Surveillance and COVID-19: smartphones, dogs and microchips

Posted by by United World International May 10, 2020 10 Min Read

The Coronavirus pandemic has become a convenient way for governments in many countries to strengthen surveillance of their own citizens. About 30 countries around the world have strengthened such measures.

As governments discuss the need to remove quarantine restrictions, the issue of controlling the number of people falling ill is becoming more and more acute. It’s impossible to continue lockdown indefinitely, but it’s also impossible to go back to pre-pandemic conditions – a surge of coronavirus cases threatens to overwhelm national health systems. The only solution is to develop patient tracking systems, collect data on the condition of people to separate the sick from the healthy and to ensure that quarantine is maintained. Doing so requires particularly sophisticated human control measures.

The spy in the smartphone

The BBC has received some preliminary documents from the British government – it seems they plan to open the country in the near future. At the same time, sanitary standards will be tightened. Health Minister Matt Hancock announced that the British government plans to begin a program to track contacts infected with coronavirus called “Test, track and trace”.

Under this program, the British will be tracked through a special application. The geolocation data of the infected will be used to identify the people they’ve been in contact with. Testing and applications have already begun on the Isle of Wight.

Similar applications are being actively used in other countries. In Singapore and Indonesia, for example, Bluetooth-based applications are used to track personal movements and contacts. Similar projects are being considered for implementation in Germany.

An effective strategy to combat coronavirus in South Korea and Taiwan is based on the principle of collecting and processing as much data as possible on the citizens of the country, which allowed for large-scale testing, quarantine and hospitalization of all potentially infected. Similar measures, in combination with lockdown measures, were used in mainland China.

In general, the most common tracking tools now are smartphone applications, or the ability for governments to use data provided by mobile operators. The smartphone has become an integral part of the lifestyle of a modern metropolitan city, from tropical Africa to Alaska.

In the United States, surveillance measures and tools for citizens during the coronavirus period are still being developed by the state and large companies. For example, the Kansas Department of Health monitors movement in the state with a platform called Unacast. In other countries – for example, in Israel – the authorities have obliged mobile operators to provide all necessary information about citizens to the police and intelligence services.

Medical-police drones

In New Jersey and Connecticut, police are using special drones that measure temperatures. Moreover, the aircraft manufacturer Draganfly assures that drones “can detect sneezing. They can detect your heart rate, your respiratory rate, and they can also detect social distancing”.

 

Less sophisticated drones are being used in the UK to “spot people suspected of violating the UK lockdown” the Independent informs.

The use of such drones, however, has been criticized by public organisations fearing that it will be legalised as a means of controlling people beyond the pandemic.

The smell of disease

French cynologists are testing a new way to detect people infected with COVID-19, training dogs to recognize the smell of their patients.

The training started on April 30. Seven service dogs (five from the rescue brigade of the Seine and Marne Departments and two from the Corsican gendarmerie) of different breeds, mostly Belgian sheepdogs, participated in the training.

Compresses soaked in coronavirus are used as a sample, and it is important that they are applied before treatment and that no medication is mixed with the smell of the disease.  Specialists argue that this method does not pose a threat to dogs because the presence of coronavirus in sweat has not yet been confirmed.

And while the initiators of the experiment are not yet confident in its success, the first results, they say, look encouraging.

The very idea that coronavirus patients smell different than healthy people or people with other infections seems bizarre on the surface… at the same time, the image of a shepherd dog trying to find social outcasts (in this case a COVID-19 patients or quarantine breakers) is painfully similar to the image of a dog trained to find Jews who escaped from a Nazi concentration camp.

Microchip implants

Despite the various “fact-checkers” and mainstream media outlets that claim that all reports of Bill Gates’ plans to use microchips embedded in human bodies are conspiracy theories, the facts point to the opposite. This includes Gates’ statement about the need to create a National Tracking System for coronavirus in the US and a project by American scientists from MIT (funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) to create special markers embedded in the human body that would demonstrate whether a person is vaccinated or not.

Bill Gates: coronavirus, death and the deep state

It is curious that since 2012, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been funding a project to install microchips in the bodies of women in the Third World – “to develop a personal system that enables women to regulate their fertility”.

As Euroweekly News reports, in Sweden, where about 4,000 people are voluntary microchipped, “using the implants makes cash and credit cards redundant and massively reduces the risk of transmitted infections by the coronavirus”.

So far, governments have not openly announced plans to chip the population, especially given the wave of criticism around Gates’ projects, but given the ongoing work in this area, this idea cannot be excluded.

Immunity passports

The world media are also discussing the possibility of obtaining “immunity passports”, which will confirm the presence of human immunity to certain diseases. Absence of necessary vaccinations in this case may mean the presence of “deficient” immunity and lead to a loss of rights – for example, a ban on movement outside a city or other settlement or a ban on entry into certain countries.

Onfido, a San Francisco-based identity verification company is now working on such a project “with at least one European government to develop phone-based “immunity passports” – the Axios informs.

The World Health Organization proposes the introduction of such “immunity passports” on the world scale, declaring that they “would enable individuals to travel or to return to work assuming that they are protected against re-infection”.

However, this initiative raises many questions. For example, about the privacy of health information. It is not clear who will have access to it and how to use it. In addition, if a person does not fall ill with coronavirus he will not have immunity to it, in which case there will be an absurd situation where a person who has not been in contact with the disease will have their rights infringed upon, while those who are actually sick will not. The introduction of immunity passports may look like a method of forcing a vaccination, including an unverified vaccine, which can be dangerous for human health. The only ones who would benefit from it are pharmaceutical companies.

Given information about typical reproductive system complications in African following the introduction of Western developed vaccines, it is difficult to dismiss the idea that such coercion to vaccine may be in the interest of Western elites, who have long talked about the need to reduce the world’s population.

Conclusion: the era of mass control

The term “invisible enemy”, which President Trump has used to refer to the coronavirus in the United States, perfectly demonstrates the attitude of Western elites. The virus has become a successful substitute for “Islamic terrorism,” the enemy with whom the US conducted the war on terror. The “War on the virus” demands a Patriotic Act on a global scale. It is to be expected that under the pretext of fighting for the health of the population, the introduction of mechanisms to control the population will continue.

The liberal idea of a citizen as a free individual is all but dead. Now, in the confrontation of geopolitical blocs, much will depend on who, how and with what efficiency the masses will be controlled.

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