BREAKDOWN: We Don’t Need Big Brother to Beat This Virus
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2020
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One of the key aspects of most plans to reopen the economy is digital contact tracing. This would be an apparatus whereby mobile phones kept track of the other mobile phones they had been physically proximate to, so that if someone were diagnosed with COVID-19, the at-risk people they had been in contact with could be notified. Apple and Google have proposed one plan while a European consortium is working on another.
At the center of the issue is whether contact tracing can be done in a way that doesn’t violate privacy and doesn’t open a Pandora’s box of new issues around the data governments have on their citizens.
Today’s episode of The Breakdown explores the crypto community’s response to contact tracing and why we don’t need big brother to beat the virus.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 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. |
| 0:22.8 | It is Thursday, April 23rd, and today we're going to be talking about a subject which is |
| 0:28.4 | high on many people's minds, not just in the Bitcoin and crypto world, but beyond, but |
| 0:33.9 | certainly has particular interest for this group of folks. |
| 0:39.7 | We're going to be talking about privacy in the context of COVID-19. |
| 0:45.4 | On Monday, the Times in the UK published an op-ed called We Need Big Brother to Beat |
| 0:52.0 | this virus. |
| 0:53.2 | The subheader is, don't let the civil liberties lobby blind us to |
| 0:56.6 | the fact that greater state surveillance, including ID cards, is required. So this is, of course, |
| 1:03.3 | clickbait. The title is designed to get engagement, and engagement it got, including for me. |
| 1:10.1 | I wrote, we really don't, though, |
| 1:11.8 | with a screenshot of the piece, and it seems from the response that I got to that tweet that this |
| 1:16.9 | is something that a lot of people are thinking about. One of the great fears in really any time |
| 1:22.2 | of extreme crisis is that centralized actors, governments, use that moment to consolidate more power. |
| 1:29.9 | Some of this is necessary. |
| 1:32.1 | There are extraordinary powers needed for extraordinary times. |
| 1:35.2 | The problem is that states tend not to relinquish that power. |
| 1:39.0 | I mean, no one tends to relinquish power easily once it has been claimed. |
| 1:43.3 | In America, we've obviously seen this with |
| 1:45.2 | the Patriot Act and how that kind of just became de rigore normal policy rather than something |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CoinDesk, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of CoinDesk and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.