It sure is convenient that global governments are using coronavirus spying mechanisms for regular spying!

No one could have predicted this. If someone did predict it, they were a white supremacist fascist, so their opinion means nothing.

AP:

Majd Ramlawi was serving coffee in Jerusalem’s Old City when a chilling text message appeared on his phone.

“You have been spotted as having participated in acts of violence in the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” it read in Arabic. “We will hold you accountable.”

Ramlawi, then 19, was among hundreds of people who civil rights attorneys estimate got the text last year, at the height of one of the most turbulent recent periods in the Holy Land. Many, including Ramlawi, say they only lived or worked in the neighborhood, and had nothing to do with the unrest. What he didn’t know was that the feared internal security agency, the Shin Bet, was using mass surveillance technology mobilized for coronavirus contact tracing, against Israeli residents and citizens for purposes entirely unrelated to COVID-19.

A worshipper shows a threatening message signed ”Israeli intelligence,” that reads: “Hello! You have been spotted as having participated in acts of violence in Al-Aqsa Mosque, and we will hold you accountable.”

In the pandemic’s bewildering early days, millions worldwide believed government officials who said they needed confidential data for new tech tools that could help stop coronavirus’ spread. In return, governments got a firehose of individuals’ private health details, photographs that captured their facial measurements and their home addresses.

Now, from Beijing to Jerusalem to Hyderabad, India, and Perth, Australia, The Associated Press has found that authorities used these technologies and data to halt travel for activists and ordinary people, harass marginalized communities and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. In some cases, data was shared with spy agencies. The issue has taken on fresh urgency almost three years into the pandemic as China’s ultra-strict zero-COVID policies recently ignited the sharpest public rebuke of the country’s authoritarian leadership since the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

For more than a year, AP journalists interviewed sources and pored over thousands of documents to trace how technologies marketed to “flatten the curve” were put to other uses. Just as the balance between privacy and national security shifted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, COVID-19 has given officials justification to embed tracking tools in society that have lasted long after lockdowns.

“Any intervention that increases state power to monitor individuals has a long tail and is a ratcheting system,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Toronto-based internet watchdog Citizen Lab. “Once you get it, is very unlikely it will ever go away.”

…

In Jerusalem’s Old City, tourists sipping fresh pomegranate juice, worshippers and locals taking a shortcut home are all monitored by Israeli security forces holding automatic weapons. The labyrinth of cavernous pathways is also lined with CCTV cameras and what authorities have described as “advanced technologies.”

After clashes in May 2021 at the Al-Aqsa Mosque helped trigger an 11-day war with Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, Israel experienced some of the worst violence in years. Police lobbed stun grenades into the disputed compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount, home to Al-Aqsa, Islam’s third-holiest site, as Palestinian crowds holed up inside hurling stones and firebombs at them.

By that time, Israelis had become accustomed to police showing up outside their homes to say they weren’t observing quarantine and knew that Israel’s Shin Bet security agency was repurposing phone surveillance technology it had previously used to monitor militants inside Palestinian territories. The practice made headlines at the start of the pandemic when the Israeli government said it would be deployed for COVID-19 contact tracing.

A year later, the Shin Bet quietly began using the same technology to send threatening messages to Israel’s Arab citizens and residents whom the agency suspected of participating in violent clashes with police. Some of the recipients, however, simply lived or worked in the area, or were mere passers-by.

Ramlawi’s coffeeshop sits in the ornate Cotton Merchant’s Market outside the mosque compound, an area lined with police and security cameras that likely would have identified the barista had he participated in violence.

Although Ramlawi deleted the message and hasn’t received a similar one since, he said the thought of his phone being used as a monitoring tool still haunts him.

“It’s like the government is in your bag,” said Ramlawi, who worries that surveillance enabled to stop COVID-19 poses a lasting menace for east Jerusalem residents. “When you move, the government is with you with this phone.”

…

‘360 DEGREE SURVEILLANCE’

Technologies designed to combat COVID-19 were redirected by law enforcement and intelligence services in other democracies as governments expanded their digital arsenals amid the pandemic.

In India, facial recognition and artificial intelligence technology exploded after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party swept into power in 2014, becoming a tool for police to monitor mass gatherings. The country is seeking to build what will be among the world’s largest facial recognition networks.

As the pandemic took hold in early 2020, state and central governments tasked local police with enforcing mask mandates. Fines of up to $25, as much as 12 days’ pay for some laborers and unaffordable for the nearly 230 million people estimated to be living in poverty in India, were introduced in some places.

