Big Brother is in the process of being created by tech billionaires, Trump administration and other politicians and world leaders are joining together to make billions at the expense of our civil liberties/democratic nations.
Big Brother is watching you. A phrase taken from George Orwell's 1984 meaning one's actions and intentions are being monitored by the government as a means of controlling and suppressing the will of the populace. ... Big Brother is watching you now, plans are to expand and continue to do so into the future.
1984 book review by Roger Ebert (book has been banned in some states and countries)
“What Orwell feared, when he wrote his novel in 1948, was that Hitlerism, Stalinism, centralism, and conformity would catch hold and turn the world into a totalitarian prison camp. It is hard, looking around the globe, to say that he was altogether wrong.”
Excerpts from a variety of articles
“Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and other billionaires are cashing in big from the COVID-19 pandemic, in a variety of different ways
“Life cannot and will not go back to normal until we can vaccinate the entire global population, Gates says, and that same sentiment is being echoed from government leaders and health authorities around the world. Never mind the fact that actual scientists and medical researchers are finding all sorts of simple, inexpensive and safe strategies to address this illness.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is being used to usher in highly controversial changes that are unmistakably totalitarian-building, including the private take-over of government through public-private partnerships.
“What you’re giving up by going along with the mainstream narrative that we need Big Tech to save us, read book by social psychologist and Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."
“It’s a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.
“Now, against a harrowing backdrop of mass death, it is being sold to us on the dubious promise that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe …
“At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants — with public schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies.”
“In a May 8, 2020, article in The Intercept, Naomi Klein reports on how New York is tasking Gates with reinventing the state’s “post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.”
“May 6, 2020, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the state is partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop “a smarter education system” focused on online learning. This, despite the fact that the Common Core curriculum — the Gates Foundation’s previous attempt at remaking American education — has been an abysmal failure.
“In her article, Klein reviews how Schmidt and Gates have been working and pushing toward the future that is now staring us square in the face, and how the surveillance apparatus that consumers have been railing against is now being rebranded as the answer to everyone’s health concerns.
“In a May 6, 2020, article, Vox’s Theodore Schleifer weighed in on Cuomo’s decision to hand over the proverbial keys to the state to tech billionaires whose philanthropy always ends up benefiting themselves the most:
“…Criticism of billionaire philanthropy: that this ‘help’ offers a few wealthy people some undemocratic influence over American public policy.”
In a May 14, 2020, Guardian article, Zephyr Teachout and Pat Garofalo comment:
“Even if Schmidt and Gates had good policies, Cuomo’s knighting of them is offensive to American self-government. Nobody voted for them and they are accountable to no one. Cuomo, often accused of being too close to big campaign donors, is tripling down: he is simply allowing billionaires to plan our future directly, taking out the middlemen.
“Cuomo anointed these tsars at the exact same time that he took vast new powers away from the state legislature,11 which has not been holding regular legislative hearings since 1 April …
“Turning away from locally-elected representatives, and towards billionaires with no accountability, represents a terrible erosion of democratic decision-making: Cuomo is quite literally replacing elected representatives with private, unaccountable monopolists. And too many other lawmakers across the U.S. are doing the same thing.”
“The COVID-19 pandemic is clearly being used to usher in highly controversial changes that are unmistakably totalitarian-building, including the private take-over of government through public-private partnerships.
“Contact tracing serves as a convenient bridge12 for this hostile takeover parading as “aid.” Not only is Big Tech offering up contact tracing apps, self-serving billionaires are also funding contact tracing groups that will provide “boots on the ground” services.
“OpenDemocracy and the tech start-up Foxglove are demanding the U.K. government share the details of its patient data deals with Big Tech. In a May 7, 2020, post, OpenDemocracy.net writes:
“Outside of the horrific death toll, perhaps the most far-reaching global consequence of the pandemic is the rapid expansion of surveillance in our daily lives. In the name of beating back the pandemic, governments around the world are giving tech giants extensive access to valuable stores of health data.
“Britain is no different. On 28 March, a blog17 quietly appeared on the website of the cherished National Health Service. It announced what might be the largest handover of NHS patient data to private corporations in history.
“U.S. tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — plus two controversial AI films called Faculty and Palantir — are apparently assisting the NHS in tracking hospital resources and in providing a ‘single source of truth’ about the epidemic, in order to stem its spread.”
“While the amount of British health data being shared with these companies has been described as “unprecedented,” the U.K. government has yet to release the details about the partnership.
“OpenDemocracy also questions how the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Faculty has managed to land seven different government contracts worth nearly £1 million in the last 18 months.
“We have laws in Britain which mean journalists and members of the public can access information about such deals, so that they can answer precisely these sorts of questions. But now the UK government is acting as though these laws no longer apply,” OpenDemocracy writes.
