When the NHS, Britain’s socialized medicine system, presented its contact tracing app, six million Brits eagerly rushed to download it. After a few days, 10 million had downloaded and installed the app, and after a month, around 40% of smartphone users had put a monitoring device on their phones that would trace their social interactions and could tell them to isolate at any moment.
Many states in America have also pushed contact tracing but with less enthusiastic support. Only a few have downloaded the app and even among those that did, few are actually actively using it. We may have rejected contact tracing but that may be about to change now that the left has taken control of our government.
While Trump allowed states to define their own policy, the left’s plan is to nationalize the crisis and control the response. Key to their plans is the creation of a national server that would store information across state lines, and allow national authorities to monitor everyone’s movements even if they leave a state.
Virtually every state and area, such as D.C., with a contact tracing app, have moved their codes to Microsoft’s National Key Server. That includes heavily populated states such as California, New York, and Michigan.
Microsoft’s Key Server will make a national contact tracing app much easier to implement. Google, which is also involved in the national server using its own cloud system, has, along with Apple, rebranded “contact tracing” as “exposure notification,” like changing the name changes the purpose.
Meanwhile, Biden’s people have been coordinating with the Rockefeller Foundation on testing plans which will only work, according to the left-wing foundation, if they are “allow” access to the infection status of most Americans.
In the not so far future, there may be a mandatory national app based either on existing Apple or Google architecture embedded into virtually every smartphone, or worse, GPS tracking like Norway’s app linked to the National Key Service which would create the key element of a national pandemic social credit system, similar to China’s. Fortunately Norway dropped the idea after feedback from Amnesty International.
Oppressive regimes have always had an eye on what its citizens can say and do, but the sheer amount of information that social media and smartphones provide make it ever so easy to control the population.
In the spring of last year, while encouraging its citizens to return to work, China unveiled a massive experiment in using data to regulate citizens’ lives by requiring those that returned to work to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces. In addition to deciding whether someone posed a contagion risk, the app also shares information with the police, setting a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides.
The Alipay Health Code, as China’s official news media has called the system, was first introduced in the eastern city of Hangzhou, a project by the local government with the help of Ant Financial, a sister company of the e-commerce giant Alibaba. Users are assigned a color code – green, yellow or red – that indicates their health status. As the user grants the software access to personal data, a piece of the program labeled “ReportInfoAndLocationToPolice” sends the person’s location, city name and identifying color code to a server.
Across the country, workers in train stations and outside residential buildings record people’s names, national ID numbers, contact information and details about recent travel. In some cities, residents now have to register their phone numbers with an app to take public transportation.
By linking a similar control app to the right to demask and return to work, Biden and his ilk may very well roll out their own oppressive app.
Source: Greenfield: Americans Said No to Coronavirus Contact Tracing Spy Apps by Daniel Greenfield; In Coronavirus Fight, China Gives Citizens a Color Code, With Red Flags, By Paul Mozur, Raymond Zhong and Aaron Krolik, NY Times