In the south-central city of Hyderabad, police started taking pictures of people flaunting the mask mandate or simply wearing masks haphazardly.

Police Commissioner C.V. Anand said the city has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on patrol vehicles, CCTV cameras, facial recognition and geo-tracking applications and several hundred facial recognition cameras, among other technologies powered by algorithms or machine learning. Inside Hyderabad’s Command and Control Center, officers showed an AP reporter how they run CCTV camera footage through facial recognition software that scans images against a database of offenders.

“When (companies) decide to invest in a city, they first look at the law-and-order situation,” Anand said, defending the use of such tools as absolutely necessary. “People here are aware of what the technologies can do, and there is wholesome support for it.”

By May 2020, the police chief of Telangana state tweeted about his department rolling out AI-based software using CCTV to zero-in on people not wearing masks. The tweet included photos of the software overlaying colored rectangles on the maskless faces of unsuspecting locals.

#AI based #FaceMaskViolationEnforcement is being rolled out by TS police.
Leveraging ComputerVision & #DeepLearningTechnique being implemented on surveillance CCTVs across the cities is #FirstOfItsKind in INDIA.
Shall be enabled shortly across the 3Commissionerates
*Hyd,Cyb&Rck. pic.twitter.com/hGwvq9cvsE

— DGP TELANGANA POLICE (@TelanganaDGP) May 8, 2020

More than a year later, police tweeted images of themselves using hand-held tablets to scan people’s faces using facial recognition software, according to a post from the official Twitter handle of the station house officer in the Amberpet neighborhood.

Police said the tablets, which can take ordinary photographs or link them to a facial recognition database of criminals, were a useful way for officers to catch and fine mask offenders.

“When they see someone not wearing a mask, they go up to them, take a photo on their tablet, take down their details like phone number and name,” said B Guru Naidu, an inspector in Hyderabad’s South Zone.

Officers decide who they deem suspicious, stoking fears among privacy advocates, some Muslims and members of Hyderabad’s lower-caste communities.

“If the patrolling officers suspect any person, they take their fingerprints or scan their face – the app on the tablet will then check these for any past criminal antecedents,” Naidu said.

S Q Masood, a social activist who has led government transparency campaigns in Hyderabad, sees more at stake. Masood and his father-in-law were seemingly stopped at random by police in Shahran market, a predominantly Muslim area, during a COVID-19 surge last year. Masood said officers told him to remove his mask so they could photograph him with a tablet.

“I told them I won’t remove my mask. They then asked me why not, and I told them I will not remove my mask.” He said they photographed him with it in place. Back home, Masood went from bewildered to anxious: Where and how was this photo to be used? Would it be added to the police’s facial recognition database?

Now he’s suing in the Telangana High Court to find out why his photo was taken and to limit the widespread use of facial recognition. His case could set the tone for India’s growing ambition to combine emerging technology with law enforcement in the world’s largest democracy, experts said.

India lacks a data protection law and even existing proposals won’t regulate surveillance technologies if they become law, said Apar Gupta, executive director of the New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation, which is helping to represent Masood.

Police responded to Masood’s lawsuit and denied using facial recognition in his case, saying that his photograph was not scanned against any database and that facial recognition is only used during the investigation of a crime or suspected crime, when it can be run against CCTV footage.

In two separate AP interviews, local police demonstrated both how the TSCOP app carried by police on the street can compare a person’s photograph to a facial recognition database of criminals, and how from the Command and Control Center police can use facial recognition analysis to compare stored mugshots of criminals to video gathered from CCTV cameras.

Masood’s lawyers are working on a response and awaiting a hearing date.

Privacy advocates in India believe that such stepped-up actions under the pandemic could enable what they call 360 degree surveillance, under which things like housing, welfare, health and other kinds of data are all linked together to create a profile.

“Surveillance today is being posed as a technological panacea to large social problems in India, which has brought us very close to China,” Gupta said. “There is no law. There are no safeguards. And this is general purpose deployment of mass surveillance.”

‘THE NEW NORMAL’

What use will ultimately be made of the data collected and tools developed during the height of the pandemic remains an open question. But recent uses in Australia and the United States may offer a glimpse.

During two years of strict border controls, Australia’s conservative former Prime Minister Scott Morrison took the extraordinary step of appointing himself minister of five departments, including the Department of Health. Authorities introduced both national and state-level apps to notify people when they had been in the vicinity of someone who tested positive for the virus.

