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

As COVID-19 continues to spread across the planet, some nations have been using technology to help flatten the curve.

In South Korea, for example, officials have been using GPS to track the movements of infected individuals in order to see who else might have contracted the virus. In Taiwan, the government has been enforcing quarantines through a smartphone-tracking app. And in the U.S., data scientists are exploring how they might use machine-learning to predict who's most at risk of dying from COVID-19, and using those projections to better allocate resources.

Last week, a company called Landing AI introduced another way technology might help combat the pandemic: a tool that measures social distancing. The tool uses cameras and AI to track people's movements, and it's able to put their location on a bird's-eye-view map of whatever area the camera is observing. Using these calculations, the tool estimates the distance between people.

Landing AI says businesses could use the tool to ensure employees are practicing good social distancing.

"For example, at a factory that produces protective equipment, technicians could integrate this software into their security camera systems to monitor the working environment with easy calibration steps," the company wrote in a blog post. "As the demo shows below, the detector could highlight people whose distance is below the minimum acceptable distance in red, and draw a line between to emphasize this. The system will also be able to issue an alert to remind people to keep a safe distance if the protocol is violated."

Landing AI noted that its system won't be able to identify particular individuals.

"The rise of computer vision has opened up important questions about privacy and individual rights; our current system does not recognize individuals, and we urge anyone using such a system to do so with transparency and only with informed consent."

Still, some privacy and workers' advocates are concerned about introducing these kinds of systems to the workplace. In its 2019 report, New York University's AI Now Institute wrote that using AI tools like these "pools power and control in the hands of employers and harms mainly low-wage workers." Others have raised concerns over normalizing mass surveillance, and the potential for employers to abuse these kinds of AI systems, now or in the future.

One concerned voice is Edward Snowden, the former CIA contractor who exposed NSA surveillance programs. In a recent interview with the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, Snowden spoke about the potential problems with introducing technological surveillance measures during the pandemic.

"When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky," Snowden said. "The emergency tends to be expanded. Then the authorities become comfortable with some new power. They start to like it."

One key takeaway from the Snowden interview is to be wary not necessarily of how surveillance tools might be used today, but of how they might be used years from now we might someday find that these tools have become too integrated in our society, too normalized, to easily remove.

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This AI tool measures social distancing in real time - Big Think

Next up on the how to get life back to normal checklist: contact tracing. But its not going to be easy.

Experts already say states need to wait until coronavirus cases actually start to decline over several weeks before they begin reopening businesses and sending people back to school and work. The US also needs to dramatically ramp up its capacity to conduct tests for Covid-19. It would help, too, if there were accurate antibody tests that would show if somebody has already been infected and is now immune.

But once people start resuming their normal routines, contact tracing will be essential to containing emerging clusters of coronavirus infections. Without those efforts, new infections could silently spread before we realize whats happening, leaving more lockdowns as the only option to guard against an out-of-control outbreak and more deaths.

If lockdowns are a sledgehammer to clamp down on new clusters, contact tracing would be the more preferable scalpel.

Traditionally, contact tracing is the work of public health staff. When somebody tests positive for an infection, field workers interview them, find out people the infected person has been in close physical contact with, and then notify those people about their exposure. Ideally, the potentially exposed people would either get tested themselves or, at the minimum, self-quarantine until symptoms show up or the incubation period has passed.

In the United States and across the world, smartphone applications are seen as a promising option to automate some of the work that health workers have traditionally been asked to do. Namely, they could silently track which people weve been in contact with, and if one of those people tests positive for Covid-19, our phone would send us a notification letting us know about our potential exposure. Apple and Google have modified their operating systems to allow our phones Bluetooth functions to do this work.

This diagram from Google helpfully explains how this would work in practice:

Google

Google

But you can probably imagine all the practical challenges and privacy concerns such a program could raise. Thats why the Center for American Progress, one of the leading left-leaning think tanks in Washington, DC, is releasing a list of recommendations for states to utilize digital contact tracing, which it shared exclusively with Vox.

Their approach seeks to maximize privacy protection while encouraging the most effective application of these tech tools. To summarize CAPs advice for states:

Digital contact tracing apps may allow all of us to better fight this virus and return to more open ways of life, CAP tech policy experts Erin Simpson and Adam Conner wrote. We come to the recommendation of distributed digital contact tracing reluctantly and only in the context of exploring the range of other recommendations. However, we find hope in the idea that new approaches make it possible to build this in a maximally privacy-protective way.

