The Coronavirus Relief Bill Promotes Surveillance for Health + New Jersey City is Deploying a Chinese Firm’s Drones to Police the Social Distancing of Americans: The Transformation of America Into a Police State!

[INTRODUCTION BY ADINA KUTNICKI: As unprecedented national lock-downs continue throughout the western world, an increasing number of citizens are recognizing that all is not as it seems, that is, that the “marching orders” have less to do with public health concerns, but more to do with garnering control over the populace. Incontestably, since the onslaught of the CHINESE virus, more and more draconian measures are being imposed, even in the heretofore land of the free and the home of the brave. Naturally, Israel is in lock-step. But let’s leave that for another discussion.

Of course, “social distancing” makes sense during a pandemic which, sort of, erupted like a bolt out of the blue. However, as mentioned, a preponderance of the restrictive measures have nothing to do with public health issues. To the contrary. They are “testing grounds” for how far they can go to maintain governmental control, the tipping point, if you will, without causing massive backlash. 

Now, if proofs in the pudding are required to demonstrate what’s what within the vast expanse of the U.S., so be it. 

As such, the most glaring examples are coming out of “Gretch” Whitmer’s socialist-driven Michigan State House. For example, arbitrarily, as if by fiat, surgeries for joint/hip replacement, etc. are deemed elective and off the table, nevertheless, abortions are good to go! Did you ever?? And whereas the sale of gardening seeds and other household/personal supplies are taboo, alas, lotto, liquor, weed/smoke shops, and other numbing agents are open for consumption! You get the Orwellian picture. In fact, more and more Demster-controlled states are following goose-step-like and becoming equally oppressive.

Alas, if any of their draconian edicts are really enacted for public health concerns, this site is all ears! But never mind. Rational folks intuit that the aforementioned beats a straight path back to today’s thesis — more control via medical records, etc., etc. is evidence of Lord Acton’s very wise adage:

“POWER CORRUPTS, AND ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY” 

Inexorably, the fork in the road, so to speak, is upon us. This is so because clear-eyed thinkers are realizing the prescience of Patrick Henry’s pronouncement at the Second Virginia Convention in 1775: “Give me liberty, or give me death!“] 

WIRED.com By Sidney Fussell March 31, 2020

PRESIDENT TRUMP ON Friday signed the largest relief bill in US history, a $2 trillion lifeline to businesses, hospitals, and workers hit hard by the explosive spread of the coronavirus. More than 160,000 Americans have tested positive for the virus, according to the John Hopkins Coronaviurus resource center, more than any other country. But some civil liberties advocates and government watchdogs worry that the measure could enable new types of surveillance of Americans, without adequate privacy safeguards. They fear that emergency provisions could become routine over time.

In addition to payments to workers, the bill provides $150 billion for public health, including $4.3 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The money is allocated for increased testing, desperately needed protective equipment for doctors and nurses, and new preventive measures. This includes $500 million for a “public health surveillance and data collection system” meant to track the spread of the virus. Other countries use similar data to detect disease hot spots, decide where to allocate resources, and enforce quarantines or lockdowns.

“We’ve already seen a bunch of countries embrace the idea of monitoring, be it [through] cell phones [or] social media,” says Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, DC, nonprofit. The stimulus bill includes provisions that restrict some government spending, but when it comes to surveillance, “there’s really not that many.”

Other countries are leaning on tech companies to provide monitoring tools to slow the virus’ spread and enforce lockdowns. In the UK, the National Health Service is partnering with tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, and Palantir to use emergency call data to predict where ventilators may be needed. In China and Spain, location data is used to flag gathering spots where drones tell people to spread out. These are preventive health measures, but have potential for state overreach.

The concerns reflect the tension between tracking people’s movements to reduce the disease’s spread and expectations of personal privacy. “I don’t predict [relief money] will be used to start building up blue light cameras or buying drones, but I could definitely see it being used to build out infrastructure for things like location tracking, cell phone tracking tools, [or] social media monitoring tools,” Laperruque says.

The White House has reportedly approached several technology companies about harnessing user data as a means of tracking the spread of the virus. Google and Facebook dismissed these reports, but grant money from the relief bill could still go to companies with the same aims: tracking people as a proxy for the virus. Legal scholars say the final version focuses on providing money to strengthen local and state responses, with a heightened focus on data collection and surveillance.

Just hours after the Senate approved the bill on Wednesday, Trump sent new coronavirus guidelines to every US governor. The new guidelines ask governors to increase testing and begin rating their respective counties according to risk of infection: low, medium, or high. The relief bill is part of a new phase of response to the pandemic: increasing testing, using that data to track the virus’s spread, rating areas on risk, and finally allocating resources and increasing measures like lockdowns, if necessary.