But the apps were also used in other ways. Australia’s intelligence agencies were caught “incidentally” collecting data from the national COVIDSafe app. News of the breach surfaced in a November 2020 report by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, which said there was no evidence that the data was decrypted, accessed or used. The national app was canceled in August by a new administration as a waste of money: it had identified only two positive COVID-19 cases that wouldn’t have been found otherwise.

At the local level, people used apps to tap their phones against a site’s QR code, logging their individual ID so that if a COVID-19 outbreak occurred, they could be contacted. The data sometimes was used for other purposes. Australian law enforcement co-opted the state-level QR check-in data as a sort of electronic dragnet to investigate crimes.

After biker gang boss Nick Martin was shot and killed at a speedway in Perth, police accessed QR code check-in data from the health apps of 2,439 drag racing fans who attended the December 2020 race. It included names, phone numbers and arrival times.

Police accessed the information despite Western Australia Premier Mark McGowan’s promise on Facebook that the COVID-related data would only be accessible to contact-tracing personnel at the Department of Health. The murder was eventually solved using entirely traditional policing tactics, including footprint matching, cellphone tracking and ultimately a confession.

Western Australia police didn’t respond to requests for comment. Queensland and Victoria law enforcement also sought the public’s QR check-in data in connection with investigations. Police in both states did not address AP questions regarding why they sought the data, and lawmakers in Queensland and Victoria have since tightened the rules on police access to QR check-in information.

In the U.S., which relied on a hodge-podge of state and local quarantine orders to ensure compliance with COVID rules, the federal government took the opportunity to build out its surveillance toolkit, including two contracts in 2020 worth $24.9 million to the data mining and surveillance company Palantir Technologies Inc. to support the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ pandemic response. Documents obtained by the immigrant rights group Just Futures Law under the Freedom of Information Act and shared with AP showed that federal officials contemplated how to share data that went far beyond COVID-19.

The possibilities included integrating “identifiable patient data,” such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control does not use any of that individual-level information in the platform CDC now manages, said Kevin Griffis, a department spokesman. Griffis said he could not comment on discussions that occurred under the previous administration.

The protocols appeared to lack information safeguards or usage restrictions, said Paromita Shah, Just Futures Law’s executive director.

“What the pandemic did was blow up an industry of mass collection of biometric and biographical data,” Shah said. “So, few things were off the table.”

Last year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control purchased detailed cellphone location data revealing people’s daily whereabouts, nationwide. “Mobility insights” data from at least 20 million devices could be used to “project how much worse things would have been without the bans,” such as stay-at-home orders and business closures, according to a July 2021 contract obtained by the nonprofit group Tech Inquiry and shared with AP.

The contract shows data broker Cuebiq provided a “device ID,” which typically ties information to individual cell phones. The CDC also could use the information to examine the effect of closing borders, an emergency measure ordered by the Trump administration and continued by President Joe Biden, despite top scientists’ objections that there was no evidence the action would slow the coronavirus.

CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said the agency acquired aggregated, anonymous data with extensive privacy protections for public health research, but did not address questions about whether the agency was still using the data. Cuebiq did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For Scott-Railton, that sets a dangerous precedent.

“What COVID did was accelerate state use of these tools and that data and normalize it, so it fit a narrative about there being a public benefit,” he said. “Now the question is, are we going to be capable of having a reckoning around the use of this data, or is this the new normal?”

Of course it’s the “new normal.”

None of these attacks on freedom are ever rolled back.

We’re still living under the Patriot Act, despite the fact that it’s now effectively illegal to talk about Moslems being terrorists.

They could admit the coronavirus never even existed, and they would never roll back these new spying measures.

The good news is: this can only go so far. Eventually, this system is going to be so monstrous and unnatural that it will have to collapse.

Democracy is the only true freedom, but it does have its downsides.

Remember when we voted to have a total 1984 type control grid implemented so that no one will ever get the flu again?

WILL IT BE USED TO AUTOMATICALLY ISSUE £10,000 FINES IF YOU'RE IN THE PUB AT 10.01pm@UnityNewsNet

Coronavirus: How do you download the new contact-tracing app and what you do next? https://t.co/k1ZXGs6pnp

— Gariusmacus (@gariusmacus) September 24, 2020

I want to go back and change my vote, because this is no fun at all.