But even the best-intentioned plans are going to raise questions and be at risk of privacy violations. As Shirin Ghaffary wrote for Recode over the weekend:

The contact tracing system Google and Apple are working on is notably more privacy-centric than the methods were seeing in China or South Korea, but it still poses concerns. The two companies have now committed to shutting down the tool once the pandemic is over which was a key issue for many privacy experts but other concerns abound. There are still ways that even the randomly generated Bluetooth keys meant to anonymize users could be linked back to real identities.

Apple and Google are also leaving it up to public health authorities to develop and manage the apps that will use their contact tracing tool. Its conceivable that those authorities could introduce their own ways to circumvent privacy protections if their governments so desire.

You can see how the CAP recommendations aim to assuage these concerns (by, for example, prohibiting law enforcement access), but state governments will have to actually commit to those principles for them to be effective.

And people will have to be willing to give the government even limited access to their phones for these plans to work, and, as Shirin notes in her story, that is no small challenge in a post-Edward Snowden world. Reuters reported on Tuesday that only one in five people in Singapore, which has rolled out an app similar to what experts are envisioning in the US, have signed up for the digital tracing app. That is nowhere near the 60 percent adoption rate experts think is necessary for digital tracing to have a measurable impact on containing the coronavirus.

And all of this is why, according to the CAP experts and Shirins reporting and really anybody you could ask, digital contact tracing can only be part of a bigger solution. The ideal plan includes the traditional kind of tracing that we discussed at the top.

The problem is the US is woefully understaffed for the kind of contact tracing that is necessary for a highly infectious pathogen like the coronavirus. Public workforces have seen their federal funding cut by 28 percent over the past 15 years, and about 50,000 jobs in this now-essential field have been lost.

According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the US needs at least 100,000 more public health staffers to conduct contact tracing, many of whom will need to be trained. Politico reported that before the coronavirus pandemic, states had fewer than 2,000 workers capable of performing these duties.

So a lot more investment may be needed. The Johns Hopkins researchers, led by Crystal Watson, put the price tag for hiring and training the necessary contact tracing workforce at $3.6 billion. The new coronavirus stimulus bill passed by Congress this week included $11 billion for states and cities to ramp up their testing capabilities, laboratory capacity, and contact tracing. Well see if that is enough.

Between the CAP recommendations, the work of other experts, and the examples of other countries that have already pursued these initiatives, we know what good contact tracing of both the digital and traditional variety might look like. But it will take the resources and commitment to certain ideals to make it happen.

This story appears in VoxCare, a newsletter from Vox on the latest twists and turns in Americas health care debate. Sign up to get VoxCare in your inbox along with more health care stats and news.

Support Voxs explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Voxs work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

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Contact tracing apps for coronavirus are the new trend. Heres why. - India Gone Viral

The VPN they are essential tools to avoid internet censorship, as well as to browse safely encrypting our entire connection and hiding it from the eyes of authorities and operators. However, many of the VPNs would not be secure, a new report reveals.

The report states that in the data they have collected, the 46.6% of all VPNs of the world are based in countries that participate in the pact of 14 eyes, where 14 countries of the world participate sharing intelligence, among which is Spain. This group includes, in turn, the Five Eyes and Nine Eyes, formed by:

Members of these agreements may share intelligence data, and you can even skip the laws that prohibit citizen surveillance. Various VPNs warn of the possibility of this type of situation, and therefore warn that using one of a specific country can lead to security problems.

Thus, a VPN could be forced to share user information with the government, which in turn would allow any member of the 14 countries to obtain such information for being part of the intelligence pact. For example, the United States might know the browsing history of a user who has committed a crime.

The eyes pact began with five countries in the 1940s and aimed to share information of military origin in the face of the Cold War. However, little by little, it was expanding to intelligence, and now it also affects the information that is available online.

The Fourteen Eyes group is also better known as SIGINT Seniors Europe, or SSEUR, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden. The relationship between the countries that make it up is not as close and intimate as that of the Five Eyes, but even so, they can share sensitive information belonging to users.

Thus, 46.6% of VPNs are present in one of those 14 countries, and the figure increases to 48.4% if we consider that there are countries that also collaborate at the intelligence level such as Israel, Singapore, Japan and Korea from the south. The risk is even higher by users using free VPNs, most of whom do not guarantee 100% anonymity; especially if a judge asks them to identify a user.

Among the data collected by VPNs are the websites visited, connection times, bandwidth, server location, and even the original IP address with which they can contact an operator to help them identify the real user with the name. And surnames.

