Is mass surveillance the new norm？
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Summary
Mass surveillance of the public is not just something communist authoritarian China does these days, or something you see in a dystopian movie, but it's happening right here right now in North America and across the western world as governments try and grapple with the coronavirus outbreak.
Transcript
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folks there's a lot of concerns right now that mass surveillance of the public is something
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that's not just something communist authoritarian china does these days or something you see in a
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dystopian movie but it's happening right here right now in north america and across the western
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world as governments try and grapple with the coronavirus outbreak and try and enforce social
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distancing measures when they feel like some members of the public aren't following along
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toronto mayor john torrey he talked about the possibility of tapping into cell phone towers
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to look at where people were what they were getting up to prime minister justin show was asked about
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this last week by media he said he doesn't think he knows of anything in the works for it right now
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but he refused to rule it out i want to read a tweet by scott gottlieb he's a doctor and he was also the
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commissioner of the fda in the u.s from 2017 to 2019 he writes on social media that covid19 it's
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not going to go away it'll infect the southern hemisphere as as uh they winter and it will want
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to come back to the u.s in the fall okay but then we'll have a massive surveillance system by then he
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says and i believe more than one drug to be uh both preventing and treating the infection will be
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available and he just kind of talks about this surveillance system as an aside like oh great we're
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going to have this great tool and we're like what really there was no caveats about the challenges
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with all of this i want to read another tweet by ann kavukian she's formerly ontario's privacy
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commissioner she says strong end dates and sunset clauses must be put in place for all of these
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tracking measures that are being invoked as a result of the coronavirus she makes an excellent
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point the new york times had a feature on this organization called cancer health they're doing
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something kind of interesting where they have a thermometer that people can test to see you know
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what their fever is just a thermometer but it's connected to an app it sends the data back to their
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firm and they have this grid that's showing the national fever rates all across america right now
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it's very interesting to see that where lockdowns are in place strict ones across the u.s
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fever rates are kind of going down in places where there's not lockdowns they're going up fever is
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of course one of the symptoms of the coronavirus so it suggests hey these lockdowns are actually
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working okay cool but it's interesting to see that we now have this big data paying attention
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to people's fevers people would have consented to use this device of course but it brings around a lot
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of questions about mass surveillance moving forward and kavukian makes a point you're implementing all
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this but let's also make sure that we don't let it stay that we say bye-bye to it once this era is behind us