Today, people are:

1. Turned away from certain places for not having the government’s coronavirus contact tracing app
2. Treated like terrorists by the police for not wearing a face mask

The government is doing this in the name of keeping people safe from the virus. Putting 1 and 2 together, it looks like they’re going to do the same or worse to people who refuse to take the coronavirus vaccine once one is made available.

They appear to be making normal life impossible for people who refuse to accept their insane New Normal rules.

Daily Mail:

Pubs and restaurants are turning away customers who don’t have the Government’s ‘pathetic’ tracing app,’ – despite glaring errors that stopped thousands from logging their test results.

The beleaguered app’s latest fiasco came last night when it blocked up to 70,000 users from logging their test results.

The app relies on Bluetooth to determine if someone has been within two metres of an infectious person for 15 minutes, but other Bluetooth devices can interfere with the signal, generating a ‘false positive’.

To compound the problems, it has also transpired that the app doesn’t work on millions of older smartphones.

Despite problems, pubs and restaurants are starting to bar customers from entering, unless they’ve downloaded the beleaguered app, with QR codes on display for punters to use.

Government advice tells businesses they ‘must’ display the ‘official NHS QR poster’ and apply for a code to be connected to the app.

One punter wrote on Twitter today: ‘Last night I was denied a meal because I didn’t have a Gvt phone app!!!!

‘You may think I’m being over dramatic but you must now get the point. What else are we soon going to be denied access to unless we have a government phone app. Please, please, please people wake up.’

Another user, Chloe James, wrote: ‘I’m in a pub and apparently they’ve been told they can’t serve anyone unless they have the track and trace app.’

If the government can’t even get a phone app working properly, how is it capable of running a total control grid in which the every movement of every person is regulated and judged?

None of this is every going to stop. It is just going to keep getting more and more extreme, until you have some fat black bitch in your bathroom, giving you a ticket for dribbling on the seat.

This is a slippery slope, but it’s more like a death drop.

It’s like the slope on one of those water slides they banned when people died.

Andrew Anglin totally rewrote this entire article. 

People entering pubs, restaurants, and cafes will be asked to show their bar codes in order to fight the Absolute Doom virus.

This is being introduced as something optional, as a guideline for these businesses, but it is highly likely to end up being mandatory either explicitly because the government orders it, or because most businesses will refuse to serve people who don’t scan their coronavirus tracking app bar codes “to protect their customers.”

I’m not saying this is literally the Mark of the Beast.

I’m just saying this literally sounds an awful lot like the Mark of the Beast.

Daily Mail:

The long-awaited mobile tracing app will finally be launched today, three months after it was promised.

Pilot schemes will begin within days on the Isle of Wight – where the first app was tested and failed – alongside one other location and among volunteers.

The public will be urged to scan barcodes at pubs, cafes and restaurants to provide a ‘virtual diary’ of their recent movements.

If another customer in a venue at about the same time tests positive for the virus, the phone owner will be alerted and encouraged to isolate for 14 days and book a test.

It’s drastically different from how the original app was designed to work, which only used Bluetooth connections to create a log of other phones nearby.

That design was proven to be flawed after months of development because it failed to detect if people came into close contact with other phones.

Professor Christophe Fraser, a scientific adviser to the Department of Health from Oxford University, told the BBC: ‘The app should enable us to return to more normal daily activities with the reassurance that our contacts can be rapidly and anonymously notified if we get infected.’

The former system was hailed as a crucial to stamping out the coronavirus in the population.

It was devised by NHSX – the NHS’s technology arm – was abandoned in favour of one provided by Apple and Google.

Apple and Google’s system is already used in several countries across the world but the government was slow to adopt it.

The app will still use Bluetooth technology to tell users if they have come into close contact with someone who has the virus.

It is understood the app will only detect other phones running the app, therefore relies on masses of the population downloading the app for it to effectively map outbreaks.

NHSX thinks more than 60 per cent of the population needs to use the app for it to be effective.

But experts at the University of Oxford told the BBC 80 per cent of smartphone users (56 per cent of the population) would have to use it for optimum results.

This time round, the app has the addition of bar code scanning so that users can receive notifications via the app of outbreaks at venues.

The app will also tell people roughly how many times they have been in close contact with someone who has the app – even if they are not infected.

They can then modify their behaviour and observe better social distancing to further reduce their infection risk.

This whole “be afraid of viruses, practice social distancing” thing is about modifying people’s behavior.

It isn’t about public health, because coronavirus is about as dangerous as the flu and its death toll is being blatantly hoaxed.