Therefore, the key is to use a VPN that does not keep records, and that is located in a country that does not fall within the Fourteen Eyes alliance. For example, Express VPN is based in the British Virgin Islands, while Nord VPN It is found in Panama, so they would be the best VPNs that we can use at the privacy level.

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Half of the worlds VPNs would not be secure - InTallaght

Edward Snowden delivers a speech during the annual Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal in 2019. (Photo by Rita Franca/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked information on Americas National Security Agency, has warned that governments may use the coronavirus to curtail freedoms.

Snowden, in an interview with Vice, said that governments may take advantage of the pandemic to impose authoritarian rules on populations.

Snowden said, 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?

Live: Follow all the latest updates from the UK and around the world

Fact-checker: The number of COVID-19 cases in your local area

6 charts and maps that explain how coronavirus is spreading

Snowden warned that while Governments may have good intentions as they build technologies such as contact-tracing apps, they are building what he describes as the architecture of oppression.

Snowden also claimed that, based on his experience working for intelligence agencies, the pandemic should have been predicted.

Snowden told Vice, There is nothing more foreseeable as a public health crisis in a world where we are just living on top of each other in crowded and polluted cities, than a pandemic.

Read more: Dying Mums plea for life-prolonging treatment to see her through coronavirus

Every academic, every researcher who's looked at this knew this was coming. And in fact, even intelligence agencies, I can tell you firsthand, because they used to read the reports had been planning for pandemics.

Earlier this month, Apple and Google announced they would work together to create contact tracing technology that aims to slow the spread of the coronavirus by allowing users to opt into a system that catalogs other phones they have been near.

Story continues

They will work together with governments on technology that will allow mobile devices to trade information via Bluetooth connections to alert people when they have been in close proximity with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19, the sometimes deadly respiratory disease associated with the novel coronavirus.

Read more: Coronavirus shows how vulnerable societies are, says Greta Thunberg

The technology will first be available in mid-May as software tools available to contact tracing apps endorsed by public health authorities.

However, Apple and Google also plan to build the tracking technology directly into their underlying operating systems in the coming months so that users do not have to download any apps to begin logging nearby phones.

Read more: British volunteers to be infected with coronavirus

Last month, tech companies including Google, Facebook and Microsoft joined forces to release an unprecedented statement on coronavirus - in the battle against online misinformation.

The statement promises that the tech giants are working together to jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus.

The statement was released online, and was signed by Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube.

The joint statement said, We are working closely together on COVID-19 response efforts. Were helping millions of people stay connected while also, elevating authoritative content on our platforms, and sharing critical updates in coordination with government healthcare agencies around the world.

We invite other companies to join us as we work to keep our communities healthy and safe.

Facebook said last week that it plans to award $100 million in cash grants and ad credits for up to 30,000 small businesses in over 30 countries, in a move aimed to address the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak.

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Coronavirus: Whistleblower Edward Snowden warns governments are building tools of oppression - Yahoo News

April 18 (Reuters) - Twitter Inc will not be able to reveal surveillance requests it received from the U.S. government after a federal judge accepted government arguments that this was likely to harm national security after a near six-year long legal battle.

The social media company had sued the U.S. Department of Justice in 2014 to be allowed to reveal, as part of its Draft Transparency Report, the surveillance requests it received. It argued its free-speech rights were being violated by not being allowed to reveal the details.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers granted the governments request to dismiss Twitters lawsuit in an eleven page order filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California.

The judge ruled on Friday that granting Twitters request would be likely to lead to grave or imminent harm to the national security.

The Governments motion for summary judgment is GRANTED and Twitters motion for summary judgment is DENIED, the judge said in her order.

Twitter had sued the Justice Department in its battle with federal agencies as the internet industrys self-described champion of free speech seeking the right to reveal the extent of U.S. government surveillance.

The lawsuit had followed months of fruitless negotiations with the government and had marked an escalation in the internet industrys battle over government gag orders on the nature and number of requests for private user information.

Tech companies were seeking to clarify their relationships with U.S. law enforcement and spying agencies in the wake of revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that outlined the depth of U.S. spying capabilities.

Twitters legal battle spanned the tenures of four U.S. attorneys general - Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, Jeff Sessions and William Barr.

Through the use of confidential declarations, the Justice Department was able to show that revealing the exact number of national security letters from 2014, as requested by Twitter, posed a risk to national security, Fridays order said.

