COVID-19 and the Rise and Rise of the Orwellian State

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Sukla Sen

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May 5, 2020, 3:19:48 PM5/5/20

to foil-l, Say NO 2 UID Core Group

《“The coronavirus is a gift to authoritarian states including India,” said the Indian author Arundhati Roy. “Pre-corona, if we were sleepwalking into the surveillance state, now we are panic-running into a super-surveillance state.”》

(Ref.: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/04/how-safe-is-it-really-privacy-fears-over-india-coronavirus-app>.)

What the hell diseae control has got to do with gathering of all these intimate info???

《The document, which describes possible COVID-19 patients as “suspects”, asks for 33 separate, and increasingly intrusive snooping functionalities including the ability to “Identify a suspect’s behaviour, see what he or she does on specific days of the week, where does he or she order food from, where does the suspect go for regular walks, where does he/she work during the day, where does he/she sleep at night etc.”

Other proposed features include the ability to incorporate billing records, cell phone data and even the ability to integrate with intrusive programs such as Cellebrite, used by police and military forces to unlock and extract cell phone records.》

(Excerpted from: <https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/coronavirus-tracking-india-police-state_in_5eb01ba7c5b6eec1982beb18>.)

And the watchdog institutions have metamorphosed into lapdogs, if not attack dogs.