Tag Archives: surveillance

Think Your $$$ Is Safe in Big Banks? Think Again

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Retail health company has Chase accounts suddenly terminated, owner critical of COVID vaccines, FDA

By Brendon Leslie

Published Jul. 25, 2023, 4:55 p.m. ET | Updated Jul. 26, 2023

Chase bank cancellation letter to Natural Health Partners.
Chase bank cancellation letter to Natural Health Partners.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to include a response from Chase.

Lydia Nusbaum co-authored this report.

CAPE CORAL, Fla. (FLV) – Employees of a Florida-based retail health company said JP Morgan Chase Bank suddenly terminated their personal and company bank accounts without an explanation.

One of the employees believes the account shutdowns were politically motivated and due to their employer’s controversial stance on COVID-19.

Another Mercola Market employee said the sudden decision to close her account is creating additional hurdles to help send money to her husband who is bedridden with dementia in the Philippines.

The owner of Mercola Market, Dr. Joseph Mercola, has criticized of COVID-19 vaccines and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Responding to the report, Chase told Florida’s Voice Wednesday that the accounts weren’t closed for political “affiliations.”

“For privacy reasons, we can’t discuss customer relationships, but we don’t close accounts because of political affiliations, and we didn’t do so in this case,” they said.

Mercola Market sells specialty beverages, food, supplements and other health items. A store is located in Cape Coral.

On July 13, Mercola Market, along with the CEO, CFO and some of their family members, all received similar letters from Chase Bank saying “[they] have decided to close” their individual personal and business accounts.

The letters obtained by Florida’s Voice did not provide a reason why the accounts were suddenly closed. Florida’s Voice reached out to Chase Bank for a response.

A voicemail from a Chase representative to CEO Steven Rye said the reason for closing his personal and wife’s accounts can’t be disclosed “for legal reasons.”

However, Rye believes his the accounts were suddenly shut down because of Dr. Joseph Mercola’s opinions on COVID-19.

“I believe they cancelled all of the accounts because of Dr. Mercola’s (our employer) opinions,” Rye told Florida’s Voice. “He has carried a contradictory view throughout the COVID narrative and co-authored the best selling book The Truth About COVID-19 which exposed the likelihood that this virus was engineered in a laboratory funded by the NIH.”

Rye said he was told his children would not be able to carry accounts with Chase Bank in the future.

“It’s just hard to believe that your family, your wife, your kids can’t have a bank account because of the opinions of your employer and they’ve never done anything wrong,” Rye said. “We all have completely clear records.”

A voicemail from a Chase Bank representative urged Rye to submit paperwork for their accounts to be reconsidered.

“We are going to try because you’re a good client of our institution,” the Chase representative said in a voicemail.

In an email from Chase to Rye Monday, a representative said he is “still trying to figure out what is going on.”

Amalia Legaspi, the CFO of Mercola Market, said both her personal and her son’s personal accounts were canceled. Her son is using the accounts to pay for college expenses.

“I received the letter during weekend and I was surprised that we received the same letters for business accounts with exact wordings,” Legaspi said.

Legaspi’s joint checking account with her husband, who has dementia and is bedridden in the Philippines, was also closed. She uses the account to send money for his medical needs and said she is not allowed to open another bank account in his name.

“I have to provide all the legal documentations including notarized physicians affidavit from the Philippines to prove that my husband is incapable of handling his finances and request the Federal to directly deposit the pension to my own personal account,” Legaspi said.

With regards to the company’s accounts, she said Chase will not give them a reason for the closure to protect the privacy of their clients.

Dr. Mercola said he published articles about the benefits of vitamin D, zinc and quercetin to boost the immune system. He also published testimony from a nurse who claimed patients were being “intentionally killed on ventilators.”

The FDA also sent a letter to Dr. Mercola telling him to take “immediate action” to address “violations” in the letter regarding supplement products the doctor said would aid in COVID-19, calling them “unapproved new drugs” that are “misbranded.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation in May to prohibit financial institutions from denying or canceling services based on political or religious beliefs.

from:    https://flvoicenews.com/retail-health-company-has-chase-accounts-suddenly-terminated-owner-critical-of-covid-vaccines-fda/

Using The Excuse of HEALTH to Enslave Humanity

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Launch of a New Doorway to Freedom

Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact Checked

Here is the lnk for the Video with Dr. Meryl Nass:

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • The World Health Organization is laying the foundation to take control over all aspects of everyone’s lives, across the world, under the auspice of “biosecurity”
  • A new organization called Door to Freedom is being set up as a one-stop shop where everyone can learn what the plan is and what we can do to stop it. Door to Freedom also hopes to align freedom organizations around the world to act in concert to get the word out more widely
  • The global cabal that is trying to seize control over the world have access to loads of capital, but they’re also using our tax dollars. The U.S. government has spent some $5 trillion on the pandemic response. Much of that money went to bribe media, hospitals, influencers, churches, medical groups and other social organizations to push the official narrative
  • Current laws give immunity to a lot of bad actors, including the Federal Reserve, the Bank of International Settlements, everybody who works for the WHO and the UN, federal government employees as well as many private organizations. Vaccines and their manufacturers are also indemnified
  • We need to pass new laws that eliminate all of these indemnifications, so that we can retroactively take them to court for the crimes they’ve committed

In this video, I interview repeat guest Dr. Meryl Nass, who has a monthly podcast with journalist James Corbett on Children’s Health Defense (CHD) TV. Their show is focused on the implementation of the World Health Organization’s efforts to install global tyranny with respect to health and global governance.

The implications for public health are enormous and extremely troubling. The WHO is basically laying the foundation to take control over all aspects of everyone’s lives, across the world, under the auspice of “biosecurity.”

In this interview, Nass explains how the WHO is being set up as a central governing body for the world, and what we can do to stop it. She also details the price she’s paid for taking a stand against the false COVID narrative and offering early treatment.

Sacrificial Lamb

Nass was one of the doctors who, during the COVID pandemic, offered patients early treatment in Maine and Maryland. As a result, her medical license was suspended and the medical board forced her to undergo psychiatric evaluation. Apparently, in the present era, doctors who think saving lives is more important than following unscientific medical advice created by bureaucrats is considered insanity. She comments:

“This whole pandemic, and the takeover of the world by ‘elites, (global cabal)’ has been orchestrated primarily through fear, and one thing that’s necessary is to make doctors cooperate. To do that, the best way is to scare them, and the best way to scare them is to threaten their medical licenses …

In July and August of 2021, there were national news reports of several doctors who were prescribing ivermectin and [who] were being investigated, but none of them actually lost their licenses.

Apparently, this was not enough to stop doctors from prescribing ivermectin, and in states where it was allowed, hydroxychloroquine. These are both licensed drugs and the federal government had no legal authority to take them off the menu.

Licensed doctors could prescribe licensed drugs, as could nurse practitioners, PAs [physician’s assistants], et cetera. Neither one had a black box warning, neither one was a controlled substance. They were both safe, and they both had been used for a number of decades.

So, instead, it had to be done through the states — because states regulate medical practice in the U.S., and pharmacy practice — so, about 30 states issued either guidelines or rules to pharmacists and doctors telling them whether they could prescribe these drugs and under what circumstances.

That had happened in early 2020. In my case, the board got an anonymous complaint against me saying I was spreading misinformation — another charge that the government really needed to control people on. They couldn’t have the truth coming out about COVID, the drugs, the vaccines, and about this whole takeover.

So, they created this baloney concept of ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation’ and ‘malinformation’ and pretended that it was the law, that people who spread misinformation could be charged, and had to stop. A whole huge system was created within the federal government to surveil our online presence and go after people [who went against the narrative].

So, I was accused, initially, not of using these drugs, because I used them legally, but of spreading misinformation. And I think that the feds were looking for an excuse to really scare doctors … I was fairly well known.

So they went after me and said, ‘Not only are we investigating you, but we find, even before an investigation goes forward, even before any hearing, before the medical board even gets to see you and you get to say one word to them, we’ve decided that you are such a danger to the people of Maine, we must immediately suspend your license.’ They did that on January 12, 2022.”

Kangaroo Court

Nass has not been able to practice medicine since. Before the first hearing, the state medical board tried to get her to plea bargain and surrender her license voluntarily. She refused. By then, she was already working with CHD, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded CHD, offered to pay for her legal defense.

Of course, before the first hearing, they realized they couldn’t possibly take Nass to court for misinformation. After all, the First Amendment allows her to say whatever she wants. So, they dropped the misinformation charges and charged her with using medications off-label instead — only, that’s perfectly legal as well.

So, they dropped that charge, and instead argued she’d been speaking ill of the COVID vaccines. But that wasn’t a winning strategy either, because, of course, they didn’t want to defend the shots in court.

“So, basically, they went through my records and they tried to find little piddly things, like my records weren’t neat enough. I had been doing telemedicine and I hadn’t written down the vital signs for a patient, things like that,” Nass says.

“So in the hearings that have gone on so far, we’ve managed to shoot down all of those charges. There’s nothing substantive, there’s nothing left for them. In fact, the attorney general didn’t even question my last witness, who was Harvey Risch, an emeritus professor and M.D., Ph.D., from Yale, who blew apart the part-time ER doctor’s testimony that I hadn’t done things correctly.

So, that’s where we are. They don’t have a case, so what they want to do instead is drag this out forever, which will do two things that are good for them: One, prevent me from being able to say I won my case and get national attention for that, because they managed to put me in the national news when they took my license;

No. 2, they want to cost Children’s Health Defense a whole lot of money by just dragging it out, and it doesn’t cost them anything to drag it out. They’ve got the assistant attorney generals who are already working for the state managing the case.

