vice | 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?
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.
