Edward Snowden warned additional surveillance put in place to battle the coronavirus by governments throughout the world could remain in place after the crisis ends.
Snowden, the former National Security Agency secrets-leaker, made his remarks during a video-conference interview for the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival.
Concern over the spread of the virus could mean governments "send an order to every fitness tracker that can get something like pulse or heart rate" and demand access to that information, Snowden said.
"Five years later, the coronavirus is gone, this data's still available to them — they start looking for new things. 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 it."
Business Insider noted, numerous counties have made deals with telecom companies to use anonymous aggregate data to create virtual heat maps of people's movements during the outbreak.
Snowden, a former NSA contractor, has lived in Russia for over six years. He is facing changes in the U.S. and is accused of providing journalists with classified documents about a government surveillance program.
Jeffrey Rodack ✉
Jeffrey Rodack, who has nearly a half century in news as a senior editor and city editor for national and local publications, has covered politics for Newsmax for nearly seven years.
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