Twitter did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comment. (Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Toby Chopra)

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U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal govt surveillance requests - Reuters

Source: Adobe/manuelhuss

The dark web typically conjures up thoughts of criminal activity. While there are undoubtedly unsavory characters leveraging the darknet for illegal pursuits, there are also virtuous uses of the hidden internet.

As reported, per data from blockchain analytics provider Chainalysis, over USD 600 million worth of bitcoin (BTC) moved on darknet markets in Q4 of 2019. (However, the darknet still accounts for less than 1% of all BTC transactions.)

In this article, we will highlight the bright side of the dark web and discuss instances where it has played a role in making positive change.

In the last decade, there have been several high-profile whistleblowers who have exposed criminal actions by governments, such as spying on their own citizens. While whistleblowers have played pivotal roles in exposing the crimes of governments, they typically do so at great risk.

For example, in June 2013, The Guardian published an explosive article revealing that the American government, through the National Security Agency (NSA), had been spying on its citizens by accessing records pertaining to their phone calls. At the time, the data was said to be from an anonymous informer. However, former government contractor, Edward Snowden, eventually outed himself as the source of the leak.

Laura Poitras, the journalist who Snowden reached out to in order to share the information with the public, credits Tor, the infamous dark web browser, as one of the main tools which made the entire endeavor possible. In a Reddit AMA, she stated:

"It would have been impossible for us to work on the NSA stories and make "Citizenfour" without many encryption tools that allowed us to communicate more securely. In fact, in the credits, we thank several free software projects for making it all possible. It's definitely important that we support these tools so the creators can make them easier to use. They are incredibly underfunded for how important they are. You can donate to Tails, Tor and a few other projects at the Freedom of the Press Foundation."

Additionally, In 2015, President Obama signed an Executive Order barring donations to people or parties that may affect national security. The loose wording of the Order led to beliefs that it applied to whistleblowers like Snowden.

In response, people began to donate to The Snowden Defence Fund in bitcoin, exceeding any amount previously donated to the fund over a similar period of time. WikiLeaks also accepts donations in bitcoin and anonymous submissions over Tor.

While the dark web is considered to be a playground for shadowy figures peddling illegal wares, a University of Surrey research paper found that only 60% of websites on the dark web were of an illegal nature.

The rest of the dark web is utilized by law-abiding citizens who simply want to protect their privacy. This is especially true in the case of citizens living in repressive regimes where there is significant censorship. Totalitarian regimes typically limit access to the internet by throttling the bandwidth or more severe blanket website restrictions and blockages.

Cindy Cohn, the executive director of US e-rights campaign group EFF, explained the connection between legitimate sites with dark web mirrors and censorship resistance saying:

Facebook has a Tor instance for people in repressive regimes. We see Tor use go up whenever a dictatorship takes over or a coup occurs. Tibetans, United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Egypt. The list goes on and on.

The dark web, accessed through Tor, can be an invaluable tool for those seeking to counter repressive regimes and their machinations. For instance, grassroots efforts leading to the adoption of the Tor browser in Mauritania led to the government abandoning the filtering of websites in 2005.

Additionally, when the government of Venezuela began to impose internet restrictions, citizens took to Tor to communicate. While the government eventually banned access to Tor through the state-owned internet service provider, some citizens were able to leverage their access to crypto to hedge themselves from inflation, conserve the value of their assets, and provide themselves with some liquidity on an as-needed basis.

Chainalysis noted in a recent report focused on the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic, the bitcoin price correction, and activity on darknet markets that spending has slowed down.

"Darknet market revenue has fallen much more than wed expect following bitcoins recent major price drop...Perhaps darknet market customers arent buying as many drugs given the public health crisis," the Chainalysis report explained.

This state of affairs is not unique to darknet marketplaces as businesses across the world are reporting significant dips in profit. However, given the lockdown effective in many areas of the world, people are not frequenting bars, clubs, pubs, festivals or other such social situations where drugs are typically consumed. Thus, people just likely don't have the need for drugs, which is one of the biggest revenue drivers for the darknet vendors.

Despite the marked fall in profits for darknet vendors, many seem to be standing in solidarity with the rest of the world. The cybersecurity firm Digital Shadows reveals that many of the actors on dark web marketplaces are echoing information found on the surface web in regards to staying safe and flattening the curve.

Additionally, some hackers are even rejecting calls for ideas through which they can exploit the general public during the pandemic. Digital Shadows states:

As weve seen time and time again, cybercriminals will find ways to take advantage of peoples fears and uncertainties in the wake of major disasters and emergencies. However, the gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic has shown some benevolent reasoning has emerged on some platforms that are typically used for crime: Users urging others to avoid taking advantage of an already dire situation.

