Monitoring
the Public After Coronavirus
By Philip
Giraldi
April 24,
2020 "Information
Clearing House"
-
It is too early to say
when or even whether the siege initiated by the
coronavirus will end, but many Americans and
Europeans are speculating over what kind of
countries will emerge on the other side. National
Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden,
who exposed illegal spying on American citizens,
recently predicted that
there would be a “slide into a less liberal and less
free world,” that the surveillance systems being
created to monitor the spread of the disease would
become an “architecture of oppression.” To be sure
he has a point in that governments have historically
used crises to expand their powers. After the crisis
is over, the emergency power granted to manage the
activity of the people tends to be retained.
Much
depends on the lessons learned from what is being
done to contain the virus currently. If testing and
“keep your distance” does not succeed in checking
the spread of the disease and restoring a version of
what once was normal life, harsher and more
permanent measures might prevail. Alexander Dugin
foresees a
“military-medical” dictatorship developing.
The
rapid spread of the virus has also spawned some
unusual conspiracy theories. One claims that the
virus was actually
developed in the United States,
stolen from a lab by Chinese scientists and then
released in China before being allowed to propagate
worldwide as part of a communist conspiracy to
destroy the economy and political system in the U.S.
Another has cast Bill Gates as the villain,
claiming that he
had a hand in the appearance of the virus as part of
a nefarious plot to take over global health care.
The megalomaniacal Gates certainly is to blame for
using his wealth and status to promote a universal
“health” surveillance system for the post-coronavirus
world, but that he might have been behind the
appearance of the virus itself is certainly a bit of
a stretch. Still other theories connect the
appearance of coronavirus
to 5G telecommunications technology.
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The
reality of to what degree the national security
state that already exists tightens its grip
based on a continuing medical emergency pretty
much depends on how the virus itself reacts to
summer heat and the measures being taken to
contain it. Meanwhile, there have been some
decidedly extreme proposals about what the
United States and other nations might consider
doing to seize and maintain the high ground in
the battle against a still proliferating, highly
contagious and lethal disease.
The key to
stopping the spread of the virus, most authorities
would agree, is to test and monitor nearly all the
public, to force them if needs be to maintain
distance from individuals who are already infected.
There have been several proposals for how to do that
ranging from testing nearly everyone and issuing
health ID cards based on the results, with those
individuals considered contagious or especially
vulnerable being subject to quarantine or some form
of further isolation. One over-the-top plan would
make the health status of individuals recorded and
updated on a chip readable by government scanners
that would be permanently embedded in everyone’s
body.
The
plan that appears to have the best possibly of being
adopted is being promoted in a joint venture by
Apple and Google that appears to have White House
support.
Bloomberg reports that
“Apple Inc. and Google
unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to
their smartphone platforms that will alert users if
they have come into contact with a person with
Covid-19. People must opt in to the system, but it
has the potential to monitor about a third of the
world’s population.”
The
monitoring would be done by central computers and
once the principle is established that phones can be
manipulated there are no technical or practical
limits to what other tasks could be included. That
means that the observation made by protagonist
Winston Smith in George Orwell’s “1984” has finally
been realized. Smith was doing the mandatory half
hour of exercise daily in front of his television,
but when he began to slack off a voice from the tv
set admonished him. He then accepted that in theory
the government was actually capable of surveilling
everyone all the time and might in fact be doing so.
Well George and Winston, we have finally arrived at
1984.
Even if
coronavirus fades into obscurity, government might
plausibly exploit the fear created by it to push
hard that a surveillance mechanism be continued and
even expanded to prevent its recurrence or the
development of future pandemics. That is what the
“science” tells one is the right thing to do, at
least according to some scientists, but it ignores
individual liberty of association, guaranteed by the
First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the United
States Constitution. The U.S. and other governments
have long demonstrated that when it comes to
individual freedom versus the ability of the state
to impose a statist uniformity, the rules makers
will always win out. 9/11, for example, produced the
Patriot and Military Commission Acts that have
considerably abridged personal liberty in America,
even though the threat of terrorism was overstated
at the time and has considerably receded ever since.
Yet, unfathomably, the Patriot Act has survived and
keeps getting renewed by Congress.
Predictably perhaps, presidential son-in-law and
jack of all trades Jared Kushner, fresh from his
failure to bring peace to the Middle East, has been
placed in charge of
a White House task force
that will determine how and when to develop a
pandemic surveillance system which will also link
those ill to hospital centers for mandatory
screening and treatment. The argument being made is
that tracking nearly everyone would enable the
identification and quarantining of those who are
sick in nearly real time, controlling the spread of
future viruses that has up until now been
impossible. That the information would be collected
into a national data base appears to be part of the
program and it would, of course, include information
on the patient’s location and activities.
As social
media is already being manipulated and controlled by
the government working hand-in-hand with the
oligarchs who own and operate the sites, the ability
to further isolate members of the public so as to
preempt the development of any genuine resistance to
state policies might well be seen as highly
desirable. It would be a gift to a developing police
state to be able to know where everyone is at any
given time and be able to intuit what they might be
doing. Real troublemakers could be further
identified and singled out for special attention.
And
one should note that it all comes at a time of great
vulnerability to both revolution and repression,
when representative government is under siege in
many countries, unable to control the narrative as
it once did. Donald Trump in a tweet barrage last
Friday
called on his followers
to “liberate” Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia
because he disapproved of the policies on
coronavirus and gun control being advanced by their
respective governors, all Democrats. Calling for the
overthrow of state governments is illegal, a call to
insurrection, but Trump apparently believes that
having survived one impeachment attempt he is now
untouchable. If many Americans begin to take Trump’s
exhortations literally, it could be a sign that the
admittedly dystopian political equilibrium in the
U.S. is about to spin out of control.
Philip Giraldi is a former counter-terrorism
specialist and military intelligence officer of the
United States Central Intelligence Agency. -Mr
Giraldi Ph.D., Executive Director of the Council
for the National Interest. "Source"
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