[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5OAjnveyJo&rel=0]
Shelter in Place with Shane Smith & Edward Snowden (Full Episode)
♪♪
-Forget the politics, we have a national crisis.
We are at war. There is no politics.
-So our news cycle is changing,
if not daily, then hourly or by the minute.
And there’s so much information out there today,
and it’s difficult to navigate the waters of the news.
-Over 2,980 deaths.
-It was another rough day for the financial markets.
-They’re going to do a 30-day extension.
-Over 4,700 deaths…
-…which means another month of this.
-So one of the things I want to do is
talk to some of the biggest thinkers in the world and say,
“Hey, what are these problems,
and what are the unforeseen consequences
of what’s happening in real time?”
-We have entered into this next phase
that has required me,
under the circumstances,
to advance a proclamation
of a state of emergency
in the state of California.
-Now, one of the biggest questions is,
all of these emergency measures,
all of the data collection to sort of say,
“Well, what’s happening with the pandemic?”
have knock-on effects.
And I think one of the greatest thinkers
around civil liberties
and these unforeseen consequences
is Edward Snowden.
-This is the truth. This is what’s happening.
You should decide whether we need to be doing this.
-So today we’re going to talk to him
about his thoughts on the COVID virus
as well as, what does that mean for our civil liberties?
Edward Snowden, thanks for being here today.
-It’s a pleasure to be with you.
-Let’s just jump into it.
-Why does it seem like we’re so ill-prepared?
We’re acting like COVID-19 is a never-seen-before virus
and that this is just out of nowhere,
surprise, surprise.
You know, we had SARS, we had MERS.
We’ve had these types of things before,
and in fact, we knew
that we were going to be having more of them,
yet we were not set up,
or it seems like
we were completely taken aback
that this is happening now
and is having, you know, such a profound effect,
when, if you talk to any epidemiologist or virologist,
they knew that this was going to happen.
-There is nothing more foreseeable
as a public health crisis for, you know, again,
a world where we are just living on top of each other
in crowded and polluted cities
than a pandemic.
And yeah, 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 I used to read the reports,
had been planning for pandemics.
And yet when we needed it, the system has now failed us,
and it has failed us comprehensively.
And the thing that I find grotesque about this situation
is that now the people who are being asked
to sacrifice the most are the people
who are in the most precarious positions,
who have the least to give.
We’re constantly being told
we’re the richest country in the world.
But when people start losing their jobs,
when rents become difficult to pay
because there’s no work for any waitress in any restaurant
in New York right now, where are our resources?
When our hospitals say they need ventilators,
you know, where is all this great technology
that’s being used to surveil everybody, you know,
down to the tiniest toenail when we need it to create things
that actually save lives?
-In South Korea, which has been successful
in at least flattening their curve,
the government’s been sending text messages
to people who have come into contact with people
that they know have COVID-19,
which means they know who has COVID-19,
they know who they’re meeting,
they know their text message numbers.
They know how to get in touch with them.
-The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses data
provided by local telecommunications companies.
-Taiwan is doing a “mobile fence,” so-called,
where, if they know you’re infected,
they’re going to put a mobile fence around you,
and if you leave, you’re going to get in trouble.
If you leave your — It’s basically the —
your mobile phone is your new ankle bracelet.
You know, we look at what China did,
including welding certain doors shut,
and we seem to be sort of knee-jerk, ad hoc,
and we’re, you know, culturally we can’t do this,
yet are our numbers are through the roof.
So 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.
Now, that doesn’t mean
that what these autocratic countries are doing
is actually more effective.
There are really only two things that we know to be true.
One is that no one knows the true number of infected
because we can only in the absolute best case
know the confirmed cases
of people that we’ve actually tested.
And once you start to layer in this autocratic,
or I would argue, more authoritarian type
of policy structure,
what you end up seeing is that instead of policy
being guided by science and facts,
you begin to see things like information releases
becoming political decisions.
Now, this is not new.
In fact, the Spanish flu around 1918
did not actually originate in Spain.
It was actually spreading in World War I
through the trenches,
where everybody was in terrible conditions.
But the militaries of the day had imposed restrictions
on what the press could report
that could impact the war effort.
And so Spain, being a neutral country,
was publishing
what they were actually seeing in their country.
And so we just presumed, because they were the only ones
that were telling the truth, that it came from them.
Now we’re a little further ahead than that today.
But that doesn’t erase the fact that people in power
who see that there is a political advantage
to disguising or concealing or massaging
or denying numbers may choose to lie about it.