Somebody up there is pulling the strings and figured out how to make this as painful as possible for myself and CHD. Well, I want to assure them that it’s not painful at all because we’ve had up to 180,000 people watching each hearing in real time.

CHD and Epoch Times have streamed every one, so everyone has been able to see what kind of kangaroo court this is, and the state of Maine has a black eye already. So let’s go forward. Let’s give them some more black eyes.”

Most Doctors Are Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Unfortunately, threatening a doctor’s medical license is an exceptionally effective way to ensure compliance, and an effective coercion to follow the rules even though they are wholly unlawful. The reason for this is simple economics. Most doctors owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans, and unless they’re independently wealthy, they can’t afford to go into private practice.

That means they work as an employee for a hospital or big clinic, where the rules are being set by hospital administrators. In addition to that, medical education is wholly captured by Big Pharma, and has been for the last 100 years. As such, medical students are being brainwashed from Day One. On top of that, you have peer pressure.

“We’re in the middle of a war,” Nass says. “It’s a war about who gets control of people, and doctors just happened to be a necessary chess piece for them. By doing this to me and others, the state has been very successful at getting most doctors to keep their mouth shut and go along, and comply with what they want.”

Indeed, it takes enormous courage and commitment to patient welfare to buck a system that has all these built-in pressures. In my estimate, perhaps only 5% of the 1 million doctors in America took a stand against the COVID tyranny.

“More than 75% of doctors are employed by somebody else, and that means they don’t have a say,” Nass explains. “If they’re employed by a hospital, the hospital bean-counters said, ‘Look, everybody who comes in is getting remdesivir, that’s it, if they’re admitted with COVID.’ And they can’t fight back.

There was so much money involved that people who tried to fight back lost their jobs. And this was what hospitals and employers were told to do by government and so-called ethicists like Art Caplan. You fire people and then everybody else goes along. So that’s what happened.

The other thing is … you can’t expect someone to believe something if their salary depends on their not believing it. So there’s that. The peer pressure is huge, for several reasons. One is malpractice. If you don’t go along with everybody else, you are liable for malpractice if your patient doesn’t do well.

So if I give someone hydroxychloroquine for COVID and they wind up dying, I can be sued for malpractice because I wasn’t following the standard of care. But if I gave them remdesivir and they die, I was following the standard of care, and I can’t be sued for that.

These are terrible things. This means that the entire profession has been pushed — through these rules and standards — to do things wrong. And all of this was probably thought of, or even planned, long ago, so that it would be relatively easy to control all the doctors.”

The Global Takeover Is Well Underway

As noted by Nass, most of you who are paying attention will have noticed that all kinds of crazy things are now happening all at once. We were mandated to get fast-tracked “vaccines” that turned out to be both ineffective and extremely dangerous, and even though the proverbial cat is now out of the bag, government is still trying to pressure people into taking additional boosters.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized vaccine manufacturers to make a third, bivalent, version of the mRNA shot, to be rolled out in the fall in combination with the flu shots.

“Why would that be, when everyone knows that after a few weeks, [the shots] make you more susceptible to get the disease, as well as have heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, et cetera, and sudden death?” Nass asks.

We’re also facing the rollout of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) and an international digital vaccine passport. We also know that the U.S. government was funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to design more lethal coronaviruses. Why did they do that? To what end?

We’ve also seen stupendous changes within our school system. Transgender ideology now trumps everything else. We’ve seen a rapid growth of online schooling and the lowering of educational standards at all levels, all while using the right pronoun has become incredibly important.

We’ve also seen a radical shift away from true environmentalism in favor of a “green” agenda that forces the poor and middle class to lower their standard of living while the wealthy profit. The fact is, the destruction of our environment and the raping of underdeveloped countries for their natural resources was done by the same globalists that now blame all of these problems on the public.

“What’s going on now is that the ‘elites’ (global cabal) have somehow gained control of enough pieces of our culture and our education system, and certainly our mass media and government, to roll out these cultural concepts and convince people of their validity,” Nass says.

“The elites have decided — they’ve got the ability now, through surveillance, through control of media and control of governments — to take over much of the world. The simplest and most legal way for them to do that, without having to fight wars, is to take over public health, and wrap the rest of the world into public health.

So public health is not just between you and your doctor. Public health now involves wild animals … They want to control the interactions of humans and wild animals.

They also want to control what happens with our livestock … so, livestock have become part of health. Ecosystems have also become part of health, and so has everything else. The name for this is ‘One Health.’

The WHO, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) — the world organization on animal health — and the UN Environmental Program, are all pushing for these things to be part of One Health and public health.

This didn’t happen by chance. It’s a scheme … funded by the Rockefeller Foundation around 2009. Many U.S. federal agencies are supposed to be using the One Health approach. This means that health problems have to be solved with a whole committee of people, not just doctors, not just veterinarians, but you need the ecologists, the plant pathologists, the livestock people, et cetera.

Everybody has to work together. But that’s not enough. You also have to throw in the police. You also have to throw in governments and legislators and everyone else into this concept of One Health.”

As noted by Nass, One Health is already enshrined in U.S. law in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), so there’s no question that U.S. agencies are all on the same track as the WHO.

Who’s Part of the Global Cabal?

In the interview, Nass goes on to name some of the organizations that are part of the global cabal that is reworking society for their own aims. Named players include the Rhodes organization, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and Chatham House, which is the equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations in the U.K.

All these groups, and many more, are linked to each other. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger cofounded the Trilateral Commission and was a Rhodes scholar and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Kissinger selected Klaus Schwab to create the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 1971, and they’ve been working together ever since.

In 1993, the WEF founded a Young Global Leaders program to groom international heads of state. Today, Germany, France, Canada, Finland and other countries are led by graduates of this program.

“It’s not exactly a secret society, but Klaus Schwab and his group have managed to identify people who would go along with their program,” Nass says. “I suspect these are people who are not the most intelligent, who lack imagination and are very obedient.

Therefore, they have been convinced that climate change is a dire emergency, and that they need to take extraordinary measures to deal with it — even if they have to reduce the population, even if they have to reduce our standard of living, even if they have to impose 15-minute cities, get rid of air travel and … eat bugs.”

How the WHO Is Being Set Up as the Central Authority

As explained by Nass, from its inception in 1948, the WHO has been an organization that transferred money from wealthier countries to poorer countries to help them with health problems like tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria.

During the COVID pandemic, the WHO and diplomats from member countries decided that a comprehensive pandemic treaty was necessary. The justification was that COVID had been mismanaged, hence we need a central decision-maker.

“Of course, what was never said is that things were managed so poorly because most countries were following the WHO advice, which was absolutely awful,” Nass says.

If this pandemic treaty goes through, either a regional epidemic or global pandemic would authorize the WHO to step in and dictate how the matter should be addressed. WHO members are also working on amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHRs), which would strip member nations of their sovereignty to make health-related decisions.

And, recall that “health” is being redefined to include all aspects of life, under the already existing One Health paradigm. As Nass explains:

“What has been proposed is that either a regional director-general or the WHO director-general can simply declare a public health emergency of international concern, or the potential for a public health emergency of international concern.

Once they make that declaration, all these powers would then accrue to the director-general of the WHO, if it’s for all countries, or if it’s regional, to that regional director-general.

That person could then say, ‘OK, medicines in your country need to be shipped to this other country.’ Intellectual property on how to make vaccines need to go away. Let’s say Abbott has a vaccine to combat whatever it is. They have to now give the recipe to Rwanda so they can make that vaccine in their own country and use it for their own people.

They can close borders. The WHO director-generals could basically take control of anything. If they say, ‘Oh, people are getting this from animals,’ they can stop contact with animals, stop you eating chicken or whatever, because One Health has taken jurisdiction over ecosystems.

The entire planet is ecosystems, and that’s part of One Health. Animals and plants are also part of One Health. So, they can tell you what to eat, they can tell you where to go and where not to go. They can lock you in your home. They can put masks on you, they can mandate vaccinations — if these [IHR] amendments and the pandemic treaty are passed.

They’re still being negotiated. The final versions are not out. But we have certainly criticized and analyzed the early versions, and they will be voted on next May [2024], and could potentially go into force on a provisional basis. The treaty could go into force almost immediately.”

How These Instruments Alter the WHO’s Existing Authority

In many ways, it seems the WHO was already exercising these powers, or at least attempting to, during the COVID pandemic. So, how do these two instruments — the IHR amendments and the pandemic treaty — alter their existing authority? Nass explains:

“There are existing international health regulations and they’ve been in existence since at least 1969 … Although the WHO claims that part of the IHRs that exist right now are binding, they aren’t binding. So, countries followed them, but there was no legal requirement for them to do so.

The International Health Regulations stated very clearly that the way they were to be carried out was with ‘full respect for freedom of persons’ dignity and human rights.’ In the new version that is being negotiated, they have struck that out. There is no longer a need to respect human rights, dignity or freedom of persons.

And, they have specifically said that these new regulations will be binding on countries, and countries are required to have a focal point that is required to carry them out and report back to the WHO how they’ve been carried out.

There are additional new provisions that countries are required to perform surveillance of their populations. They want you to think this is surveillance of only bacteria or surveillance of only social media, but it’s both. So, the WHO could require people to be swabbed in your country, whether or not they’re crossing a border.

Say there’s an outbreak. Everybody has to line up and get swabbed to see if they’re infected with X. And animals have to be surveilled as well, because they’re looking for pathogens that have the potential to be become pandemics. So that is supposed to happen.

Now, there’s a huge problem with that, and that is, you can always find viruses that have the potential to become pandemics … So, if you start surveilling for them, you’re going to find them, which means that would allow the director-general of the WHO to declare a public health emergency anytime he or she wants.