After taking away all of your rights and forcing you to stay home for months, the government wouldn’t be especially concerned about asking for your “consent” in order to install this contact tracing app on your phone.

We’re way outside of the “rule of law” these days. The government and everyone else are just doing whatever the heck they want.

They won’t be asking for your consent once the vaccine is ready, either.

Daily Mail:

Apple and Android users have been left puzzled after a coronavirus tracking software quietly glided on to their mobile phones without consent.

Despite no prior warning, a function called COVID-19 Exposure Logging has been installed to pave the way for a fully-fledged test and trace app.

Users across the world have slammed the ‘sneaky’ and ‘Orwellian’ way in which the feature suddenly appeared.

Critics feared it heralded a slippery slope towards data security breaches – concerns which dogged the beleaguered NHS app, which has now been axed.

And people have also blamed the download for a recent spate of glitches as well as killing the phone’s battery life.

Critics fear this heralds a slippery slope? How about the fact that people’s rights were eliminated during the lockdown with the excuse of the virus? Did these critics think, “yeah, the government has taken away pretty much all of our rights but they wouldn’t dare violate our privacy”?

Both of these things are being done in the name of keeping people safe from a virus that is about as dangerous as the flu. They have created a bulletproof excuse to do whatever they wish, which immediately frames any kind of opposition as something that risks people’s lives.

The function, which is found on the health section of an iPhone’s privacy settings and the Google settings of an Android device, is automatically disabled in countries without contact-tracing apps, such as Britain.

The feature was built in to phones on May 20, however, because nobody was told, users are only now discovering the function.

It makes clear it will allow a future app to harness in-built Bluetooth technology and alert the owner if they have been in proximity with someone infected.

Many are up in arms over the lack of information and even went as far as to brand it a violation of trust.

In countries which have an app, such as Germany, users are claiming it is rapidly sapping their battery life – a complaint with the NHS app, which has now been scrapped.

When people bought their phones, they thought they were buying something they owned and controlled, not a surveillance device.

But nothing is what it seems anymore.

Everything is some kind of trick.

The “track everyone” Mark of the Beast agenda is still being pushed.

The idea that the coronavirus is somehow a threat has been widely debunked for a while now, but the WHO wants the government to track everyone before lifting the lockdown under the pretense of stopping the spread. It gets even insaner when you consider that most places that lifted the lockdown saw decreased infection rates.

All of this, including the current Black Lives Matter stuff, is part of a greater plan to radically change the structure of society in a very short period of time.

Daily Mail:

The UK should not lift lockdown rules until the test and trace system is ready to cope with huge numbers of people, a World Health Organization director has warned.

Dr Hans Kluge, the WHO’s chief for Europe, said the Government must only take sure-footed steps and not rush into decisions like scrapping the two-metre social distancing rule.

He said test and trace must be ‘robust’ and ready for ‘aggressive’ use if the number of new cases starts to soar again.

Dr Kluge said: ‘The key words here are to do it gradually. Do it carefully.’

His comments come after data last week showed that the NHS’s test and trace system was not able to get co-operation from a third of contacts in its first week.

Britain is gradually returning to something of a normal way of life as restrictions on spending time outdoors, travelling across the country, and meeting up in small groups have all been lifted.

‘Non-essential’ shops, including clothes stores, will reopen for the first time today, and face coverings over the nose and mouth are now mandatory on public transport.

And Government ministers are coming under pressure to loosen the rule demanding that people stay 2m (6’6″) from others who they don’t live with. Scientific evidence suggests the majority of infectious droplets do not travel that far, but the Government is sticking to the measure as a precaution.

The government is doing something against scientific evidence, and they say it is as a “precaution,” but a precaution based on what? On what they feel like?

It should be the other way around: the government should do things based on scientific evidence. None of the things they’ve done to respond to coronavirus have been based on scientific evidence.

The two meter social distancing rule was conjured out of nowhere.

Speaking to The Guardian, Dr Kluge said the timing of the end of lockdown is as important as the timing of its start.

He said: ‘We know that early lockdowns saved lives and bought some time for the health system to be ready.

‘But I would rather than instead of looking to the past, jump to the future and say that the question of lifting the lockdown is as important as going to the lockdown.

‘The key words here are to do it gradually. Do it carefully.’

That is a lie. Facts and data point in the opposite direction: the lockdown did more harm than good.

Dr Kluge told The Guardian: ‘Contact tracing is key especially as the UK starts to relax the social and physical distancing measures. There has to be a robust track and trace system in place of operation.

