The New Patriot Act
Governments are considering tracking citizens locations as a way to monitor the spread of coronavirus and enforce quarantines and lockdowns.
My thoughts are as follows: fuck that. This will be the new Patriot Act. The world is quickly becoming an episode of Black Mirror.
Israel is doing it. Fuck them.
The Israeli government has approved emergency measures for its security agencies to track the mobile-phone data of people with suspected coronavirus.
The new powers will be used to enforce quarantine and warn those who may have come into contact with infected people.
Absolutely atrocious. If Israel ever had a brain, they’ve lost it.
Unfortunately, the United States isn’t very far behind. Terrifyingly enough, this is an idea I’ve heard reverberating a bit in recent days, both on a podcast I usually enjoy (Crooked Media’s Pod Save America*) as well as a blog I stumbled across. I never expected to see the day where American government leaders would be calling for a mass surveillance system, much less American citizens themselves asking for it.
If the U.S. government allows this to happen, then fuck them, too. I‘ll stop carrying a phone before I just go along with something like this, pandemic or not. This is deeply un-American.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
— Benjamin Franklin
And oh yeah, of course, Facebook is involved in this, so #deletefacebook