Where does Surveillance Stand 10 Years after Snowden?
Edward Snowden said in an interview that advances in surveillance technology have made it easier for government agencies to spy on citizens
The Facebook punishment of 1.2 billion last week goes back to Snowden’s disclosures exactly 10 years ago about how they provided the government illegally with private data.
As valuable as Snowden’s data was, the question remains: why did he go to Russia and has become a Russian citizen as part of putins Propaganda ? Why not India , South Africa, or any other country ? Russia and China intrude the privacy and rights of its citizens much more than the NSA.
On Thursday, Edward Snowden, joined other privacy rights advocates in warning that, despite making some progress over the past ten years, the fight for privacy rights has become more challenging as a result of significant advancements in technology. This week marks ten years since whistle-blower Snowden, revealed to journalists widespread government snooping by American and British agencies.
According to Snowden, the emergence of widely use surveillance tools like Ring cameras, Pegasus spyware, and facial recognition technologies has created new risks.
Due to security issues and the hackability of its products, the home security company Ring has run into legal issues. It has also come under fire from rights organizations for its partnerships with more than 1,000 police departments, some of which have a history of using force against the public. This puts community members at risk of harassment or unjust arrests.
Despite the fact that face recognition software is known to regularly misidentify individuals of colour — resulting, among other incidents, in the wrongful arrest and imprisonment of Randal Redi in Georgia earlier this year — law enforcement agencies have started utilizing it to identify criminal suspects.
Keeping the public safe from monitoring “is an ongoing process,” Snowden said on Thursday to The Guardian. “And we will have to keep working at it for the rest of our lives, our children’s lives, and beyond.”
Snowden’s disclosure in 2013 that the American government had been broadly observing citizens’ communications sparked a discussion about surveillance as well as persistent privacy rights campaigns from organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Fight for the Future.
“Technology has grown to be enormously influential,” Snowden said on Thursday to The Guardian. “We believed the government would treat us fairly. Still, they did. We believed that the tech industry wouldn’t take advantage of us. Still, they did. Due to the nature of the situation, that will most likely occur once more."
It’s been 10 years since the Snowden revelations and it’s time for world leaders to wake up and finally pass some legislations that actually protects the privacy of the people from companies, as well as from the NSA directly.
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