‘I would like to reply [to questions about the first results of the system] and say we need an effective tracking system in place, it is one of the measures that we recommend that are in place now.’

They really do need an effective tracking system in place, but not for your own good.

They need it in order to advance their malicious agenda.

This doesn’t really bother the government, because they actually want as many people as possible to be locked up, which is why they’ve been doing all of these insane lockdown and social distancing things these last few months.

But it should bother people.

Daily Mail:

People identified as having been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for coronavirus will not be told who has named them when they are asked to self-isolate for two weeks.

The NHS Test and Trace programme launched yesterday and requires people who develop symptoms to self-isolate for seven days and to order a test.

If they test positive for the disease they must then hand over phone numbers and email addresses for people they have interacted with in recent days.

Those people will then be contacted and told that they must go into quarantine for 14 days – but they will not find out who originally tested positive.

The need for secrecy has been partially blamed on a fear of reprisals from people angry at being told to stay at home and potentially losing out financially if they are unable to work.

But there are concerns that not revealing who has named someone could leave the system open to abuse in the form of pranks or people maliciously reporting someone they have not come into contact with.

Those people who are contacted by NHS Test and Trace will only be told that they are a ‘significant contact’ of someone who has tested positive.

People who test positive will be told to share the contact details of anyone they have spent more than 15 minutes with at a distance of less than two metres in the absence of protective screening.

Call handlers have been given scripts on how best to deal with people who take the news that they need to self-isolate badly.

They have been told to ‘stay calm’ and try saying things like ‘I can hear that you are angry’ and ‘I am trying my best to help you’.

NHS Test and Trace has launched without a new contact tracing app which will digitally record who people have been in close contact with.

That means the current system is entirely reliant on human testimony, prompting fears it could be abused or manipulated.

Michael Veale, lecturer in digital rights and regulation at University College London, told The Telegraph: ‘It is a real possibility and you have to have trust that people will not do that.

‘The concern is that if that happens to some people then everyone might start to doubt whether or not their instruction to isolate was valid or not.’

The programme’s definition of a close contact and the fact social distancing rules remain in place means that most people are likely to know who may have reported them even if they are not told by officials.

Concerns had been expressed that the data revealed during the process could be passed onto the police to crackdown on non-compliance with lockdown rules. 

For example, if someone has visited a friend’s house during lockdown but is then flagged as a contact for a positive test and they then have to reveal their rule breaking.

Yes. That is exactly what the government wants.

Coronavirus is about as dangerous as the flu. We’ve known this for some time now. There is no way for the government to argue that they don’t have this actual data confirming that coronavirus is not a threat for the vast majority of the population. The logical conclusion, after considering what they state as their goal and what they do in an alleged attempt to achieve it, is that they’re blatant liars.

The government is using coronavirus as an excuse to increase its power to levels only a handful of science fiction authors could have even imagined. Our rulers want total control over people, total knowledge about what people do, and total power to rule unchallenged.

And they’re achieving all of that by simply telling people that the flu is dangerous and that they have to comply in order to be safe.

Pictured: the coronavirus after landing on Earth, looking for people to infect.

But we don’t need the government to keep us safe. We have the right to decide what risks to take.

Unfortunately, people have forgotten that the government is supposed to serve them, not the other way around.

Some people think that the idea that the government wants to implant microchips in people is a conspiracy theory, even though the government is openly discussing the use of tracking bracelets that would serve exactly the same purpose as the microchips.

Governments and businesses are looking into forcing everyone to wear tracking devices, under the pretense of keeping people safe from a virus that we know is only as dangerous as the flu.

They’re first going to try to make the devices mandatory in the workplace, and if no one pushes back, they’re going to try to make them mandatory in order for people to be allowed to go outside their homes and have a social life, arguing that there’s no difference between the workplace, the streets, gyms, clubs, and anywhere else.

You’d best start believing in Mark of The Beast agendas.

The Intercept:

Surveillance firms around the world are licking their lips at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cash in on the coronavirus by repositioning one of their most invasive products: the tracking bracelet.

Body monitors are associated with criminality and guilt in the popular imagination, the accessories of Wall Street crooks under house arrest and menace-to-society parolees. Unlike smartphones, de facto tracking devices in their own right, strapped-on trackers are expressly designed to be attached to the body and exist solely to report the user’s whereabouts and interactions to one or more third parties; they don’t play podcasts or tell you how many steps you took that day to sweeten the surveillance.