The other surveillance is they require countries to surveil their social media and mainstream media, and censor anything that goes against the public health messaging of the WHO. So this is big. This is huge.”

Is Global Tyranny an Inevitability?

While it may seem there’s no way to derail this proverbial bullet train, Nass remains optimistic. “This is a dystopian future that actually is not good for anybody. Even the people who want it are going to find it’s not good for them either,” Nass says.

Now, the global cabal that is trying to seize control have access to essentially unlimited capital. But they’re also using our tax dollars. As noted by Nass, the U.S. government has spent some $5 trillion on the pandemic response.

“That’s our money, not theirs,” she says, “and a lot of that money, most likely, went to bribe media.” Hospitals were also paid to go along with the narrative, as were celebrities, churches, medical groups and other social organizations.

“These very wealthy people do not want to spend their own money to take over the world. They want to spend our money or put us in debt. But are these expenditures justified and legal?

If we get governments of people who are responsive to normal life, we can investigate where that money went. What are these public officials doing? We can put them on trial, and we can probably even claw back a lot of this money.

Now, to do that might require some new laws, but if we had really good people in office — like Bobby Kennedy — we could potentially create the laws, very quickly, that will allow us to try government officials and others, heads of media, et cetera, if they’re doing things that are against the law.”

Why We Need New Laws

The reason we need new laws is because current laws give immunity to a lot of bad actors, including the Federal Reserve, the Bank of International Settlements, everybody who works for the WHO and the UN, and federal government employees as well as many private organizations.

Vaccines and their manufacturers are also indemnified. We need to pass new laws that eliminate all these indemnifications, so that we can retroactively take them to court for the crimes they’ve committed.

“This whole thing goes against the principles of the Constitution, the principles of natural law. This is a dystopian nightmare that was figured out by some very clever people in public relations and in consulting groups. We know the French government paid something like €1 billion or €2 billion to McKinsey to help manage the pandemic response.

So we can identify organizations that have brought these things on us and go after them. We also need to tell our members of Congress, our parliamentarians, and legislators, we don’t want this dystopia. Government doesn’t give us rights. We have rights. We are giving government authority. Government doesn’t have authority and own us. We own the government.

We’ve been led to believe that it’s the other way around, but it isn’t. And we can fix all this. There are about 50 members of Congress already who have signed on as co-sponsors to HR79 [the WHO Withdrawal Act1]. We need to get out of these international organizations.

The UN is trying to do something similar. The WHO was simply pulled in because there was an opportunity to gain control legally through the WHO because of the way its constitution exists, because of several Supreme Court cases, et cetera, there was an ability to use the WHO. The cabal may try to use other international organizations or other means to gain control.

But look, there’s a few thousand of them. There’s 8 billion of us. This is like a million to one. We can beat them. We don’t have to go along with any of it. If everybody says no, if the police don’t enforce, if the Army doesn’t enforce, it’s not going to happen. So people just need to realize what’s going on.”

Door to Freedom

To that end, Nass is working with a new organization called Door to Freedom. Their website, which will launch shortly, will contain all the relevant WHO and UN documents, criticisms of those documents, and both long and short explanations of what’s going on.

It’ll be a one-stop shop where everyone can learn what the plan is and what we can do to stop it. Door to Freedom also hopes to align freedom organizations around the world to act in concert to get the word out more widely.

Personally, I’m skeptical about the likelihood of winning this battle through legislative efforts because this cabal has been working on this plan for decades, if not centuries. So, they already have everything buttoned up, or close to it. Perhaps someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could get it done, but it will take a small miracle to get him into office as well.

What I do hold out hope for is that public resistance will block attempts of implementation. So, the key, I think, is to educate people. Henceforth, most of the day-to-day choices you make will take the world either closer to freedom, or closer to slavery, so it’s crucial to understand where we are, where the cabal intends to take us, and how they intend to get us there.

That way, you can make decisions and take actions that will move us in the opposite direction. Door to Freedom will be able to help you understand all of that, so please bookmark doortofreedom.org, and check back regularly.

from:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/07/16/who-global-tyranny.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20230716&foDate=true&mid=DM1433941&rid=1857121056

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Tyranny

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Gorsuch: Covid Lockdown Mania Stripped Civil Liberties

Wikimedia Commons, Franz Jantzen

POSTED BY: VIA BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE MAY 22, 2023

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch declares, “Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” It’s about time, but it’s to late since the damage is already done. TN decried the wanton destruction of civil liberties from day one of the globalist-led pandemic.⁃ TN Editor

In a statement made today on a case concerning Title 42, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch breaks the painful silence on the topic of lockdowns and mandates, and presents the truth with startling clarity. Importantly, this statement from the Supreme Court comes as so many other agencies, intellectuals, and journalists are in flat-out denial of what happened to the country.

[T]he history of this case illustrates the disruption we have experienced over the last three years in how our laws are made and our freedoms observed.

Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes.

They shuttered businesses and schools public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too.

They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.

Federal executive officials entered the act too. Not just with emergency immigration decrees. They deployed a public-health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide.They used a workplace-safety agency to issue a vaccination mandate for most working Americans.

They threatened to fire noncompliant employees, and warned that service members who refused to vaccinate might face dishonorable discharge and confinement. Along the way, it seems federal officials may have pressured social-media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed.

While executive officials issued new emergency decrees at a furious pace, state legislatures and Congress—the bodies normally responsible for adopting our laws—too often fell silent. Courts bound to protect our liberties addressed a few—but hardly all—of the intrusions upon them. In some cases, like this one, courts even allowed themselves to be used to perpetuate emergency public-health decrees for collateral purposes, itself a form of emergency-lawmaking-by-litigation.

Doubtless, many lessons can be learned from this chapter in our history, and hopefully serious efforts will be made to study it. One lesson might be this: Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat.

A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes.

We may even cheer on those who ask us to disregard our normal lawmaking processes and forfeit our personal freedoms. Of course, this is no new story. Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.

But maybe we have learned another lesson too. The concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government. However wise one person or his advisors may be, that is no substitute for the wisdom of the whole of the American people that can be tapped in the legislative process.

Decisions produced by those who indulge no criticism are rarely as good as those produced after robust and uncensored debate. Decisions announced on the fly are rarely as wise as those that come after careful deliberation. Decisions made by a few often yield unintended consequences that may be avoided when more are consulted. Autocracies have always suffered these defects. Maybe, hopefully, we have relearned these lessons too.

In the 1970s, Congress studied the use of emergency decrees. It observed that they can allow executive authorities to tap into extraordinary powers. Congress also observed that emergency decrees have a habit of long outliving the crises that generate them; some federal emergency proclamations, Congress noted, had remained in effect for years or decades after the emergency in question had passed.

At the same time, Congress recognized that quick unilateral executive action is sometimes necessary and permitted in our constitutional order. In an effort to balance these considerations and ensure a more normal operation of our laws and a firmer protection of our liberties, Congress adopted a number of new guardrails in the National Emergencies Act.

Despite that law, the number of declared emergencies has only grown in the ensuing years. And it is hard not to wonder whether, after nearly a half-century and in light of our Nation’s recent experience, another look is warranted. It is hard not to wonder, too, whether state legislatures might profitably reexamine the proper scope of emergency executive powers at the state level.

At the very least, one can hope that the Judiciary will not soon again allow itself to be part of the problem by permitting litigants to manipulate our docket to perpetuate a decree designed for one emergency to address another. Make no mistake—decisive executive action is sometimes necessary and appropriate. But if emergency decrees promise to solve some problems, they threaten to generate others. And rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Arizona v. Mayorkas marks the culmination of his three-year effort to oppose the Covid regime’s eradication of civil liberties, unequal application of law, and political favoritism. From the outset, Gorsuch remained vigilant as public officials used the pretext of Covid to augment their power and strip the citizenry of its rights in defiance of long standing constitutional principles.

While other justices (even some purported constitutionalists) absconded their responsibility to uphold the Bill of Rights, Gorsuch diligently defended the Constitution. This became most apparent in the Supreme Court’s cases involving religious liberty in the Covid era.

Beginning in May 2020, the Supreme Court heard cases challenging Covid restrictions on religious attendance across the country. The Court was divided along familiar political lines: the liberal bloc of Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan voted to uphold deprivations of liberty as a valid exercise of states’ police power; Justice Gorsuch led conservatives Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas in challenging the irrationality of the edicts; Chief Justice Roberts sided with the liberal bloc, justifying his decision by deferring to public health experts.

“Unelected judiciary lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people,” Roberts wrote in South Bay v. Newsom, the first Covid case to reach the Court.

And so the Court repeatedly upheld executive orders attacking religious liberty. In South Bay, the Court denied a California church’s request to block state restrictions on church attendance in a five to four decision. Roberts sided with the liberal bloc, urging deference to the public health apparatus as constitutional freedoms disappeared from American life.

In July 2020, the Court again split 5-4 and denied a church’s emergency motion for injunctive relief against Nevada’s Covid restrictions. Governor Steve Sisolak capped religious gatherings at 50 people, regardless of the precautions taken or the size of the establishment. The same order allowed for other groups, including casinos, to hold up to 500 people. The Court, with Chief Justice Roberts joining the liberal justices again, denied the motion in an unsigned motion without explanation.

Justice Gorsuch issued a one paragraph dissent that exposed the hypocrisy and irrationality of the Covid regime. “Under the Governor’s edict, a 10-screen ‘multiplex’ may host 500 moviegoers at any time. A casino, too, may cater to hundreds at once, with perhaps six people huddled at each craps table here and a similar number gathered around every roulette wheel there,” he wrote. But the Governor’s lockdown order imposed a 50-worshiper limit for religious gatherings, no matter the buildings’ capacities.

