Covid 19 Health Data
The Trojan Horse of Government Surveillance
Governments worldwide are abusing Covid-19 surveillance powers. Once the state has an excuse to electronically track everywhere we have been and everyone we are near, abuses of such power can only be expected rather than avoided.
From social insurance numbers to face scanners at airport security, the government's ability to track or surveil us will inevitably expand beyond their allegedly benign stated intentions. Recently, the Associated Press (A.P.) reported in detail that tracking technologies designed to save lives from Covid-19 are being used for many other undisclosed and unauthorized state purposes.
The A.P. examined what they justifiably call the "firehouse of individuals' private health details, photographs that captured their facial measurements and their home addresses" that governments collected via allegedly life-saving Covid tracking methods, which we now know were almost uniformly ineffective. The wire service finds many instances where "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."
Where is all of this leading, you ask? What is the point? Why does my government want to spy on me and track my every move?
China specifically requires its citizens to install cell phone apps to move about freely in most cities. Drawing from telecommunications data and PCR test results, such apps produce individual QR codes ranging from green to yellow or red, depending upon one's health status. These records have been key to China's attempts to oppress its citizens in fain pursuit of "zero-Covid". The Chinese have used illegitimate app declaration of Covid infection to detain people who protest being illegitimately locked out of their online bank accounts. Sound familiar, Canada? This is the page of the CCP playbook that our Deputy Prime Minister, Krystia Freeland, was reading from when she directed Canadian banks to freeze the accounts of Canadians who dared to either participate in or even to financially support the Freedom Convoy protest staged in Ottawa earlier this year.
Surreptitious use of Covid tracking technology thus extends well beyond the tyrannical grip of the CCP. Israel's Shin Bet has been using Covid tracking tools which mark people as having been near spots of Arab unrest to send ominous text messages warning people that they "will be held accountable" for merely having their phone pinged in the vicinity of an Al-Aqsa mosque where violence was reported.
Covid has also been used as pretext to further abuse pre-Covid surveillance tech: India has been utilizing older facial recognition software more aggressively, ostensibly to crack down on violations of mask mandates. In Australia, intelligence agencies were caught "incidentally" collecting data from the national CovidSafe app. The national app was cancelled in August by a new administration as a waste of money, after it discovered only two positive Covid-19 cases that would not have otherwise been detected. Consider it Australia's version of the ArriveCan boondoggle. At the local level, Australians used apps to tap their own phones against a site's QR code, logging their individual ID so that if a Covid-19 outbreak occurred, they could be contacted. Of course, the data was sometimes used for other purposes, including by Australian police, who co-opted the state level QR check-in data as a sort of electronic dragnet to investigate Covid crimes.
There are also similar reports of Germany using Covid tracking data in general criminal investigations. Fears of disease that led to creation of contemporaneous, preservable digital records of where one has been and who one has been near will forever tempt governments to use them for whatever purpose the administrative state thinks convenient; a real-time searchable panopticon whose abuse was both predictable and accurately forecast.
Earlier this month, at a convention in Geneva for the Bill Gates puppet organization otherwise known as the World Health Organization (WHO), negotiators met to thrash out a "pandemic treaty" aimed at ensuring flaws that turned Covid-19 into a global crisis could never happen again. According to WHO Chief Tedros Adhanorn Ghebreyesus, "the lessons of the pandemic must not go unlearned", which is to say that the WHO wants a global agreement to regulate how sovereign nations prepare for and respond to future pandemic threats. The dense, 32 page early draft of the agreement includes, you guessed it-mandatory vaccine passports for international travel. It should surprise no one that Canada is one of the 194 Member states involved in the drafting process and will vote on the final treaty at the World Health Assembly in May of 2024. Heaven help us if our current Prime Minister is there to vote on that treaty 15 months hence.
Despite its involvement in negotiation of this WHO Pandemic Treaty, one is left to wonder how interested our Federal government really is in the health of Canadians. The annual growth rate of the Canada Health Transfer (CHT) has fallen by 50% in the 7 years since Justin Trudeau's Liberals took office and has actually been trending downward since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in 2020. Our Federal government is not even close to being an equal partner with the Provinces in the funding of health care for Canadians. The CHT currently covers a paltry 22 per cent of all costs, a decline of 1.5% points under Trudeau's watch.
Trudeau and his Health Minister, Mr. DuClos, have both repeatedly stated that they are not prepared to cut the Provinces a "blank cheque" for health care without guarantees that federal dollars are going to "high-priority areas." Never mind that health care is an exclusive s.92 Provincial power under our Constitution, and that these so called "federal dollars" have been vacuumed out of the local coffers of Canadians, all of whom live in Provinces.
In direct talks with the Provincial leaders, DuClos has pegged federal health care spending to unprecedented and likely unconstitutional performance indicators and development of -here it comes-"a world class health data system for Canada." In other words, the health minister behind the ArriveCan fiasco is now demanding that Provinces share their residents' highly sensitive, legally protected, private health information with the federal government that has oppressed, harassed, insulted, over-taxed, and locked them down for most of the past three years since we first heard about something called "The Covid-19 Pandemic."
The Trudeau government is holding the health care of Canadians for ransom to achieve an exchange for our personal health data. Meanwhile, all over this country, people are sick, they are being denied essential care, they are enduring lengthy waits for essential surgeries, and they are dying, sometimes because they have chosen to do so under this government's malevolent MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) program. The old, the young, the infirm, all of them Canadians. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister makes the rounds on leftist media outlets for his year-end interviews. The Freedom Convoy was just announced as the story of the year in Canada, and so Trudeau naturally could not avoid talking about matters of state and took the opportunity to vent about the public protest against his government's Covid-19 restrictions, including vaccine passports.
"What worried me so much about the convoy...the issue is there are people out there who are trying to spread the anti-vaccine message and push it beyond just 'my choice is to not do it'...it's more of a deliberate attempt to destabilize, to fundraise-to make money off of people's fears-to shift the narrative to undermine their trust in institutions to just sow chaos in our democracy and our society and our using very, very, powerful means to do that...in a way that actively and deliberately harms Canadians...I could not just shrug that off."
My interpretation of this typical Trudeau word salad is that he disregarded public safety or at least attempted to redefine it as protecting Canadians from ideas with which he disagrees, and that he had to use the Emergencies Act to restore order and avoid some kind of insurrection which existing only his narcissistically addled imagination.
More importantly, what we are witnessing, if we continue to countenance it, is the death of privacy, which is inextricably linked to the demise of many other concepts essential to human flourishing. The collection of our health data is a means to achievement of the ultimate goal which the Covid-19 pandemic helped governments like Trudeau's to advance: total surveillance and corresponding control of human populations.