But a climate of perpetual bio-anxiety has paved the way for broader acceptance of carceral technologies, with a wave of companies trying to sell tracking accessories to business owners eager to reopen under the aegis of responsible social distancing and to governments hoping to keep a closer eye on people under quarantine.

Take AiRISTA Flow, a Maryland-based outfit that helps corporations track their “assets,” breathing or not. In an April 21 press release, the company announced it would begin selling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi trackers to be worn on an employee’s wrist like a Fitbit — or around their neck like a cowbell. “When people come within six feet of each other for a period of time,” the company wrote in a press release, “the device makes an audible chirp and a record of the contact is made in the AiRISTA Flow software system.” But the tracking goes far beyond audible chirps: AiRISTA’s platform allows employers to continuously upload a record of close encounters to a corporate cloud, providing an up-to-date list of presumed social distancing violators that would double as a detailed record of workplace social interactions.

The company’s marketing language is explicit in talking up the nonviral benefits of tracking your workers’ every move: By helping companies “Locate people and things in real time” (the two are seemingly treated interchangeably), they can expect a “Reduction in unplanned downtime,” “Improved asset utilization rates, [and a] reduced need for spares.”

In a press release published just a day after AiRISTA Flow’s, Boston-based Redpoint Positioning Corporation, another player in the business of tracking workers and inanimate objects, announced that it was taking its own “cutting-edge technology … already used by leading companies worldwide in third-party logistics, auto manufacturing, mine operation” and repackaging it for social distancing. Like AiRISTA, Redpoint offers companies the ability to “tag” their equipment and employees using ultra-wideband radio signals, a wireless positioning technology only recently added to the most advanced iPhones. Redpoint boasted in the announcement of its ability to use these tags to “track the location of people and equipment with extremely high accuracy, even in complex industrial environments,” now with a coronavirus-specific augmentation: “If social distancing parameters, such as a 1- or 2-meter radius, are violated between workers, the tag alarm will alert them to the hazard.” The company will also collect a history of employee interactions: “If an infection does occur, historical data from the system will allow for highly accurate contact tracing, as records can show the individuals who were near the infected party.”

…

While the AiRISTA and Redpoint trackers merely evoke the aesthetics of a police state in the workplace, Israeli surveillance outfit SuperCom is literally repackaging as a Covid-19 “solution” technology previously used on incarcerated or criminally convicted people. The security company has customers in 20 countries, including the U.S., and claims decades of experience with what it calls in a press release “secured boundaries projects,” like border crossings and home confinement. It’s the house arrest expertise that the company is now marketing as PureCare, described on the SuperCom website as a “state-of-the-art solution for quarantine and isolation monitoring to aid government efforts in containing and limiting the reach of infectious diseases” and, incredibly, as “a non-intrusive patient friendly system that constantly tracks patient location within buildings, vehicles and outside.”

SuperCom Americas President Ordan Trabelsi declined to tell The Intercept where the company’s ankle bracelets are currently being used for quarantine enforcement, but it named Central America as the location of one pilot deployment, and referenced a second pilot program in some other, unspecified region, in an April 6 press release announcing a “Coronavirus (COVID-19) citizen quarantine and containment tracking technology.” The company announced separately, on April 27, that it had begun selling tracking devices for prisoners released from an unnamed “United States of America correctional facility due to COVID-19.”

In the same press release, SuperCom claimed to see a spike in interest from “government agencies looking to restrict the spread of COVID-19 among their general population” and envisioned “additional potential industry demand for electronic monitoring services coming from the incarcerated American population.”

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In an interview with The Intercept, Trabelsi said interest in SuperCom’s coronavirus product has been “mostly government” so far. Should any of these intrigued governments decide to use SuperCom bracelets to enforce quarantines, Trabelsi said it’s up to them to do so responsibly. “Everyone has their own rules,” he told me. “Some countries share that they want to put everyone who comes into the country into quarantine for 14 days, some want to put it onto people who are sick, or who have a confirmed case; it depends what [that government’s] regulations are. They define the rules exactly as they want. We just provide them with technology to track people.”

Coronavirus is just an excuse. Experts not employed by the government, and even a Nobel laureate, have disavowed the virus hysteria and lockdown lifestyle. All data points to the virus being about as dangerous as the flu.

The only things that government people are using to excuse their lunatic actions are made up graphs, projections, and estimations that proved to be wrong.