“The First Amendment prohibits such obvious discrimination against the exercise of religion,” Gorsuch wrote. “But there is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel.”

Gorsuch understood the threat to Americans’ liberties, but he was powerless with Chief Justice Roberts cowing to the interests of the public health bureaucracy. That changed when Justice Ginsburg died in September 2020.

The following month, Justice Barrett joined the Court and reversed the Court’s 5-4 split on religious freedom in the Covid era. The following month, the Court granted an emergency injunction to block Governor Cuomo’s executive order that limited attendance at religious services to 10 to 25 people.

Gorsuch was now in the majority, protecting Americans from the tyranny of unconstitutional edicts. In a concurring opinion in the New York case, he again compared restrictions on secular activities and religious gatherings; “according to the Governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians… Who knew public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience?”

In February 2021, California religious organizations appealed for an emergency injunction against Governor Newsom’s Covid restriction. At the time, Newsom prohibited indoor worship in certain areas and banned singing. Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Kavanaugh and Barrett, upheld the ban on singing but overturned the capacity limits.

Gorsuch wrote a separate opinion, joined by Thomas and Alito, that continued his critique of the authoritarian and irrational deprivations of America’s liberty as Covid entered its second year. He wrote, “Government actors have been moving the goalposts on pandemic-related sacrifices for months, adopting new benchmarks that always seem to put restoration of liberty just around the corner.”

Like his opinions in New York and Nevada, he focused on the disparate treatment and political favoritism behind the edicts; “if Hollywood may host a studio audience or film a singing competition while not a single soul may enter California’s churches, synagogues, and mosques, something has gone seriously awry.”

Thursday’s opinion allowed Gorsuch to review the devastating loss of liberty Americans suffered over the 1,141 days it took to flatten the curve.”

Read full story here…

from:    https://www.technocracy.news/gorsuch-covid-lockdown-mania-stripped-civil-liberties/

WeKnow Who You Are…..

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Media Covers Up Tracking of Unvaccinated People

Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact Checked

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • In mid-February 2023, I reported that the U.S. government has secretly been tracking those who didn’t get the COVID jab, or are only partially jabbed, through a previously unknown surveillance program
  • Within days, fact checkers tried to debunk the idea that individual people are being tracked, or that these data could be misused by government or third parties
  • COVID “vaccination” status was not considered a private medical matter at all during 2021 and 2022, yet mainstream media now want you to believe that your COVID jab status is protected by medical privacy laws
  • Your medical data are not nearly as private as you think. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is rife with exemptions when it comes to your privacy. Federal agencies such as Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, are exempt from the privacy clauses and can access identifiable data — especially if there’s an outbreak of infectious disease, be it real or fictitious
  • Government agencies and a number of third parties or “covered entities” can also use a number of loopholes to re-identify previously de-identified patient data

In mid-February 2023, I reported that the U.S. government has secretly been tracking those who didn’t get the COVID jab, or are only partially jabbed, through a previously unknown surveillance program designed by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.1

Within days, fact checkers were burning the midnight oil trying to debunk the idea that individual people are being tracked, or that these data could be misused by government or third parties.

Strangely enough, the most egregious “misinformation” example USA Today’s fact checker could find was a social media post that “generated nearly 200 likes in less than a month.”2 Two hundred likes? To most influencers, that’s nothing, especially not over the course of 30 days.

Why is USA Today stressing over a post with 200 likes? Seems a bit panicky if you ask me. Reuters also came out with a fact check and, like USA Today, Reuters claimed there was a lack of “context:”3

“New diagnostic codes that describe a patient as under-immunized against COVID-19 were introduced to help doctors identify patients potentially at risk for more-severe COVID and to help health officials track vaccine effectiveness and mortality statistics, among other public health questions, not for U.S. government tracking of unvaccinated individuals, as some are claiming online.

The codes in an individual’s medical record, like all personal health information, are protected by U.S. privacy law and could only be analyzed at the group or population level uncoupled from individual identities …”

Your Medical Records Are Far From Private

As is so often the case, the fact checkers are the ones taking the issue out of context or, rather, not presenting the full picture. The fact is, your medical data are not nearly as private as you think. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is rife with exemptions when it comes to your privacy.

Federal agencies such as Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have every right to access identifiable information, as they are exempt from the privacy clauses, and they’re particularly justified to access your private vaccination data if there’s an outbreak of infectious disease, be it real or fictitious. As noted in the HHS’s and CDC’s HIPAA guidance:4

“Balancing the protection of individual health information with the need to protect public health, the Privacy Rule expressly permits disclosures without individual authorization to public health authorities authorized by law to collect or receive the information for the purpose of preventing or controlling disease, injury, or disability, including but not limited to public health surveillance, investigation, and intervention …

[T]he Privacy Rule expressly permits PHI [protected health information] to be shared for specified public health purposes. For example, covered entities may disclose PHI, without individual authorization, to a public health authority legally authorized to collect or receive the information for the purpose of preventing or controlling disease, injury, or disability …

Further, the Privacy Rule permits covered entities to make disclosures that are required by other laws, including laws that require disclosures for public health purposes.”

Loopholes Also Allow Re-Identification of Personal Data

Government agencies and a number of third parties or “covered entities” can also use a number of loopholes to re-identify previously de-identified patient data. As explained in a CDC Public Health Law document detailing the lawful sharing of private medical data:5

“While HIPAA limits the use and disclosure of health information, it also permits certain secondary use exceptions for public health purposes. HIPAA provides certain circumstances under which patient data can be disclosed to health departments without patient authorization.

Under HIPAA, providers may disclose identifiable patient data (protected health information or PHI) if required by law, allowing states to pass legal exceptions to HIPAA restrictions.

Providers may also disclose PHI to health departments without patient authorization for public health activities, such as communicable disease reporting, or to a public health authority to prevent or control disease, injury, or disability under the public health exemption. A covered entity may access, use, and disclose PHI for clinical research without an individual’s authorization if:

1)it obtains documentation of waiver of individual’s authorization by an institutional review board or privacy board

2)the PHI is necessary for this research

3)the research is using PHI of decedents

Providers may disclose EHI without patient authorization when the data have been ‘de-identified’ … but still permits re-identification by providers or regional health information organizations through randomized patient source codes should a public health alert or case report become necessary.

Finally, providers may disclose a ‘limited data set,’ including dates and zip codes, without authorization and still re-identify patients if they maintain patient codes derived from certain identifiers.”

So, can your vaccination status be accessed by federal health agencies? Yes. Can that information be identifiable? Absolutely yes. Does that mean that you, as an individual, could be surveilled and/or get caught in a forced vaccination dragnet or end up experiencing negative repercussions in other areas of your life due to your vaccination status? Probably.

U.S. “privacy” laws certainly make allowances for such scenarios, and considering the behavior of government over the past three years, it would be naïve to believe they would never use your vaccination data against you.

Reuters Muddies the Water

Reuters also muddies the water in other ways. For example, the fact check stresses that medical providers have used the general code Z28.3 (which represents “underimmunized”) since 2015, and that “these codes are not used with purposes beyond monitoring and reporting diseases and mortality statistics or for insurance billing.”

While it’s true that the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code Z28.3 has been around for years, the new subcodes that track COVID jab status were added in mid-September 2021 during a ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee meeting, and during that meeting, they specified that “there is interest in being able to track people who are not immunized or only partially immunized.”

Below is a screenshot of page 194 of the agenda6 distributed during that meeting. There’s no ambiguity here. The new ICD-10 codes were added for the specific purpose of “tracking people” who are unjabbed or only partially jabbed against COVID-19.

They didn’t say they wanted to track “general population data.” They specifically said “people” are to be tracked. They also clearly state that this tracking is “of value for public health” — and again, the key words “public health” open the door to federal health agencies accessing identifiable data.

underimmunization for covid-19

Moreover, additional subcodes specify the “why” a person chose not to get the COVID shot or stopped getting boosters. Those codes are listed in the screenshot below, under Z28.3 Underimmunization Status.7

z28.3 underimmunization status

The use of “delinquent immunization status” under code Z28.39 also tells us something about where this is all headed. “Delinquent” means being “neglectful of a duty” or being “guilty of an offense.” Is refusing boosters a criminal offense? Perhaps not today, but some day, it might be, and these codes lay the foundation for that kind of medical persecution.

All Missed Vaccinations Will Be Tracked

Another tipoff that these codes will become part and parcel of the biosecurity control grid, even if they’re not used in this way now, is the fact that code Z28.39 — “Other underimmunization status”8 — is to be used “when a patient is not current on other, non-COVID vaccines.”9

In other words, they have already begun tracking ALL of your vaccinations, not just the COVID shot, and they can use the Z28.3 sub-codes to identify why you refused a given vaccine.

They’ve also added a billable ICD-10 code for “immunization safety counseling,” which explains the codes detailing “why” you refused a vaccine. So, if you didn’t get a vaccine due to “personal decision” (code Z28.2), or due to “personal beliefs or group pressure” (code Z28.1), then your doctor can bill your insurance for regurgitating vaccine propaganda and trying to change your mind.

Codes Could Be Put to Good Use

Giving credit where credit is due, Reuters Fact Check did point out a potentially beneficial purpose for the new ICD-10 codes:10

“[Eric Burnett, who specializes in hospital and internal medicine at Columbia University] said the ICD-10 codes could also help track data on vaccine efficacy, including comparisons between vaccination statuses of hospital or ICU patients with COVID, or patient mortality data based on vaccination status.”

That would be great, but the risk of these data being misused by the government is, I believe, greater than the possibility of them being used to protect the public from dangerous mRNA shots, seeing how overwhelming amounts of data showing harms are already being willfully ignored.

