1) I fully expect to see the US government make up most of the US economy by spending in my lifetime (I'd argue they are already there, but that involves an argument I don't feel like typing).

2) COVID shows us that the US government also sees their role as deploying an invasive level of social control for The Greater Good. COVID level threats aren't going to be that rare, we'll see another one in our lifetimes.

3) The US government pioneered using phones to support a global surveillance apparatus (probably military too, I expect more than one missile has been targeted on an iPhone).

So to repeat myself, although I'd still rather take the Americans than the Chinese, these are not categorically different things. They see their roles as the same and their methods are converging. Especially on the subject of surveillance and the risks it poses to ordinary people.

Ironically, we are debating Singapore in parent, which has extremely strong rule of law, but the laws are such that security is prioritized.

Naturally the ones that survived the question process.

Snowden and others in similar spots don't have any reason to worry about.

Not much different than being stop by the police in more dubious countries.

A scale it is.

You are more likely to be permanently incarcerated in America than China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy

As for privacy issue - they ended up stating that they would only use it for serious crimes e.g. they used it in a murder investigation. Seems like a reasonable compromise for better public safety.

(I recognize that not everyone will agree on that, but the level of safety and security in Singapore is mind blowing.)

Signal is the chief example of this kind of design. All they can provide a government is the creation date of someone’s account, and the last time they tried to check for messages. Neither message content nor metadata (who sent messages to whom) is accessible, assuming the app follows the design and the design doesn’t have defects.

Australia is also complicit in abusing COVID contact tracing datasets. At least in one well publicised case, a police officer accessed someone's location information even without requesting a court order first because… well, it made sense to the police officer. There are likely other instances of the contact tracing abuse, however they are likely to have been quietly swept under the rug.

It is true that the Government kept insisting that there is no way the data will be used for any other use and the minister who kept repeating that in parliament subsequently had to apologise that it was indeed used for a murder case. But, legislation was introduced to specifically limit the use cases of any of the data collected - https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/proposed-restrictions....

The contact data in the phone or hardware token is stored for 21 days in a rolling manner with only the latest 21 days available and should there be a need to send the data to the health authorities in the event that there is a need for actual contact tracing, the data extraction is a two step process: a) the owner of the device (phone/token) has to agree to the extraction b) there is a OTP-like code sent to the individual for it to be entered into the phone for the data to be extracted.

Now, should the person deem that he/she does not want to make the data available, the app in the phone can be deleted and be done with. At which point nothing much can be done for subsequent contact tracing.

The right to privacy of data etc is embodied in the Personal Data Protection Act of 2012 (https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/PDPA2012) and all of the data in the app/token is convered by that law.

Yes, trust in the Singapore Government dropped many notches when it was revealed that despite numerous assurances that data won't be used for anything else, that it was indeed used and for a specific criminal investigation, it left a bad impression that the SG govt has not recovered from yet. Suffice to say, as of last month, you can delete the phone app and just take the battery out of the hardware token and be done with it. There are, however, a small set of scenarios where the "SafeEntry checkin" via the tt/token is needed - for places where there are large number of people attending, like weddings, concerts, etc. What I've done is to "force stop" the app in the phone, deny bluetooth access to it and just keep the app still installed.