During the 2008 Economic Crisis, Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s then-chief of staff infamously said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
Twelve years later, as the COVID-19 crisis has turned our world upside down, governments across the globe are considering and/or doing something they certainly could not do before: implement mass surveillance programs to track COVID-19 patients.
As if they have taken a page straight from Stalin’s surveillance playbook, governments that have previously protected privacy and civil liberties are doing abrupt about-faces by giving in to the siren call of mass surveillance under the auspice of “protecting public health.”
Although you may expect this type of government surveillance in places such as China, would you believe that Western democracies are also already or on the verge of implementing similar measures?
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