CDC Refuses to Answer Questions About the New Codes

Another red flag is the fact that the CDC has refused to answer questions about how it intends to use the new ICD-10 codes. In mid-February 2023, nine House Republicans sent a letter to the CDC demanding answers to these five questions:11

  1. Why did the CDC and National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) decide to start gathering data on why Americans chose not to take the COVID-19 vaccine?
  2. How do the CDC and NCHS intend to use these new COVID-19 vaccination ICD codes?
  3. What steps are the CDC and NCHS taking to ensure that Americans’ private health information contained in the ICD system is protected?
  4. Will the CDC and NCHS confirm that they have not, will not, and cannot create a database of Americans based on their COVID-19 vaccination status?
  5. Can the CDC and NCHS confirm that private companies do not have access to lists of Americans’ COVID-19 vaccination status through the ICD system, or any other database overseen by the CDC and NCHS

As reported by The Daily Signal February 28, 2023, the CDC for some reason does not want to answer these questions:12

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told The Daily Signal that it ‘will not be tracking’ the reasons Americans give for refusing to take a COVID-19 vaccine … Meanwhile, congressional Republicans told The Daily Signal that the CDC failed to respond to their questions by a deadline last week.

‘Two weeks ago, we sent a letter to the CDC demanding answers about its new COVID-19 vaccine database,’ Rep. Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., told The Daily Signal in a statement …

‘The CDC is stonewalling us and refusing to respond. Why won’t the CDC explain why it’s gathering data about Americans’ personal choices? House Republicans are not afraid to use the budgetary process to keep the CDC accountable to the American people,’ Brecheen warned.

House Republicans raised the alarm about the CDC’s involvement with the World Health Organization’s recently codified International Classification of Disease, or ICD, codes related to COVID-19 vaccination status, which went into effect last April. The codes enable the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to collect data on the reasons Americans refuse to take one of the vaccines …

‘The ICD codes were implemented in April 2022, however the CDC/NCHS does not have any data on the codes and will not be tracking this information,’ Nick Spinelli, a CDC spokesman, said in an emailed statement. ‘The codes are developed and managed by the World Health Organization to enable healthcare providers to track within their practices …'”

End Goal Is Global Database for the Vaccine Passport System

The mention of the WHO brings me to my next point, which is that all of this information will likely, eventually, be transferred into a global vaccination database. Hence the reason why the WHO develops and manages the ICD-10 codes. It’s to allow for the “harmonization” of health care across the world.

Incidentally, the fact that the WHO develops and manages these codes also means that the WHO has approved these new codes that track vaccination status, and we already know that the WHO is working on a global vaccine passport.

To work properly, a global vaccine passport system needs a global vaccination database, and there’s no telling what privacy measures, if any, such a database might end up with. What we do know is that white papers13 and proposed legislation14 published during the COVID era that discuss health tracking and/or vaccine passports have stressed that privacy concerns must be relaxed or dropped altogether to ensure global biosecurity.

We also saw how COVID “vaccination” status was not considered a private medical matter at all during 2021 and 2022. In many places, you had to disclose your status and show proof that you’d been jabbed. Yet mainstream media now want you to believe that your COVID jab status is protected by medical privacy laws. What a joke.

As noted by Dr. Robert Malone in a January 25, 2023, Substack article, this vaccine passport system is being put into place right under our noses, and it would be incredibly naïve to think that these new ICD-10 codes are not part of that scheme:15

“The administrative state is busy building a vaccine passport system that will be active before most Americans are aware of what is being done to them. No one is going to knock on your door asking for your vaccine status because they already know …

They don’t need approval from Congress or the courts because we have given them the information through our health care providers. The CDC is the governmental organization tasked with tracking vaccine status on individuals.

They already have the records, as well as updated booster information. They just need to tweak a definition here and there, or get President Biden to keep the COVID-19 public health emergency in place indefinitely and the vaccine passports will be a fait accompli.”

A Data Collection Dragnet

As of January 1, 2014, the U.S. government required public and private health care providers to adopt and use electronic medical records (EMR) if they wanted to quality for full Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement.

The government also financially incentivized physicians and hospitals to adopt electronic HEALTH records or EHR.16 The difference between EMR and EHR is that EHR provides a far more comprehensive patient history than EMR, as it contains a patient’s medical history from more than one medical practice.

In essence, EHR is what you get when doctors share your medical data to create one comprehensive file that covers all your interactions with the medical system. While that sounds good in theory, Big Pharma immediately seized the opportunity to misuse it by placing drug ads within the EHR system.

This in turn has driven up medical costs and resulted in poor prescribing decisions that put patients at risk.17 Patients are also directly targeted with drug marketing through patient portals.

Physicians and hospitals who adopted EHR got paid extra. Between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) paid out EHR incentive payments to hospitals totaling $14.6 billion.18 Meanwhile, those who chose not to capture, share and report clinical data on patients were financially penalized through reduced Medicare reimbursements.19,20

Needless to say, these “sticks” and “carrots” led to the rapid adoption of both EMR and EHR, both of which government requires if it wants the power to control the population through medicine, and we now know that’s exactly what government intends to do.

Transhumanism Is Being Implemented Through Food and Medicine

At the end of September 2022, President Biden laid out a “bold goal” to “end hunger and increase healthy eating and physical activity by 2030” through a federally-backed “Food Is Medicine” campaign.21

Integrating food and nutrition with health care so that food and health policies are under one umbrella will facilitate the creation of new policies, funding and control over both areas. Eventually, food purchases and health records will be linked to your vaccine passport/digital identity, which also holds your educational records, travel records, work records and bank accounts.

That this “Food Is Medicine” campaign has nothing to do with promoting real nutrition or whole food is obvious, as that same month Biden also signed the “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy.”22

This specifies that biotechnology and genetic engineering be used to transform the food and medical industries in order to promote a transhumanist agenda. It’s all about creating fake, synthetic and genetically manipulated foods and tinkering with the human genome.

On a larger scale, this plan is also promoted by the World Health Organization, which is trying to seize power over health care globally through International Health Regulation (IHR) amendments and the Pandemic Treaty. For more information on that, see “Pandemic Treaty Will Usher In Unelected One World Government.”

The WHO is also seeking to put food, medicine and climate under one umbrella. This would allow it to control the global population in any number of ways, as a climate issue could be positioned as a public health issue, or a food issue, and vice versa. In other words, people could be forced to eat bugs instead of beef because it “benefits the climate.” Private vehicle use could be restricted because it helps lower vehicular pollution that endangers public health, and so on.

So, to bring us full circle back to where we started, while media are now trying to lull you to sleep with “promises” that there’s nothing nefarious about tracking the unvaccinated or “undervaccinated,” think long and hard before you close your eyes to the possibility that this is all part of biosecurity-based totalitarian control grid.

from:  https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/04/18/media-covers-up-tracking-unvaccinated-people.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20230418&cid=DM1384405&bid=1776322061

Facts??? What Facts? Who Cares?

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How the Virality Project Threatens Our Freedom

Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact Checked 
  • March 29, 2023

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • We now have proof that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) partnered with a censorship consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to illegally censor Americans
  • During the 2020 election cycle, the EIP and CISA worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-backed Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) to police political wrongthink on social media
  • In February 2021, the EIP rebranded itself as the Virality Project, and went on to censor COVID-19 narratives on behalf of the government, even when they knew it was true
  • The Virality Project targeted first-hand accounts of COVID jab injuries to prevent vaccine hesitancy, and posts that expressed fears about vaccine passports because being against vaccine passports was a “gateway to being anti-vax.” They also censored jokes and satirical memes on the basis that they might “exacerbate distrust” in public health officials, and made asking questions a punishable event because questioning is “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation”
  • As bad as things are, they’re about to get a whole lot worse unless Congress puts a stop to it. In the last three years, the U.S. government has granted more than 500 contracts and/or grants aimed at tackling “misinformation”
  • The Department of Defense is also focused on research involving AI and tech that can monitor internet conversations and deploy countermeasures before wrongthink goes viral. Congress must defund all of these programs, as well as any agency department or team involved in censoring Americans

As detailed in “Propaganda and Censorship Dominate the Information War,” we now have proof, courtesy of the Twitter Files, that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) partnered with a censorship consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to censor Americans.1

In an Atlantic Council interview, EIP head Alex Stamos also admitted that the partnership between the EIP and the DHS was set up to outsource censorship that the government could not do due to “lack of legal authorization.”2

Stamos, a former chief of security at Facebook, is also director of the Stanford Internet Observatory — one of the four organizations that make up the EIP — and is a partner in the cyber consulting firm Krebs Stamos Group together with former CISA director Chris Krebs.

Virality Project Is EIP Rebranded

During the 2020 election cycle, the EIP and CISA worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-backed Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) to police political wrongthink on social media. The EIP coordinated the take-down of undesirable content using a real-time chat app that the DHS, EIP and social media companies all share.3

In February 2021, the EIP rebranded itself as the Virality Project, and went on to censor COVID-19 narratives on behalf of the government in the same way the EIP censored election narratives on behalf of the political Left.4

According to independent journalist Matt Taibbi, the Virality Project was essentially a dry run for President Biden’s federal Disinformation Governance Board.5 In fact, the Virality Project proposed a federal “Misinformation and Disinformation Center of Excellence” just one day before President Biden announced the plan for this Orwellian outfit.

Public backlash forced Biden to reconsider, but all that means is that the government chose not to make its unconstitutional censoring of Americans official policy. They’re still doing it through partnerships with the EIP/Virality Project and other third parties.

Virality Project Censored Truth

In a March 20, 2023, report (video above), The Hill host Robby Soave detailed the goals of the Virality Project, which “above all else were to protect the perceived integrity of the federal health bureaucracy, vaccine manufacturers and government vaccine policymakers, and to advance mainstream establishment narratives and interests in general.”

