is considered proportionate. It does not state the reasons why this function would ever be needed.

In parts of China, contact tracing technology is already in use, with software on peoples phones giving red and green lights to indicate if they are allowed to leave their home. Only those with the green code can go past checkpoints in subway stations, restaurants, hotels, and apartment blocks. However, neither the company behind the software nor Chinese officials have explained how the system actually classifies whether someone gets a red or green light. Analysis by the New York Times also found that, like the UKs GCHQ system, Chinas software was developed in partnership with the police and, as a result, all the collected data is being shared with them.

Governments have been exploring how contact tracing can be paired with biometric surveillance including CCTV cameras capable of reading a persons body temperature and health tracking bracelets similar to consumer wearables like the Apple Watch and Fitbit. Liechtenstein has become the first country in Europe to begin trialling the bracelet technology, which logs data ranging from skin temperature and breathing to pulse rates. Researchers in the US are exploring their own version, which may also record sleeping patterns.

People say it is just an emergency and when the emergency is over we will dismantle this new surveillance system but it usually doesnt happen like that, said international best-sellingwriterand academic Yuval Noah Harari in an interview with Iran International TV. It is easy to take it in but very difficult to take it out again because there is always a new emergency.

If you wore a biometric bracelet that monitors at every moment, your body temperature, your heartbeat and your blood pressure, that can give the government knowledge. Not just about what disease you have but also how you feel about what you see on television, for example, are you scared by what you are hearing? Are you bored by it? Do you like it? Do you not like it?

Just imagine a place like North Korea in 10 years when every citizen has to wear a biometric bracelet and when you watch on television or hear on the radio a speech by the big leader, they know how you feel about it. If you are angry about the big leader you can smile, you can force yourself to smile at the big leader and you can clap your hands at what the big leader says but they know you are actually angry because they are watching your blood pressure, body temperature and you have no control over that.

Imagining this dystopian reality is not necessary because, to some degree, it already exists in north-west China, in a place called Xinjiang home to the Uyghur population.

Louisa Coan Greve, director of Global Advocacy at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, told Byline Times that what is happening there should be a warning to the world.

The Uyghurs experience is a red-alert warning for the world, she said. The world needs to take heed before it is too late. The Uyghurs experience shows that a state can ramp up a techno-totalitarian control over 12 million people in a very short time. The Uyghurs live under the most intensive surveillance regime the world has ever known. The Uyghur region is rightly called a no rights zone. It was the first place where the Government forced 100% of the population albeit only Uyghurs, not Han Chinese to give DNA samples and other biometric data like face scans, voice prints, and iris scans.

That provides the big-data on a sufficient scale to rapidly develop AI-enabled technical surveillance. There is a reason that tech firms have made and invested billions of dollars in Xinjiang, a place that had no high-tech industry just a few years ago. The data necessary to lead on artificial intelligence could not have been collected on this scale anywhere else.

Human rights researchers have found it hard to imagine how the surveillance of Uyghurs could get worse, given the states capacity to throw millions into detention and achieve 100% surveillance of electronic devices. Add the fact that not carrying your phone can get you thrown into a prison camp, the Chinese Government appears to have created the perfect total-surveillance state in the Uyghur homeland.

She added that, even in George Orwells 1984, people were not forced to carry Big Brother screens around with them 24 hours a day.

This Orwellian society was developed by China using the same rhetoric that Western democracies used to justify their mass surveillance programmes to keep people safe. With the new justification of keeping people healthy, Chinas policy-makers, like many in other parts of the world are likely to be looking to seize the fresh opportunity presented by the Coronavirus.

Is the world we build after this pandemic to be one of surveillance, control and fear? Dr Tom Fisher, senior researcher at Privacy International, told Byline Times. We are seeing unprecedented levels of surveillance emerging in the fight against the virus. These emerge not only from government initiatives, but also measures promoted by the surveillance and biometrics industry.

Its essential that the measures and technologies introduced are necessary and proportionate, and driven by epidemiological need. Its particularly important that these measures be time-limited. Introducing new forms of physical surveillance infrastructure, like cameras for measuring body heat, is of great concern.

We know from experience that, even when justified for a short-term purpose, this infrastructure becomes a permanent part of our lives. It is hard to predict how these tools might be used in the future, as the biometrics industry finds new ways of exploiting this new source of data. For example, digital CCTV has led to companies developing concerning technologies ranging from facial recognition to emotion recognition who knows to what new uses theyd put in measures like thermal cameras.

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The Coronavirus Crisis: Patrolling Hearts and Minds? A 'Red Alert' Surveillance Warning to the World - Byline Times

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I dont know about you people, declared Gavin Belson, the spoof Silicon Valley CEO from the hit series of the same name, but I dont want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place, better than we do!

This parody is now playing out for real with the coronavirus contact tracing tech only theres nothing funny about it this time.

Contact tracing apps are meant to notify people when someone they were in close quarters with is diagnosed with COVID-19. The idea is to alert those at high risk of being infectious so they quarantine, allowing the rest of us to move about with relative confidence. For this to work though, your contact tracing app needs to be able to handshake with everyone elses which is why the profusion of incompatible solutions is a mortal mistake.

