Shane chats with former NSA spy and whistleblower Edward Snowden on the rise of authoritarianism during the COVID-19 pandemic.
There’s all of this data being collected, how are the government so when in in South Korea, I get a text saying oh you met Joe Blow, he might be infected you should, you know sequester yourself for 14 days, how are they getting that data.
[Snowdon] That’s a good question. I mean that’s really the one that should make everyone just look at their phone, you know, sort of raise an eyebrow, there’s a number of ways that you can track the location of someone, through their phone. There are the cell phone towers themselves, but there’s also the wireless network that you’re connected to. And then, what other wireless networks around you that you’re not connected to this you can think of as what wireless networks, your phone can hear. And so these wireless network identifiers are then collected, and they’re mapped out against GPS and then they know if you can see. Mom’s Wi Fi and neighbor Ted’s Wi Fi and the library Wi Fi all at the same time, you have to be within range of these things and becomes a proxy for location.
[Snowdon] Now that we know all of our phones can and are being tracked at all times, just by being turned on the phone companies have it at a bare minimum Facebook probably has it Google probably has an apple probably has it, and many, many other companies you’ve never even heard of what this really means in a France or United States is they go well look we’re aware of privacy concerns.
[Snowdon] So what we’re going to do is we’re going to deep personalize this information we’re going to anonymize it. And we’re not going to look at individuals we’re going to look at the flows of movement of these firms right we’re not looking at one phone we’re looking at the aggregate movements of phones. The problem is, if you’re not tracking one infection or 100 infections, but you’re tracking 100,000 infections, contact tracing quickly becomes useless and more. The precision of location information is either, so rough, that it is largely useless, which is the case if we’re talking about the cellphone networks the cell phone towers from year to very, very precise location information, in which case this information when you’re applying it at scale, cannot be anonymized and meaningful way.
[Snowdon] And then there’s this big question of, well, where’s all that information go. How is it controlled, who is being used it’s information about me. I should have some influence over it. I should have control over it. But unfortunately in the United States to a large degree, you don’t. There is no basic privacy law in the United States. We need to be able to make sure that the brakes that are being pumped are on the pandemic rather than on our society.
Shelter in Place with Shane Smith & Edward Snowden on YouTube