As noted by Soave, the Virality Project frequently pressured social media companies to censor COVID-19-related information and/or label it as “misinformation” — even if the information was true.

“This coalition, which was working with government agencies, NGO’s and the social media companies themselves, took the position that even true information could count as dangerous misinformation if its effect was to encourage a policy that clashed with the expert consensus …

If we still value the First Amendment, we must resist these pernicious calls for censorship. A call that is coming from a sordid coalition of ‘truth czars’ and ideological activists masquerading as fact checkers,” Soave says.

The mere possibility of causing “vaccine skepticism” or “vaccine hesitancy” was enough of a justification to censor information about the deadly COVID shots, for example, even though the information was truthful and required in order to make an informed decision.

This even included true first-hand accounts of serious COVID jab injuries, which could have saved lives had they been allowed to be shared. As noted by Andrew Lowenthal, co-founder of EngageMedia and author at Brownstone Institute:6

“Rather than listening out for safety signals to protect the public, leaders in the ‘anti-disinformation’ field ran cover to protect Big Pharma, smearing and censoring critics.

The moral depravity is astounding and quite possibly criminal … [In] suppressing ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ the Virality Project put people in danger. Rather than keeping people safe they exposed us to the depredations of Big Pharma.”

Wartime Logic

Best-selling author John Leake7 also commented on the Virality Project’s censoring of truthful information, saying:8

“This reminded me of our recent trip to Australia in which we learned the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) led by Dr. John Skerritt, MD, PhD, made the decision to suppress accurate reports of vaccine-induced myocarditis in young people because such reports could cause ‘vaccine hesitancy.’

As these policymakers and regulators see it, the incidence of grave and fatal side effects are sufficiently rare to warrant censoring ANY reporting of them, as such reporting could cause the greater harm of ‘vaccine hesitancy.’

By their calculus, severe injuries and deaths caused by COVID-19 vaccines are the price we as a society must pay for the purportedly greater number of lives saved by the vaccines.

Never in the history of medicine has this calculus been used to evaluate the benefit of a medical product. Only in a military context — that is, commanders in the field must accept a certain number of casualties in order to achieve the greater benefit of vanquishing the enemy — has this logic been applied.”

No Concerns, Jokes or Questions Allowed

The Virality Project also targeted posts that expressed fears about vaccine passports — because being against vaccine passports was a “gateway to being anti-vax” — and censored jokes and satirical memes on the basis that they might “exacerbate distrust” in those targeted as the butt of the joke.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is one example of a public health official whose reputation was protected in this way. They even made asking questions a punishable event, because asking questions is a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.”9

Have You Heard of Pre-Bunking?

The Virality Project also invented “pre-bunking” strategies to “warn” the public about purported misinformation before it had time to spread.

For example, when the Johnson & Johnson COVID jab was temporarily suspended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in April 2021, the Virality Project issued a rapid response statement10 saying the number of incidents of rare and severe types of blood clots was “very small,” especially considering the millions of doses given.

They also analyzed the narratives put forth “concerning the J&J suspension within anti-vaccine groups across social media platforms” and in foreign and international media, and how these narratives might affect “vaccine hesitancy,” and proposed strategies to counter efforts to use the suspension as support for anti-COVID jab arguments.

Twitter Files Include Calls to Censor Me

As predicted, the Twitter files also contain correspondence with social media companies relating to yours truly. Taibbi points out the Twitter files “repeatedly show media acting as proxy”11 for the NGOs in the censoring network.

As an example, he posted the email below,12 in which the Financial Times used the shady NGO Center for Countering Digital Hate’s fabricated “Misinformation Dozen” report to pressure Twitter into banning me, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the rest on its list.

misinformation dozen

Government Censorship Campaign Is Financed by Taxpayers

As noted by Taibbi in a March 9, 2023, Twitter thread:13

“Well, you say, so what? Why shouldn’t civil society organizations and reporters work together to boycott ‘misinformation’? Isn’t that not just an exercise of free speech, but a particularly enlightened form of it?

The difference is, these campaigns are taxpayer-funded. Though the state is supposed to stay out domestic propaganda, the Aspen Institute, Graphika, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, New America, and other ‘anti-disinformation’ labs are receiving huge public awards.

Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded NewsGuard, not only seek content moderation but apply subjective ‘risk’ or ‘reliability’ scores to media outlets, which can result in reduction in revenue. Do we want government in this role? …

This is the Censorship-Industrial Complex at its essence: a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives. It’s the opposite of what a free press does …

This, ultimately, is the most serious problem with the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Packaged as a bulwark against lies and falsehood, it is itself often a major source of disinformation, with American taxpayers funding their own estrangement from reality.”

Censorship Darling With a Shady Past

You can learn more about Taibbi’s work on the Twitter files in the video above. In his Twitter Files No. 19 thread, Taibbi also highlights some of the shadier characters within this censorship-industrial complex, such as Renée DiResta, technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory (which, again, is part of the EIP and Virality Project):14

“Profiles portray DiResta as a warrior against Russian bots and misinformation, but reporters never inquire about work with DARPA, GEC and other agencies. In the video below … Stamos introduces her as having ‘worked for the CIA.'”

“DiResta has become the public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, a name promoted everywhere as an unquestioned authority on truth, fact, and Internet hygiene, even though her former firm, New Knowledge, has been embroiled in two major disinformation scandals …

DiResta’s New Knowledge helped design the Hamilton 68 project exposed in the Twitter files. Although it claimed to track ‘Russian influence,’ Hamilton really followed [Conservative] Americans … Hamilton 68 was funded by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which in turn was funded by the German Marshall Fund, which in turn is funded in part by — the Department of State.

The far worse scandal was Project Birmingham, in which thousands of fake Russian Twitter accounts were created to follow Alabama Republican Roy Moore in his 2017 race for US Senate. Newspapers reported Russia seemed to take an interest in the race, favoring Moore.

Though at least one reporter for a major American paper was at a meeting in September 2018 when New Knowledge planned the bizarre bot-and-smear campaign, the story didn’t break until December, two days after DiResta gave a report on Russian interference to the Senate …

The incident underscored the extreme danger of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Without real oversight mechanisms, there is nothing to prevent these super-empowered information vanguards from bending the truth for their own ends.

By way of proof, no major press organization has re-examined the bold claims DiResta/New Knowledge made to the Senate — e.g. that Russian ads ‘reached 126 million people’ in 2016 — while covering up the Hamilton and Alabama frauds.”

US Government Is Building Vast Speech Suppression Web

As bad as things already are, they’re about to get a whole lot worse unless Congress puts a stop to it. In a March 21, 2023, article,15 The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent Margot Cleveland details grants showing the U.S. government is “building a vast surveillance and speech suppression web around every American.”

“Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet — the speech of journalists, politicians, religious organizations, advocacy groups, and even private citizens. Should those conversations conflict with the government’s viewpoint about what is in the best interests of our country and her citizens, that speech will be silenced,” she writes.16

“While the ‘Twitter Files’ offer a glimpse into the government’s efforts to censor disfavored viewpoints, what we have seen is nothing compared to what is planned, as the details of hundreds of federal awards lay bare.

Research by The Federalist reveals our tax dollars are funding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) technology that will allow the government to easily discover ‘problematic’ speech and track Americans reading or partaking in such conversations.

Then, in partnership with Big Tech, Big Business, and media outlets, the government will ensure the speech is censored, under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation.'”

In the last three years alone, the federal government has granted more than 500 contracts and/or grants aimed at tackling “misinformation” and “disinformation.” The Department of Defense itself is also focused on research involving AI and ML tech that can monitor internet conversations for objectionable viewpoints and deploy countermeasures before they go viral.

A Catch-22

Unfortunately, many of those who have the greatest power to inform the public about what’s happening, and those with the power to protect us by putting an end to this dystopian nightmare, don’t want to because they have something to gain from it, or believe they do. As noted by Cleveland:17

“The threat is further heightened because those with the power to warn the public and demand the government stop silencing Americans’ speech are complicit.

With Democrats, the legacy media, and many Republicans all in on the government’s efforts to censor misinformation and disinformation, it will be extremely difficult for the public to recognize the risks free speech faces — especially since those trying to sound the alarm have already been falsely branded purveyors of disinformation.

A chance remains, though, that enough ordinary Americans will hear the message before it is too late and demand Congress close the Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

Taibbi, in the video above, says the revelations about the Virality Project tell us two things:18

“One, as Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success. Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging.

Two, it accelerated the evolution of digital censorship, moving it from judging truth/untruth to a new, scarier model, openly focused on political narrative at the expense of fact.”

This is deeply problematic and will strangle democracy and end the republic that is the United States if allowed to continue. To quote Lowenthal:19

“Free speech and expression protect us from the most powerful actors on the planet, corporations, the State, and a growing plethora of international bodies. Ultimately, we need radically decentralized social media that is more immune to their capture. Our safety depends on it.”

Decentralizing social media is just one necessary defense tactic though. We must also demand Congress take swift action to defund and dismantle the “censorship-industrial complex” that is using our tax dollars to deceive us and withhold truth. Nothing less will suffice. We can’t invent enough privacy laws to protect us from what’s coming.

For a time, many of us suspected that this massive surveillance and control system was primarily funded and built by private interests, but now we’re finding that government funding is behind much, and perhaps most, of it.

Congress has, for many years, if not decades, approved funding for programs intended to destroy our constitutional rights. Now, they must defund all of them. They must also defund all government agency departments or teams involved in the federal censorship network, and that includes the FBI, CIA and DHS.

from:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/03/29/how-virality-project-threatens-freedom.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20230329_HL2&cid=DM1372268&bid=1758336702

So… You Always Wanted to Be On Camera?

