COVID-19 accelerated and normalized state surveillance

[man down]

Who would have guessed?

An

investigation has found that COVID-19 accelerated and normalized state surveillance and tracking tools that are now being used to investigate crime and harass marginalized communities.

[Citizen Koba]

Yeah man down whatever our differing opinions on the nature of the disease and the legitimacy of the Public Health response to it in different countries that's one I can certainly agree on.

Ain't just COVID of course, it's basically SOP for authoritarian leaning Governments everywhere - including the US & UK - to claim emergency powers during any crisis (war, famine, disease, civil disturbance, economic collapse) and become recalcitrant when it comes to giving up those powers. They also of course take every opportunity to slip through laws and deals which benefit their cronies and sponsors any time public opinion is fixated on something else.

Love this quote from the AP article you linked:

“Any intervention that increases state power to monitor individuals has a long tail and is a ratcheting system,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Toronto-based internet watchdog Citizen Lab. “Once you get it, is very unlikely it will ever go away.”

Authoritarian creep is a rather nice term for it that I picked up somewhere I don't now recall.

Both the US and UK have brought in / are bringing in a raft of new legislation which increases state control and reduces the right of the citizenry to protests against Governmental overreach - and that's of course not dealing with the various back door deals and profiteering which saw ?billions funneled from public funds into private pockets. I don't have immediate figures for the amount the two US administrations funneled off but I have to imagine it's substantially more than our UK crooks-in-charge managed.







New UK authoritarian legislation: