Chris Hedges on Surveillance and Security

"I think maybe in a couple of decades when people look back, the thing they will remember from the Covid crisis is this is the moment when everything went digital and this was the moment when everything became monitored, that we agreed to be surveilled all the time, not just in authoritarian regimes, but even in democracies and maybe most importantly, this was the moment when surveillance started going under the skin, because really we haven’t seen anything yet. I think that the big process that’s happening right now, the world is hacking human beings, the ability to hack humans, to understand deeply what’s happening within you, what makes you go." Yuval Noah Harari

"The threat to freedom in Germany does not come with violence and noise, but rather quietly. It comes with all sorts of justifications, often well-intentioned ones. For example, when it comes to civil rights. In times when we are all concerned about the threat of terrorism, when we all naturally have to do everything we can for our citizens so that they can live happy lives unharmed. In times like these, parties and politicians come along and say, 'Now is the time to once again gradually reduce civil rights, which always bother us a little anyway. Freedom always dies inch by inch, as Karl Herrman Flach once put it. And freedom does not die because of politicians, it does not die because politicians want to restrict civil rights and liberties, but rather it becomes dangerous for freedom when citizens forget their own immune system, which must arm them against any threat to freedom. And for me, that is the decisive self-image of our party. That we say: For us, the citizen comes first and then the state. Other parties trust the state first and only then trust the citizens. Under the pretext of creating security, every civil right can be called into question. Under the pretext that security requires it, every tightening of the law can be decided. We fight this wherever we can, in the federal government, in parliament, but ladies and gentlemen, we also need the citizens. We also need self-confident citizens who do not accept the statement: “If you have nothing to hide, you should not complain.” No, we want a nation of self-confident citizens, not subjects of the state." Guido Westerwelle