Edward Snowden Warns That Privacy Violations Instituted During Coronavirus Panic Will Be Made Permanent

Whistleblower Edward Snowden, whose leaks exposed the unconstitutional spying of the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, is warning about the permanent impact that coronavirus hysteria will have on civil liberties and privacy rights.

While recently appearing on a video feed to the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival, Snowden said that it is likely that emergency powers that are enacted during the pandemic will remain in place once it has concluded.

Snowden warned of governments sending “an order to every fitness tracker that can get something like pulse or heart rate” as a possibility of overreach that could become commonplace following the crisis.

“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.”

Snowden explained that it is the M.O. of governments to exploit a crisis to gain illicit power. These powers, billed to the public as temporary during the crisis, then become permanent once they are implemented and normalized.

“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?” he added.

There is already research being done to harvest the social media data from users in order to help governments enforce societal lockdowns:

A research group is trying to make it possible for government bureaucracies to enforce the coronavirus lockdown based on the social media footprint of users. Ghost Data took half a million Instagram posts, from areas in Italy that are under strict lockdown, and handed the data to LogoGrab. LogoGrab was able to match people, times and places from the images and video they received. The study ultimately determined that 33,120 individuals have violated quarantine orders in Italy, just from the small amount of data that was gathered.

These innovations could keep more people safe during the time of a pandemic, but they could also be used to perfect Big Brother and make the Orwellian nightmare a permanent phenomenon. Andrea Stroppa, Ghost Data’s founder, is not particularly concerned about opening Pandora’s Box with his work.

“In our view, privacy is very important. It’s a fundamental human right,” Stroppa said. “However, it’s important to give our support to help the government and the authorities. Hundreds of people are dying every day.”

The World Health Organization (WHO), a globalist body that helped spread the coronavirus throughout the world with their incompetence, are encouraging governments the world over to violate privacy rights in an attempt to stop the spread of coronavirus.

“The use of high-quality data can support the vital work of scientists, researchers, and public health authorities in tracking and understanding current pandemic,” European Digital Rights, an association representing various pro-freedom groups, said in a statement.

“However, some of the actions taken by governments and businesses under exceptional circumstances today, can have significant repercussions on freedom of expression, privacy and other human rights both today and tomorrow,” they added.

Snowden’s dire warning may ultimately fall on deaf ears. Society may be inextricably changed due to the coronavirus pandemic with crucial liberties never being restored.