It’s happened before and it’s almost certainly happening now.
-If you’re looking at countries like China,
which seems to have flattened,
how much can we trust that those numbers are actually true?
-I don’t think we can.
Particularly, we see the Chinese government recently
working to expel Western journalists
at precisely this moment
where we need credible independent reporting
from this kind of region.
And then there’s all of these rumors and initial reports
that say things like, you know, the number of urns shipments
for burials have gone way up,
way beyond what you would expect from the official numbers.
And the fact that we cannot get independent verification
of the facts gives us reason to doubt the official story.
And the reality that we need to accept,
which is an uncomfortable reality,
is that even in places that are not autocratic regimes,
they’re going to have a second wave.
They’re going to have a third wave.
They’re going to have a fourth wave based on all of
the best medical analysis that we have available today.
I think — I was reading
a paper this morning that was from,
I think, that the Chan School of Public Health
at — I think it was Harvard University
that said pumping the brakes
is going to have to be the new strategy.
-Which means we’re at the beginning of, as you say,
you know, second, third, fourth waves of this coming.
And so all of these measures are going to get more severe.
And what then happens to civil liberties,
to privacy rights, to democracy?
I mean, what are the knock-on effects that you can see?
-I mean, this is really the central question
of this moment in history.
What we see is everyone is fearful and hopeless
and so worried about today
that we have really stopped thinking
about what tomorrow will look like
as a result of the decisions that we take today.
We’ve seen in countries like Taiwan and South Korea
and spreading also into more Western countries,
and of course, in the United States,
where it has begun as well,
the tracking and monitoring of the movements
of the whole of the human population
through the movements of our phones.
And it is, I think,
something that should raise cause for concern,
because when we talk about the applications,
and I’m sure we will,
they’re saying they’re using it for contact tracing.
This person gets sick. Where did they go?
Who may they come in contact with precisely
so they can produce these kind of text messages
that you describe?
On its face, it seems like it might be a good idea.
There is, of course, a natural presumed benefit here.
And yet, this level of contact tracing,
this method of contact tracing does not really work
on a pandemic scale.
-You know, we’re declaring, you know,
various states of emergencies here and there,
but these have sweeping powers.
-What is being built is the architecture of oppression.
♪♪
-So when we look at South Korea,
when we look at China,
when we look at, you know, Taiwan, Singapore,
countries like this, now America,
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?
-[ Laughs ] That’s a good question.
I mean, that’s really the one
that should make everyone just look at their phone
and, you know, sort of raise an eyebrow.
There are a number of ways that you can track the location
of someone through their phone.
There are these 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.
It becomes a proxy for location.
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 it. Apple probably has it.
And many, many other companies you’ve never even heard of
that run ad networks.
What this really means
in a France or a United States
is they go, “Well, look,
we’re aware of privacy concerns, so what we’re going to do
is we’re going to depersonalize 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 phones.
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 cellphone towers you’re near,
to very, very precise location information,
in which case this information
when you’re applying it at scale,
cannot be anonymized in a meaningful way.
And then there’s this big question of,
well, where does all that information go?
How is it controlled?
Who’s it 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.
-You know, it seems that this is
maybe the greatest question of the modern era
around civil liberties,
around the right to privacy.
Yet no one’s asking this question.
We really don’t hear a lot about it.
And so now this is probably the largest societal
zeitgeist change to, “Yes, have the information
because we have to stop this thing.”
You know, we’re declaring, you know,
various states of emergencies here and there.
But these have sweeping powers.
So we’re sitting here in America quarantined and saying,
“Okay, what does this mean going forward?”
-When I think about the future,
when any of us look at where this is heading,
we need to think about where we’ve been,
and sadly, these kind of emergency powers
that are born out of crises
have a perfect history of abuse.
I mean, down the board,
whenever you look at these things,
the funniest part about it in a dark way
is that the emergency never ends.
It becomes normalized.
When you talk about mass surveillance,
the Bush-era warrantless wiretapping program,
only part of it was shut down, and it’s rolled over
and it’s rolled over and it’s rolled over.
And we’ve performed things at the edges,
but the basic practices of what was supposed to be
a stopgap emergency,
which was in response to another stopgap emergency,
was which was, of course, the legacy of 9/11
and the Patriot Act.
And we are still today engaged in the same wars
that we declared nearly 20 years ago
that we have not managed to escape.
You know, we had, as a result of 9/11,
the rise of the nuclear Iran
because their counterbalance in Iraq was ruined.
We saw authoritarianism begin to creep across Western societies,
places we wouldn’t expect, like Hungary and Poland.