All of these social distancing measures, the house arrest lifestyle, and the promotion and encouragement of germophobia, are the tools that the rulers are using to push their total control agenda with impunity. Coronavirus has proven to be their best tool to date. They’ve set up a situation where anyone in opposition to what they claim is being done to keep people safe can be effectively labeled a dangerous individual who is putting people’s lives at risk.

They are going to keep pushing. It doesn’t matter if people believe in their evil agenda or not. They believe in it.

Experts advising the government say that current restrictions should remain in place until a smartphone application capable of tracking people and “tracing contact” is ready. But such an app isn’t likely to be ready by June 1, which means that people must continue to live like prisoners, without their rights, because of a virus that’s about as dangerous as the flu and mostly killing very old people.

Just like they’re now portraying this tracking app as a requirement for working and doing normal life stuff, they’ll eventually do the same with vaccinations.

They are determined to mark you and humiliate you.

Daily Mail:

Fears are mounting over the government’s new coronavirus contact tracing system today as No10 admitted a crucial coronavirus smartphone app will not be ready – and rebranded the operation to remove a reference to ‘tracking’ the outbreak.

Downing Street will only say that the software, to detect which users have been in contact with people who test positive for the disease, is due to be ready in the ‘coming weeks’.

But ministers insist the contact tracing regime can still be in place by the hard deadline set by Boris Johnson, with plans to bring back schools, shops and businesses hanging in the balance as the economy goes into meltdown.

The PM has hailed a 25,000-strong army of trackers recruited to identify the contacts of infected victims and prevent outbreaks. Similar schemes have controlled outbreaks in countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, allowing them to ease lockdown.

However, Niall Dickson, chief executive of the NHS Confederation – which represents organisations across the healthcare sector – warned the system was being put together ‘very late in the day’ and the draconian lockdown cannot be loosened without a ‘clear implementation plan’.

Although Mr Johnson’s determination to launch the tracking system by June 1 was ‘very much welcome’, he added: ‘I think it is being done very late in the day and we really do need to get on with this.’

The new app has been tested on the Isle of Wight but its rollout has been delayed for weeks because of security flaws and failure to work on all types of smartphone.

Meanwhile, the government has mysteriously abandoned the word ‘track’ from the name of the scheme, which had been ‘test, track and trace’ – or TTT. No10 sources suggested it was just because test and trace was a ‘simpler’ message.

It’s not that it is a simpler message, it is that it’s a less threatening message. Telling people that the app “traces contact” sounds much more acceptable than telling them the truth, which is that the app tracks their every move in order to know who they come into contact with.

In order to alert people if they came into contact with someone with coronavirus, the app needs to log all contacts in case someone ends up having the virus.

It’s actually all completely nonsensical in that it couldn’t ever possibly accomplish its stated goal and is obviously just a tool to get people acclimated to the idea of being constantly tracked by the state, with the state intervening in your life in response to information gleaned from the tracking whenever they feel like it. Think about what is implied by this.

Health officials began contact tracing for every positive diagnosis of coronavirus following the first confirmed cases in January. But widespread contact tracing was controversially abandoned in mid-March as the number of cases soared in the UK.

The app, which uses bluetooth to track what phone users have been in close proximity, has been lauded as a critical piece of the puzzle to implementing a South Korea-style system.

But Mr Brokenshire conceded that it will not be ready by June 1, telling Sky News it ‘will be introduced in the coming weeks in parallel’ with the system employing track and trace staff.

He added: ‘Obviously, the priority being to get these track and tracers trained, in place, that is what the Prime Minister is very confident about.

‘We’re confident the system will be there, able to track and trace around 10,000 people on 1 June.’

The Government’s scientific advisers insist the system must be in place before any more restrictions are lifted. If the scheme is up and running in time some schools and shops could reopen as early as June 1.

Rules limiting social contact could also be relaxed at that point, with a decision due at the end of next week.

The media and the government are openly talking as if it was common knowledge that the lockdown is meant to stay in place until they have their tracking apps, vaccinations, and whatever else is going to be added to this weird list.

But that was never the deal. They told us that the lockdown was meant to “flatten the curve” and keep hospitals from being overwhelmed in order to allow them to treat all cases. It was never about preventing people from ever catching the virus. Hospitals were not overwhelmed and doctors and nurses spend their days dancing because there are barely any patients to attend to.

The government should start explaining exactly when and why they went from “the lockdown is meant to flatten the curve” to “the lockdown is meant to keep people from ever catching the virus until we have other tools for preventing people from ever catching the virus.”

They are playing with people’s lives.