UK Government Ignores FOIA Request
“Foxglove submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the U.K. government on April 3, 2020. A reply is required within 20 working days, yet no response has been forthcoming. The British Information Commissioner’s Office, the independent regulator responsible for FOIA enforcement, has announced21 it has relaxed enforcement for the duration of the pandemic crisis.
“That seems suspiciously convenient, considering deals are being made in secret that shouldn’t be, and panic is being drummed up without much real-world data to support the narrative that we’re still in a high-risk situation.
“The public urgently needs to know not only how their personal information is being traded, and who has access to it. But also whether this pandemic means that our rights to ask questions, and to scrutinize the actions of our leaders, are fundamentally compromised. COVID-19 cannot be an excuse for governments and corporations to avoid accountability.”
“Anyone still living under the misguided spell that governments’ responses to this pandemic are simply temporary emergency measures need to rapidly reassess. As reported by Vox, tech billionaires like Gates and Schmidt are hard at work trying to convince governments and the public at large that only they can save us from another pandemic.
“Such is the focus of the Pandemic Action Network, responsible for the #MaskingForAFriend Twitter campaign, pushed by Hillary Clinton and other celebrities.
“The Pandemic Action Network aims to lead a pressure campaign that shapes the policy debate, a debate that will be at the fore of the next wave of pandemic response efforts.”
“A lead-in to global totalitarianism, predicated on protecting public health and preventing another pandemic, is the issuance of “digital health passports.”
“According to the British tech magazine Verdict, coronavirus digital health passports are now being supplied to 15 nations.
“The passport is “designed to make it easier for individuals to return to work after the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic” — as if we’ve never been able to return to normal life after any other epidemic or pandemic scare. In a May 11, 2020, article Verdict reports:
“These countries will include Italy, Portugal, France, Panama, India, the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Spain, South Africa, Mexico, United Arab Emirates and The Netherlands, with the goal of supplying 50 million digital health passports … The Covi-pass27 will work using a color system of green, amber, red to indicate whether the individual has tested positive or negative for Covid-19 and relevant health information.
“Firstly, the user downloads the app and enters key information such as name, address, age and verifies their identity using their fingerprint or a facial scan.
“They then take a Covid-19 test, administered by an authorized healthcare professional, and the results are scanned into the Covi-pass. They can then use the digital health passport to authenticate their health status to enable ‘a safe return to work, life, and safe travel.’”
“According to Covipass.com, the app will display “your COVID-19 test history and immunoresponse and other relevant health information.”
“According to a recent speech by Trump, his administration is mobilizing the military to distribute the vaccine once ready, which could be as early as the end of 2020.
“At the same time, the U.S. Senate has voted to renew federal surveillance powers that would otherwise have expired, and an ill-named bill, HR 6666, would put the government in charge of COVID-19 tracking and tracing, costing taxpayers a whopping $100 billion.
“As predicted in a Law360 article published April 26, 2020, virus surveillance is now colliding head-on with civil liberties:
“Imagine your phone buzzing with an alert: Someone who passed you at the grocery store has tested positive for COVID-19. Based on location data transmitted through a smart phone app, authorities believe the stranger exposed you to the coronavirus. You might be infected.
Their goal is for us to give up our freedoms, our privacy, our rights.
“The alert directs you to self-quarantine for 14 days to prevent further spread of the deadly disease. In the app, a map of color-coded dots displays the population of your home town. You notice the dot associated with you, previously green, has turned to yellow — now everyone else with the app knows you could be dangerous.
“Whether the scenario sounds Orwellian or absolutely necessary could depend on your answer to a rhetorical question Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently posed during a live Snapchat interview. ‘Do you give up a little liberty to get a little protection?’ he said.”
“The answer to that question should be a resounding “no.” The idea that government can keep you safe against a virus by giving up your civil liberties is a fantasy that must be outgrown. As noted by CNN Business:
“It took the attacks of September 11, 2001 to shove aside the previous decade's phobia of mass surveillance, and usher in an era where many of us imagined the state was probably skimming our emails, in exchange for keeping us safe from terror.
“Over the next 15 years, billions of people agreed to a tacit deal where Facebook or Google were permitted to learn a staggering amount about them in exchange for free access to messaging apps, news, and shared pictures … Eventually, that mutated into the heights exemplified by Cambridge Analytica — private companies hoovering up the online lives of tens of millions in order to try to sway elections.
“But the challenge presented by Covid-19 — and the urgent need to trace contacts and movements — is of another scale of intimacy … Technology is again claiming the mantle of the savior … embedding into our phones anonymous methods of knowing who we may have infected and when … If they become ubiquitous, where does this new scrutiny end? …
“Will we look back at 2020 as the moment privacy finally evaporated?”
“It’s time to fully recognize that surveillance has become the biggest for-profit industry on the planet, and your entire existence is now being targeted for profit.”