BREAKDOWN: COVID-19 and the Mass Surveillance Machine, Feat. Maya Zehavi
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As the COVID-19 crisis rages, it takes on new economic and political dimensions. The frames for many of the most important questions for the next decade are being set now, in this moment.
On this episode of The Breakdown, NLW is joined by Maya Zehavi, a long-time blockchain consultant known for her insightful domain-spanning takes.
They discuss:
- How the COVID-19 health crisis overlapped with a political crisis in Zehavi’s home country of Israel
- Why governments use times of crisis to take extraordinary powers
- How contact tracing apps have become a battleground for mass surveillance
- Why the shift to localism from globalism creates new challenges
- How the problems distributing stimulus are shaping the conversation around central bank digital currencies
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW. |
| 0:15.0 | The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:20.0 | Welcome back to the breakdown. |
| 0:22.4 | It is Tuesday, April 28th, and today we're exploring a theme which has been |
| 0:26.7 | recurrent on this show, which is the idea that this coronavirus crisis intersects |
| 0:32.4 | not just health, but economic and even political issues. |
| 0:37.4 | My guest today is Maya Zahavi. Maya has been in the |
| 0:40.7 | blockchain space since 2014. She is an itinerant consultant who's worked on a number of different |
| 0:46.8 | projects. But I got to know Maya when I started noticing these brilliant tweets just consistently |
| 0:52.9 | coming out of this person's account. And so I've |
| 0:56.0 | followed her for the last couple years. I've watched her observations across a huge number of |
| 1:00.1 | issues and really think that she has a unique synthesizer-type perspective. I wanted to bring on |
| 1:06.3 | Maya generally because I think she's incredibly smart and has a great perspective, but specifically |
| 1:10.5 | because Israel, her home country, has served as something of an interesting case study of |
| 1:17.1 | the overlapping of political crisis with this exogenous health crisis, with serious questions |
| 1:24.7 | of surveillance. The Israeli apparatus took extraordinary power to surveil |
| 1:30.7 | citizens that was just unwound by the Supreme Court there, and I think it makes for a very |
| 1:36.5 | interesting case study and microcosm of the debate going on around contact tracing the |
| 1:42.3 | world over. We talk about that, but we also get into |
| 1:45.6 | larger geopolitical issues, how the COVID crisis is or isn't reorienting countries like Israel |
| 1:52.4 | vis-a-vis the relationship with China or their relationship with Europe or with the US. We talk |
| 1:57.4 | about the question of domestic supply chains and how people might shift to localism |
... |
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