Singapore launched a COVID-19 contact tracing app on March 20. Israel launched theirs three days later, and things snowballed from there. The smorgasbord of governments promoting incompatible apps now includes those of Austria, China, the Czech Republic, Ghana, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Italy, North Macedonia, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, and South Korea, with the promise of more to come from Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, and the UK. Not to be outdone, the great state of Utah is working on its own contact tracing app, as are several other states. The path to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.

COVID-19 doesnt know theres a border between Denmark and Germany, and neither should our contact tracing. Flooding the planet with provincial apps that nobody uses makes it harder to get what we really need: a universal solution that is actually installed by billions of people.

Heres a three-step proposal for achieving just that.

A few days ago, it did: Google and Apple joined forces to create an anonymous and global contact tracing technology which will be built into every Android and iOS smartphone. Their architecture neither stores nor discloses personal or medical information, ensuring it cannot be abused by rogue governments, or co-opted by corporate interests.

Our own company, Lemonade, had been trying to rally support for something similar when the Google-Apple news broke, and we shelved our effort to back theirs. If were all going to unite behind a single technology, the one by the makers of the only two mobile operating systems is the one to back.

The second step, therefore, is for all competing initiatives to do the same: stop proliferating parochial solutions, and start backing Google and Apple. Its not enough though, to stem the splintering we need to positively incentivize universal usage of this universal solution. Governments are leery of mandating usage of their own apps, let alone Silicon Valleys, and consumers are wary of using government-sanctioned tech. Both stances make sense, but neither heralds global adoption.

Thats a problem. Modeling done at Oxford University suggests that 80% of us need to install the app if the pandemic is to be stopped. In Singapore, the poster child for contact tracing apps, only 17% of people did.

The good news is that corporations can do what governments cannot. When Edward Snowden exposed the extent of the US governments data gathering on its citizens, everyone was horrified. But we remained quite comfortable with Google harvesting far more data from our phones than the NSA ever did.

You see, when we give up some privacy in a commercial exchange, we feel like were exercising our freedom. When governments invade our privacy, we feel like were losing our freedom. Right or wrong, therein lies our salvation: Corporations can do what governments cannot.

The final step then is for a few large corporations to incorporate the Google-Apple tech into their service, so that we all choose to join this effort. Thats right, five or six well-placed CEOs, acting in their shareholders best interest, can change everything for everyone without breaking a sweat.

Imagine, for example, if Starbucks 30,000 global locations required patrons to tap their phone on a reader before entering the store, confirming they have contact tracing enabled, and are unlikely to have been in close quarters with a COVID-19 patient in the past two weeks. How much sooner might you get that white chocolate mocha frappuccino with an extra shot of espresso?

Imagine if Uber made its app run the same check automatically on your device, so that before sending a car it confirmed you are low-risk for being contagious and extended you the same peace of mind about the driver who picks you up.

Star Alliance flies to 98% of the worlds countries, AMC runs 11,000 movie theatres worldwide, the Simon Property Group controls 250 million square feet of shopping malls globally. Imagine if you had to scan your device before boarding one of those planes, entering one of those cinemas, or shopping at one of those malls.

All it would take is for these five multinationals or a handful of similarly placed corporations to pledge to check for the Google-Apple contact tracing before extending service to patrons, and two things would happen.

The first is that Starbucks coffee shops, Uber drivers, Star Alliance airlines, AMC cinemas, and SPG malls would all be open for business and flourishing that much sooner.

The second is that around the world countless eateries, stores, hotels, stadiums, theatres, museums, schools, trains, planes, and automobiles would take the pledge too. This cascade would ensure ubiquitous contact tracing across the globe without a single law mandating it.

The Google-Apple architecture is entirely anonymous, allowing the world to start turning again, without sacrificing our privacy to our governments nor, indeed, to Google, Apple, or any commercial interests. In taking steps one through three, humanity will have joined forces behind a single, confidential, and global contact tracing solution and it is humanity that will reap all the rewards.

A ubiquitous and incognito system for contact tracing can be a reality within weeks. It wont be a panacea massive testing, social distancing, and frequent handwashing are going to be critical for a while but it can change things beyond recognition. It will enable well-meaning people who contract COVID-19 to effortlessly and anonymously ensure anyone they may have unknowingly infected is alerted to self-quarantine letting everyone else move about the world that much safer, that much sooner.

When it comes to contact tracing, its like Ronald Reagan said: The most terrifying words in the English language are: Im from the government and Im here to help. All that is needed now is for competing initiatives to back off, for leaders of multinationals to step up, and for governments to cheer from the cheap seats.

Daniel Schreiber is the CEO and cofounder of Lemonade, the insurance carrier powered by artificial intelligence and behavioral economics. His previous roles include SVP Global Marketing and General Manager at SanDisk, and VP of Business Development and Marketing at msystems, which SanDisk acquired for $1.6B. Schreiber began his career as a corporate-commercial attorney.

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A contact tracing app could help stop the spread of COVID-19 only if billions of people use it heres how to make that happen - Business Insider