Former CIA contractor Edward Snowden believes that governments have failed to prepare for the Corona pandemic, despite warnings for years, and warned against authorities using the current situation to build what he called "engineering oppression."
Shane Smith, co-founder of VICE, a tech specialist, interviewed Edward Snowden on his new program on Weiss TV.
Smith spoke with Snowden - who blew up the NSA surveillance scandal of the American people in 2012 - in the first episode, which covered two topics: countries ’unwillingness to confront a global epidemic that poses a threat to humanity, and whether the power and mandate that people now hand over to governments to deal with the pandemic will do harm On these peoples.
Why didn't the major powers prepare?
Snowden said, "Every academic and every researcher who has seen this knows that this is coming. But when we needed these governments we failed the system now, and we failed a lot."
"In a world where we live on top of each other in crowded and polluted cities, predicting a pandemic will not be difficult. Every academic and every researcher who has seen this knew that this is coming, and even the intelligence agencies (...) and because they used to read the reports they were planning to confront the epidemics." .
Are authoritarian regimes better?
Snowden answered a question about the ability of authoritarian regimes to better cope with the pandemic than democracies; and he said, "I don't think so, I mean there are opinions that China can do things the United States cannot do. This does not mean that what these authoritarian countries do It is actually more effective. "
"If you mean in countries like China, where the cases seem to have settled, how can we trust that these numbers are really true? I don't think we can, especially as we see the Chinese government recently working to drive out Western journalists at the moment when the world needs To reassurances from independent and credible sources in this region. "
Does Corona hit privacy and civil liberties?
Smith asked that the Corona virus was invaded not only by countries, but also by individual privacy and civil liberties, and could these values disappear with the disappearance of the virus?
In this context, Snowden says that while despotism spreads with the imposition of emergency laws, and while we sacrifice our rights to save ourselves from the virus, we also sacrifice our ability to stop the slide into a less liberal and less free world.
"Do you really think that when the Coruna virus becomes a forgotten memory, countries will not retain these capabilities of control that they built during the pandemic? Do you guarantee that this data will not be preserved? No matter how you use these capabilities and data, what I see is Developing the structure of repression "in the post-Corona era.
Snowden was the first guest in the new "Shelter in Place" series that will be shown on Weiss TV every Thursday evening.
The program addresses the topic of the global response to the Corona virus and its lasting impact around the world. He will discuss these topics, as well as how to adapt to quarantine, with a group of specialists in science, entertainment, economics and journalism.