European citizens will have to take greater precautions with their personal data if the United States tilts into a “hostile” relationship with Europe under Donald Trump, Chelsea Manning and her colleagues at Nym Technologies have said.
The former US soldier and WikiLeaks source was speaking at Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, where she appeared with Harry Halpin, chief executive of Nym.
The company, where Ms Manning serves as head of security and public relations, is developing a more powerful virtual private network (VPN), aimed at users who want to prevent their metadata from being processed by state actors and tech companies.
Mr Halpin said he began working on the project, initially with funding from the European Commission, in the wake of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelation that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been spying on former German chancellor Angela Merkel.
“People were like, ‘it’s not all that bad. It’s Obama,’” he said. “But now that we will have Trump in power, I think that these kinds of powers will be actively used by the United States.
“The United States will probably become more and more hostile towards Europe. People should be more concerned.”
Ms Manning said that Mr Trump’s win does not change the underlying technological capabilities of the US government and its ability to spy on citizens. She said people should protect their privacy online “regardless who is in charge”.
However, she said the Trump administration is likely to be a “uniquely, openly authoritarian” government in the context of US history.
“My sense of things is that vigilance is always necessary, but that, obviously, I think there’s increased risk to certain groups of individuals, who they openly target and they openly go after,” she said.
“So I think that that those groups of people should, obviously, you know, focus on upping their game when it comes to to privacy, when it comes to security.”
Speaking to The Irish Times in Lisbon earlier on Wednesday, William Fitzgerald, the Irish-born founder the Worker Agency in California, said there are concerns the Trump administration will leverage surveillance technology to assist with its plans to deport millions of immigrants.
He said his company, an advocacy and communications firm that works with trade unions and activist groups in the US, has assisted the #NoTechForICE campaign to highlight and put pressure on the tech companies working with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport immigrants.
“JD Vance has said there’s 12 million or 15 million they want to deport,” Mr Fitzgerald said. “They’re gonna start with the first one or two million.
“How do you do one or two million when you only have 20,000 agents? You use technology to basically round people up, because you can’t just kind of knock on doors.”
He said several major US-listed tech companies already have large contracts with Ice. “Tech is really in bed with some of the bad stuff,” he said. “Because that’s where the money and the power is.”
There will be an opportunity for tech companies to distinguish themselves by swimming against the current, Mr Fitzgerald. But the outlook is “worrisome”, he added.
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