As authoritarianism spreads,
as emergency laws proliferate,
as we sacrifice our rights,
we also sacrifice our capability
to arrest this slide into a less liberal and less free world.
Do you truly believe that when the first wave, the second wave,
the 16th wave of the coronavirus
is a long-forgotten memory,
that these capabilities will not be kept,
that these data sets will not be kept?
Will those capabilities begin to be applied
to small-time criminality?
Will they begin to be applied to political analysis?
Will they begin to be applied
for doing things like performing a census?
Will they be used for political polling?
No matter how it is being used,
what is being built is the architecture of oppression.
And you might trust who is dealing with it,
you might trust who runs it.
You might go, “You know, I don’t care about Mark Zuckerberg.”
But someone else will have this data eventually.
Some other country will have this data eventually.
In your country, a different president
will have control of this data eventually,
and someone will abuse it.
Now, could China use it for something interesting to them?
Yes. And what happens when they abuse it?
And I believe they already have.
You know, they’re they’re running internment camps
in China.
And these practices, when they don’t get pushback,
when they don’t get condemnation,
when they don’t face sanction,
this will become normalized and it will spread.
And we’ll face them in Russia.
We’ll face them in Iran.
And then we’ll face them in Poland,
we’ll face them in Hungary,
we’ll face them throughout Europe.
We will face them in the United States
because we will face them everywhere.
♪♪
-This is a pivotal moment.
-It is. -And why is nobody
talking about this?
-Because we’re scared.
♪♪
-We’ve talked about, this is, let’s say, the first wave.
And until there’s a functioning vaccine,
there’s going to be more waves.
There’s going to be more pandemics.
I mean, this is just the way it’s going to go.
So if there’s going to be more waves of COVID-19, and in fact,
more waves of other pandemics going forward,
then theoretically there will be more information,
more information collected, more information shared.
This is the “new normal.”
This is just — it’s not going to get better.
This is just it. This is a pivotal moment.
-It is. -And why is nobody
talking about this?
-Because we’re scared.
If we work together, if we think that how we can
protect ourselves, our families, our communities,
our hospitals, if we think about how we can work
together internationally to overcome this,
as our weeds peak in different places at different times,
we cooperate, we can start to get this space
to think not about addressing the symptom
of our overcrowded and unequal world,
which is this virus that has spread across borders instantly.
When you look at what’s happened,
when we have this health crisis,
and it very quickly morphed into an economic crisis
and then very quickly became a financial crisis,
you see all the governments of the world leap into action.
And it’s interesting that you see the majority of this money
go not to the public, not to hospitals,
but to businesses,
loans to the groups and corporations
that actually created the systemic problems
that were exacerbated by this sudden sharp decline.
But we need to remember that this virus will pass,
but the decisions that we make today in this atmosphere
will last.
We will have to live with them
and our children will have to live with them.
All of our posterity will.
It’s not just about America. It’s not just about your city.
It’s about everywhere.
Because these systems, if we do not change them,
they’re going to make decisions for us on an automated basis
to determine who gets a job,
who gets a home, and who does not.
♪♪
-So we seem to be heading
into this uncharted territory.
And I wanted to ask you, you know, step back,
take some time.
What should we be thinking about?
What should we be concentrating on?
-One of the things that strikes me is
this sensation that this is,
you know, a bolt out of the blue,
it couldn’t have been prevented, it couldn’t have been resisted,
it couldn’t have been imagined that this would come to pass,
this global pandemic.
When you think about the average American,
you know, they go to work every day.
They spend ten hours at the office, in the car,
away from their family, away from their home.
And by the end of the day, they’ve got no space to think.
And now all of us collectively at the same time
has been forced into a global sabbatical all around the world,
which is an extraordinarily rare event in history.
We are at one of the only moments
that will be in our lifetimes where the system is so stressed
and so overextended and the leadership
so clearly out of its league that we have the ability
to make not reformative changes,
but revolutionary changes,
that we can actually change the functioning of society,
that we can actually change the structure of the system
that controls and influences our lives —
the way that we are being monitored,
the way that we’re being tracked.
Because these systems, if we do not change them,
will not simply be used to monitor our health.
They’re going to make decisions for us on an automated basis
to determine who gets a job, who goes to school,
who gets a loan, who gets a home,
and who does not.
And we today are being asked
in a moment of extraordinary fear,
“What do we want these systems to look like?”
And if we don’t make that decision ourselves,
it will be made for us.
-Edward Snowden, thank you for your time today.
-Thanks so much, Shane.