Thread by @doctorow

"Shelter in Place" is a new show on @VICETV. In its inaugural episode, @snowden warns that pandemic is providing cover for governments to create "the architecture of oppression."

vice.com/en_us/article/…

Snowden warns that the surveillance and authoritarian controls enacted to control the pandemic will not be temporary, but rather, will endure long after the crisis (just as the Patriot Act's "temporary" measures are still in place decades later).

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And that this will exacerbate the world's "slide into a less liberal and less free world." The datasets and measures put in place to control the virus will be used to control people, constituting "the architecture of oppression."

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He is skeptical of the idea that authoritarianism has been proven effective in the time of pandemic, noting that China expelled independent western press corps, leaving us to rely on internal Chinese sources for evidence of whether pandemic controls are working in China.

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And adds that the advent of a global pandemic is no surprise: it's been a commonplace among epidemiologists that we would face a crisis like this (he says that he's seen intelligence reports on the matter). But our political classes chose to ignore those warnings.

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It's worse than that. It wasn't just that officials ignored the need for disaster preparation. They actively worked against it.

The $200m California stockpile of ventilators, masks, emergency beds? Dismantled in 2008 to pay for the financial crisis.

pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/gri…

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Think of how the Tea Party repeatedly nerfed CDC budgets earmarked for pandemic prep:

pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/soc…

(ex-GOP Rep Denny Rehberg: "pandemic was as unforseeable as 9/11.")

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Or how the DoJ allowed Covidien to buy up Newport, the company that CDC had tapped to build fleets of low-cost ventilators for stockpiles, which would competed with Covidien's $10K machines (Covidien killed the project).

pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/med…

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Officaldom didn't merely ignore the warnings of a looming pandemic: they marginalized, undercut, and destroyed any attempt to heed them.

eof/