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‘Watched the whole time’: China’s surveillance state grows under Xi

Jing Xuan TENG

When Chen picked up his phone to vent his anger at getting a parking ticket, his message on WeChat was a drop in the ocean of daily posts on China’s biggest social network.

But soon after his tirade against “simple-minded” traffic cops in June, he found himself in the tentacles of the communist country’s omniscient surveillance apparatus.

Chen quickly deleted the post, but officers tracked him down and detained him within hours, accusing him of “insulting the police”.

He was locked up for five days for “inappropriate speech”.

His case — one of the thousands logged by a dissident and reported by local media — laid bare the pervasive monitoring that characterises life in China today.

Its leaders have long taken an authoritarian approach to social control.

But since President Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he has reined in the relatively freewheeling social currents of the turn of the century, using a combination of technology, law and ideology to squeeze dissent and preempt threats to his rule.

Ostensibly targeting criminals and aimed at protecting order, social controls have been turned against dissidents, activists and religious minorities, as well as ordinary people — such as Chen — judged to have crossed the line.

– Eyes in the sky –

The average Chinese citizen today spends nearly every waking moment under the watchful eye of the state.

Research firm Comparitech estimates the average Chinese city has more than 370 security cameras per 1,000 people — making them the most surveilled places in the world — compared with London’s 13 or Singapore’s 18 per 1,000.

The nationwide “Skynet” urban surveillance project has ballooned, with cameras capable of recognising faces, clothing and age.

“We are being watched the whole time,” an environmental activist who declined to be named told AFP.

The Communist Party’s grip is most stark in the far-western region of Xinjiang, where facial recognition and DNA collection have been deployed on mainly Muslim minorities in the name of counter-terrorism.

The Covid-19 pandemic has turbo-charged China’s monitoring framework, with citizens now tracked on their smartphones via an app that determines where they can go based on green, yellow or red codes.

Regulations rolled out since 2012 closed loopholes that allowed people to purchase SIM cards without giving their names, and mandated government identification for tickets on virtually all forms of transport.

– Online offences –

There is no respite online, where even shopping apps require registration with a phone number tied to an identification document.

Wang, a Chinese dissident speaking to AFP under a pseudonym due to safety concerns, recalled a time before Xi when censors were not all-knowing and “telling jokes about (former Chinese president) Jiang Zemin on the internet was actually very popular”.

But the Chinese internet — behind the “Great Firewall” since the early 2000s — has become an increasingly policed space.

Wang runs a Twitter account tracking thousands of cases of people detained, fined or punished for speech acts since 2013.

Thanks to the real-name verification system as well as cooperation between police and social media platforms, people have been punished for a vast array of online offences.

Platforms such as Weibo employ thousands of content moderators and automatically block politically sensitive keywords, such as tennis star Peng Shuai’s name after she accused a senior politician of sexual assault last year.

Cyberspace authorities are proposing new rules that would force platforms to monitor comments sections on posts — one of the last avenues for people to voice their grievances online.

– Ideological policing –

Many of the surveillance technologies in use have been embraced in other countries.

“The real difference in China is the lack of independent media and civil society able to provide meaningful criticism of innovations or to point out their many flaws,” Jeremy Daum, from the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, told AFP.

Xi has reshaped Chinese society, with the Communist Party stipulating what citizens “ought to know, to feel, to think, and say, and do”, Vivienne Shue, professor emeritus of contemporary China studies at Oxford University, told AFP.

Youngsters are kept away from foreign influences, with authorities banning international books and forbidding tutoring companies from hiring overseas teachers.

Ideological policing has even extended to fashion, with television stations censoring tattoos and earrings on men.

“What disturbs me more is not the censorship itself, but how it shaped the ideology of people,” said Wang, the Twitter account owner.

“With dissenting information being eliminated, every website becomes a cult, where the government and leaders have to be worshipped.”

tjx/je/kma/axn/qan

from:    https://news.yahoo.com/watched-whole-time-chinas-surveillance-030215860.html

Well, This Makes Me Feel Comfortable

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FACEBOOK ENGINEERS: WE HAVE NO IDEA WHERE WE KEEP ALL YOUR PERSONAL DATA

In a discovery hearing, two veteran Facebook engineers told the court that the company doesn’t keep track of all your personal data.


September 7 2022, 4:00 a.m.

IN MARCH, two veteran Facebook engineers found themselves grilled about the company’s sprawling data collection operations in a hearing for the ongoing lawsuit over the mishandling of private user information stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The hearing, a transcript of which was recently unsealed, was aimed at resolving one crucial issue: What information, precisely, does Facebook store about us, and where is it? The engineers’ response will come as little relief to those concerned with the company’s stewardship of billions of digitized lives: They don’t know.

The admissions occurred during a hearing with special master Daniel Garrie, a court-appointed subject-matter expert tasked with resolving a disclosure impasse. Garrie was attempting to get the company to provide an exhaustive, definitive accounting of where personal data might be stored in some 55 Facebook subsystems. Both veteran Facebook engineers, with according to LinkedIn two decades of experience between them, struggled to even venture what may be stored in Facebook’s subsystems. “I’m just trying to understand at the most basic level from this list what we’re looking at,” Garrie asked.

“I don’t believe there’s a single person that exists who could answer that question,” replied Eugene Zarashaw, a Facebook engineering director. “It would take a significant team effort to even be able to answer that question.”

When asked about how Facebook might track down every bit of data associated with a given user account, Zarashaw was stumped again: “It would take multiple teams on the ad side to track down exactly the — where the data flows. I would be surprised if there’s even a single person that can answer that narrow question conclusively.”

In an emailed statement that did not directly address the remarks from the hearing, Meta spokesperson Dina El-Kassaby told The Intercept that a single engineer’s inability to know where all user data was stored came as no surprise. She said Meta worked to guard users’ data, adding, “We have made — and continue making — significant investments to meet our privacy commitments and obligations, including extensive data controls.”

THE DISPUTE OVER where Facebook stores data arose when, as part of the litigation, now in its fourth year, the court ordered Facebook to turn over information it had collected about the suit’s plaintiffs. The company complied but provided data consisting mostly of material that any user could obtain through the company’s publicly accessible “Download Your Information” tool.

Facebook contended that any data not included in this set was outside the scope of the lawsuit, ignoring the vast quantities of information the company generates through inferences, outside partnerships, and other nonpublic analysis of our habits — parts of the social media site’s inner workings that are obscure to consumers. Briefly, what we think of as “Facebook” is in fact a composite of specialized programs that work together when we upload videos, share photos, or get targeted with advertising. The social network wanted to keep data storage in those nonconsumer parts of Facebook out of court.

In 2020, the judge disagreed with the company’s contention, ruling that Facebook’s initial disclosure had indeed been too sparse and that the company must reveal data obtained through its oceanic ability to surveil people across the internet and make monetizable predictions about their next moves.

Facebook’s stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level. In the March 2022 hearing, Zarashaw and Steven Elia, a software engineering manager, described Facebook as a data-processing apparatus so complex that it defies understanding from within. The hearing amounted to two high-ranking engineers at one of the most powerful and resource-flush engineering outfits in history describing their product as an unknowable machine.

The special master at times seemed in disbelief, as when he questioned the engineers over whether any documentation existed for a particular Facebook subsystem. “Someone must have a diagram that says this is where this data is stored,” he said, according to the transcript. Zarashaw responded: “We have a somewhat strange engineering culture compared to most where we don’t generate a lot of artifacts during the engineering process. Effectively the code is its own design document often.” He quickly added, “For what it’s worth, this is terrifying to me when I first joined as well.”

THE REMARKS IN the hearing echo those found in an internal document leaked to Motherboard earlier this year detailing how the internal engineering dysfunction at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, makes compliance with data privacy laws an impossibility. “We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose,’” the 2021 document read.

The fundamental problem, according to the engineers in the hearing, is that Facebook’s sprawl has made it impossible to know what it consists of anymore; the company never bothered to cultivate institutional knowledge of how each of these component systems works, what they do, or who’s using them. There is no documentation of what happens to your data once it’s uploaded, because that’s just never been something the company does, the two explained. “It is rare for there to exist artifacts and diagrams on how those systems are then used and what data actually flows through them,” explained Zarashaw.

“It is rare for there to exist artifacts and diagrams on how those systems are then used and what data actually flows through them.”

Facebook’s inability to comprehend its own functioning took the hearing up to the edge of the metaphysical. At one point, the court-appointed special master noted that the “Download Your Information” file provided to the suit’s plaintiffs must not have included everything the company had stored on those individuals because it appears to have no idea what it truly stores on anyone. Can it be that Facebook’s designated tool for comprehensively downloading your information might not actually download all your information? This, again, is outside the boundaries of knowledge.

“The solution to this is unfortunately exactly the work that was done to create the DYI file itself,” noted Zarashaw. “And the thing I struggle with here is in order to find gaps in what may not be in DYI file, you would by definition need to do even more work than was done to generate the DYI files in the first place.”

The systemic fogginess of Facebook’s data storage made answering even the most basic question futile. At another point, the special master asked how one could find out which systems actually contain user data that was created through machine inference.

“I don’t know,” answered Zarashaw. “It’s a rather difficult conundrum.”

Update: September 7, 2022, 9:56 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a statement from Meta sent after publication.

from:    https://theintercept.com/2022/09/07/facebook-personal-data-no-accountability/

Surveillance from the Floor

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Did Amazon Buy iRobot To Map Inside Your Home?