Information and data collection are vital parts of the plan. The CDC will issue grants to carry out a number of tasks, many of which could be handled by technology companies: real-time updates on the spread of the virus, community messaging via social media, identifying and counteracting misinformation, assessing travelers’ risk of exposure, and predictive modeling of the future spread of the virus.

“This new information will drive the next phase in our war against this invisible enemy,” Trump wrote to the governors.

Technology is indispensable in a pandemic, but rushing to use untested algorithms can be dangerous. Sean McDonald is a digital-governance researcher at Duke University who studied the use of location data in fighting the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Liberia. State health organizations shared information from cell phones, including location data, with international aid groups without user consent, rules governing its use, or a plan to ensure anonymized data stayed anonymous. (Research has long suggested anonymized location data can still identify people). McDonald warns that similar problems could crop up in the US.

“We have a lot of people with good intentions,” McDonald says, referring to tech companies volunteering their services. But he says the projects are experimental, and their outcomes could be “really dangerous or unjustified.”

One problem, McDonald says, is that scientists don’t have good data on how coronavirus spreads, either via surfaces or from person to person. The specifics of transmission—such as how long the virus lasts on metal as opposed to concrete, or if it can be transmitted through contact with bodily fluids—affect data modeling or projections. Because that information hasn’t been nailed down, algorithms predicting where and how the virus will travel should, for now, be viewed cautiously.

The relief bill provides some oversight of government spending, through a Pandemic Response Accountability Committee that will report quarterly. The 2009 stimulus bill in response to the financial crisis similarly created an internal board that spent years auditing funds. Investigations led by that task force resulted in over 1,600 civil and criminal judgments on fraud or similar abuse charges. As Liz Hempowicz, the director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight, says, these regular updates can include checks on privacy overreach as well. But oversight may not stop overreach in the meantime.

“We have to be clued in to the fact that people will try to take advantage of this,” Hempowicz says. “And we just have to make sure that there are enough oversight mechanisms in place and conditions in place on [relief] money that we can try to head off as much of that as possible.”

Onto….DAILYPOLITICALNEWSWIRE.com By Mike Vance April 19, 2020

Elizabeth, New Jersey is using a Chinese firm’s drones to make sure citizens are employing proper social distancing. Reports in the past have suggested that these drones are feeding data to China.

Elizabeth Mayor J. Christian Bollwage is deploying the drones to give warnings to Elizabeth citizens who are walking too close to one another while outdoors. The drone blares sirens and says “Stop gathering, disperse and go home!”

Bollwage is very dismissive of the critics of his approach.

“If these drones save one life, it is clearly worth the activity and the information that the drones are sending,” they Mayor said during an interview with MSNBC on Friday.

More on the story from Dally Caller:

New Jersey is considered a coronavirus hotspot — more than 3,000 in the state have died from the virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, before skipping across the globe and landing in the United States, where it has killed more than 30,000 people. The drones might not be benign.

Past reports suggest DJI poses a substantial security threat to U.S. infrastructure.

A 2017 memo from the Los Angeles office of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau said officials had “moderate confidence” that DJI’s commercial drones are giving critical U.S. “infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government.”

The memo cited first- and second-hand anonymous sources inside the drone industry. ICE has not responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment about the memo, which was initially reported in November 2017 by The New York Times.

The memo also stated that officials had “high confidence the company is selectively targeting government and privately owned entities within these sectors to expand its ability to collect and exploit sensitive U.S. data.” The U.S. Army banned the use of all DJI drones in 2017, citing “cyber vulnerabilities.”

DJI is dismissing ICE’s claims and said the company gives full control over the drones to the users.

Many government officials are playing a dangerous game with the American people. You can’t completely disregard the Constitution due to some people suffering from a virus……………………………………………………………..

Now, if today’s analyses seem over the top, just know that none of the above is a surprise to the likes of David Kupelian (and others, whose eyes have been wide open for years), an award-winning journalist and best-selling author, namely, The Snapping Of The American Mind, and The Marketing Of Evil. He explains very clearly:

       “Even before the coronavirus pandemic descended upon us, we were in a bizarre, almost surreal state, with the Democratic Party having moved so far left as to become almost indistinguishable from the Communist Party USA. (If that statement sounds like hyperbole, stop reading right now and go to the Communist Party USA’s website, CPUSA.org, and spend some time reading and digesting it. Try to discern any major differences between the Communist Party’s concerns, sensibilities and solutions – on issues from gay rights, to unfettered immigration, to renewable energy, to wealth redistribution, etc.

America also faces the very real possibility of being transformed into a totalitarian, dystopian “Brave New World”-type society – if we allow the Democratic Party’s lunatic leadership, along with the progressive Big Tech companies and other left-wing thought-leaders, to chart our course.”