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A Bright Side to the Dark Web - Cryptonews

Big Brother is watching you appeared on billboards in George Orwells acclaimed novel, 1984, first published in 1949. Today, that ominous warning is rapidly becoming a reality.

In the past two decades, roughly since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has increased its surveillance of Americans to a level unforeseen, even by Orwell.

Whether it be the National Security Administration, Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, or your supposedly benign local government, you are being watched and tracked at almost every turn.

Making matters even more harrowing, the advent of smartphones, GPS tracking devices, social media, and countless other new technologies has made it easier than ever for private corporations to track your every move, thought, and desire. Just think about it: your every text message, Google search, phone call, and email is stored somewhere.

And as we have seen in the recent past, the government is not shy about forcing companies to hand over their users most private data should they deem it necessary. Although there is a need for the work of the NSA, CIA, FBI, or whichever organization claims jurisdiction to access sensitive personal data in extreme cases, such as an imminent terrorist attack, common sense and reality shows that these omnipotent agencies have been more than willing to seek data and information that is well outside the bounds of these strict guidelines.

Fortunately, whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, a former NSA employee, have exposed some of the surveillance-state actions perpetrated by his ubiquitous former employer. Who knows what is actually happening in the deep corridors of these agencies, however, under the auspices of national security?

Although technology per se is not the primary driver of the increased government surveillance weve all come to expect and accept today, it certainly makes it much easier for governments to monitor their citizens. From a historical perspective, the scourge of surveillance has been alive and well for centuries. The Soviet KGB and the East German Stasi are just two examples of the sordid history of government surveillance.

In perhaps the most ominous current case, consider Communist Chinas massive surveillance apparatus, where every citizen is monitored constantly. Chinas social credit system is the most all-encompassing and terrifying surveillance program in world history.

For better or worse, most Americans are not overly concerned with government surveillanceyet. When we hear about things like city cameras capturing our every move, however, we should definitely raise our eyebrows. Even worse, stories abound over seemingly innocuous government surveillance operations that continue to push the envelope while trampling upon privacy rights and individual liberty.

The U.S. Constitution protects our privacy rights for a reason. Before our victory over Great Britain in the War of Independence, Americans (or colonists as they were then known) were victims of British surveillance and spy networks. Indeed, a primary reason for going to war against the mighty British military was so Americans would be free from surveillance.

Yet, here we are, more than two centuries later, struggling to avoid the onset of our own surveillance state. Although numerous officials from NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. will claim surveillance is necessary to protect the homeland, this is a false choice.

Benjamin Franklin warned us, Those who give up liberty for security deserve neither. This may be more relevant today than ever before.

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Government Surveillance Is a Dangerous Path to Trek - American Greatness

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

The future may be unpredictable, but global pandemics arent. There isnt a single government on the planet that hasnt been warned, repeatedly, that at some point a viral pandemic will sweep the globe, causing untold death and economic disruption.

And yet most failed to prepare for the novel coronavirus.

Every academic, every researcher who's looked at this knew this was coming, says famed whistleblower Edward Snowden in an exclusive interview with VICE co-founder Shane Smith. Yet when we needed it, the system has now failed us, and it has failed us comprehensively.

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. 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 Agencys surveillance of the American people in 2012. In the interview conducted from Smiths 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 were handing to global leaders will come back and bite us in the ass.

Smith: Why does it seem like we're so ill-prepared?

Snowden: There is nothing more foreseeable as a public health crisis in a world where we are just living on top of each other in crowded and polluted cities, than a pandemic. And every academic, every researcher who's looked at this knew this was coming. And in fact, even intelligence agencies, I can tell you firsthand, because they used to read the reports had been planning for pandemics.

Are autocratic regimes better at dealing with things like this than democratic ones?I don't think so. 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.

If you're looking at countries like China, where cases seem to have leveled off, how much can we trust that those numbers are actually true?I don't think we can. Particularly, we see the Chinese government recently working to expel Western journalists at precisely this moment where we need credible independent warnings in this region.

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.

Watch the full interview Thursday at 10 p.m. on VICE TV or catch the episode later on VICEtv.com.

Cover: VICE co-founder Shane Smith interviews Edward Snowden for a new show, "Shelter in Place" from VICE TV.

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Snowden Warns Governments Are Using Coronavirus to Build the 'Architecture of Oppression' - VICE UK