BY TYLER DURDEN
WEDNESDAY, AUG 10, 2022 – 11:45 AM

Amazon.com Inc.’s $1.7 billion acquisition of robot vacuum cleaner company iRobot Corp. is a move by the megacorporation to use Roombas to map the interior of homes. This data type is a digital gold mine for Amazon because if marketers know more about what’s inside, they can easily create tailormade ads.

From a market perspective, Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot is to gain deeper insight into customers’ homes via the autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner called “Roomba.”

The latest model of the Roomba, called J7, has a front-facing, AI-powered camera that maps out each room and will identify nearly everything in its path, such as floor plans, where the kitchen is, which space is the master bedroom, and where the kids sleep, as well as items on the floor.

“Slightly more terrifying, the maps also represent a wealth of data for marketers. The size of your house is a pretty good proxy for your wealth. A floor covered in toys means you likely have kids. A household without much furniture is a household to which you can try to sell more furniture. This is all useful intel for a company such as Amazon which, you may have noticed, is in the business of selling stuff,” Bloomberg said. 

Roomba’s surveillance from within the home is pure digital gold, as Amazon’s ambition to learn more about the customer will allow marketers to sell more junk.

Vice News said, “leaked documents acquired by Motherboard revealed that one of the goals of Astro [Amazon’s robot] was to create a robot that intelligently plotted out the interior of a user’s homes, even creating heat maps of highly trafficked areas.”

Amazon customers haven’t received Astro well for privacy reasons, and the same could happen with robot vacuums following the acquisition. Some on Twitter are already calling the Amazon/iRobot deal “pure dystopia.”

People are starting to catch onto Amazon’s mass surveillance program of the household:

So, what iRobot brings to Amazon is the ability to embed its vast surveillance infrastructure into what appears to be a harmless vacuum, but just as Echo smart speakers are always ‘listening,’ perhaps the vacuum will always be watching.

As a reminder, Amazon has a frightening partnership with the Central Intelligence Agency — maybe it’s time to ditch the Roomba.

from:    https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/pure-dystopia-amazon-buys-irobot-map-inside-your-home

Smile for the Camera

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All the Data Amazon’s Ring Cameras Collect About You

The popular security devices are tracking (and sharing) more than you might think.
Amazon Ring doorbell camera mounted on wall
PHOTOGRAPH: FORTGENS PHOTOGRAPHY/SHUTTERSTOCK

IF YOU WALK through your local neighborhood—providing you live in a reasonably large town or city—you’ll be caught on camera. Government CCTV cameras may record your stroll, but it is increasingly likely that you’ll also be captured by one of your neighbors’ security cameras or doorbells. It’s even more likely that the camera will be made by Ring, the doorbell and security camera firm owned by Amazon.

Since Amazon splashed out more than a billion dollars for the company in 2018, Ring’s security products have exploded in popularity. Ring has simultaneously drawn controversy for making deals (and sharing data) with thousands of police departments, helping expand and normalize suburban surveillance, and falling to a string of hacks. While the cameras can provide homeowners with reassurance that their property is secure, critics say the systems also run the risk of reinforcing racism and racial profiling and eroding people’s privacy.

Videos shared from security cameras and internet-connected doorbells have also become common on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, raking in millions of views. “Ring impacts everybody’s privacy,” says Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Most immediately, it impacts the people who walk down the streets every day, where the cameras are pointing out.”

While Ring is far from the only maker of smart doorbells and cameras—Google’s Nest line is another popular option—its connections to law enforcement have drawn the most criticism, as when it recently handed over data without warrants. So, what exactly does Ring collect and know about you?

What Ring Knows About You

Whenever you use any tech, it’s collecting data about you. Spotify uses the data it collects to work out your mood, Slack knows how many messages you send. Ring’s products are no different. Ring’s privacy policy—running 2,400 words—and its terms of service detail what it collects about you and how it uses that information. In short: It’s a lot.

Ring gets your name, phone number, email and postal address, and any other information you provide to it—such as payment information or your social media handles if you link your Ring account to Facebook, for instance. The company also gets information about your Wi-Fi network and its signal strength, and it knows you named your camera “Secret CIA Watchpoint,” as well as all the other technical changes you make to your cameras or doorbells.

In March 2020, a BBC information request revealed that Ring keeps detailed records of people’s doorbell activity. Every doorbell press was logged. Each motion the camera detected was stored. And details were saved every time someone zoomed in on footage on their phone. In just 129 days, 4906 actions were recorded. (Ring says it does not sell people’s data.)

Ring can also collect the video and audio your camera records—the system doesn’t record all the time, but it can be triggered when it senses movement. Ring says its cameras can detect movement “up to 155 degrees horizontally” and across distances of up to 25 feet. This means there’s a good chance cameras can be triggered by people walking down the street or pick up conversations of passersby. According to tests by Consumer Reports, some Ring cameras can record audio from about 20 feet away.

Jolynn Dellinger, a senior lecturing fellow focusing on privacy and ethics at Duke University’s school of law, says recording audio when someone is on the street is a “serious problem” for privacy and may change how people behave. “We operate with a sense of obscurity, even in public,” Dellinger says. “We are in danger of increasing surveillance of everyday life in a way that is not consistent with either our expected views or really what’s best for society.” In October 2021, a British woman won a court case that said her neighbor’s Ring cameras, which overlooked her house and garden, broke data laws.

Ring’s privacy policy says it can save videos of subscribers to its Ring Protect Plan, a paid service that provides an archive of 180 days of video and audio captured. The company says people can log in to the service to delete the videos, but the company may ultimately keep them anyway. “Deleted Content and Ring Protect Recordings may be stored by Ring in order to comply with certain legal obligations and are not retrievable without a valid court order,” the privacy policy says.

Ring can also keep videos shared to its Neighbors’ app—an app where people and law enforcement agencies can share alerts about “crimes” and post their videos of what is happening around the homes. (There are rules about what people are allowed to post.)

Ring’s privacy policy and terms of service allow it to use all this information it collects in multiple ways. It lists 14 ways the company can use your data—from improving the service Ring provides and protecting against fraud to conducting consumer research and complying with legal requirements. Its privacy policy includes the ambiguous statement: “We also may use the personal information we collect about you in other ways for which we provide specific notice at the time of collection and obtain your consent if required by applicable law.” Ring spokesperson Sarah Rall says this could apply if the company added features or use cases that are not already covered by its privacy policy. “We would provide additional notice or get permission as needed,” Rall says.

While Ring’s privacy policies apply to those who purchase its devices, people who are captured in footage or audio don’t have a chance to agree to them. “Privacy, security, and customer control are foundational to Ring, and we take the protection of our customers’ personal and account information seriously,” Rall says.

Ultimately, you agree to give Ring permission to control the “content” you share—including audio and video—while you own the intellectual property to it. The company’s terms of service say you give it an “unlimited, irrevocable, fee free and royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide right” to store, use, copy, or modify content you share through Neighbors or elsewhere online. (Audio recording can be turned off in Ring’s settings.)

“When I went out to buy a security camera last year, I looked for ones only that did local storage,” says Jen Caltrider, the lead researcher on Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included, which evaluates the privacy and security of products. Caltrider says people should try to keep as much control of their data as possible and not store files in the cloud unless they need to. “I don’t want any company having this data that I can’t control. I want to be able to control it.”

How Ring Works With Police

Ring’s deals with police forces—both in the US and the UK—have proved controversial. For years, the company has partnered with law enforcement agencies, providing them with cameras and doorbells that can be given to residents. By the start of 2021, Ring had partnered with more than 2,000 US law enforcement and fire departments. Documents have shown how Ring also controls the public messaging of police departments it has partnered with. “There is nothing mandating Ring build a tool that is easily accessible and helpful to police,” Guariglia says.

Rings’ terms of service say that the company may “access, use, preserve and/or disclose” videos and audio to “law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or third parties” if it is legally required to do so or needs to in order to enforce its terms of service or address security issues. Government officials could include any “regulatory agency or legislative committee that issues a legally binding request for information,” Rall says. For the six months between January and June 2022, Ring says it had more than 3,500 law enforcement requests in the US.

In December 2021, researchers at New York University’s (NYU) Policing Project released an audit of Ring’s relationship with law enforcement and the way its Neighbors app works. (Ring provided data to the audit’s authors about how the service functions.) The report details concerns that Ring could exacerbate police bias against Black and brown communities and notes a lack of transparency around how Neighbors works.

“We see a lot of risk in having police responding to calls about homeless people or low-level drug use,” says Max Isaacs, a staff attorney with the Policing Project and a coauthor of the audit. “When police are relying on private devices like Ring devices, it creates a democratic deficit, because now police can greatly expand their surveillance capabilities,” Isaacs says. Citizen-on-citizen surveillance, which Isaacs calls “lateral surveillance,” lacks scrutiny. “They can have thousands of cameras in a jurisdiction … without any legislative oversight.”

In response to the NYU audit, Ring said it made more than 100 changes to its service. These changes hint at how the app may have previously been misused by law enforcement agencies. Police are now required to use official accounts to request content about crimes, Ring will not donate devices to law enforcement bodies, and it will “no longer will participate in police sting operations.”

Ring also agreed to stop citing the impact its cameras have on crime—previous claims say it reduces crime in areas—until that has been verified by an independent study. “Ring also reviewed all of its marketing and social media materials to remove any claims about crime reduction,” the report says. The change that will do most to protect people’s privacy may be the introduction of end-to-end encryption, which means the company can’t access recordings of users who have the feature enabled. However, it isn’t turned on by default. Here’s how to turn it on.

Update 10:30 am ET, 8-5-22: Ring spokesperson Sarah Rall’s statement that the company “would provide additional notice or get permission as needed” pertains to other ways Ring may use your personal information, not to its data-retention policies.

from:    https://www.wired.com/story/ring-doorbell-camera-amazon-privacy/