MARK OF THE BEAST?

REVELATION 13: 16And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: 17And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. 18Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

The Surveillance State Thrives During the Pandemic Can we take government officials at their word that they'll eventually abandon their new powers? J.D. TUCCILLE | 4.10.2020 1:40 PM maxphotostwo076157 (PHOTOPQR/LE PROGRES/MAXPPP) From cellphone tracking to drone eyes in the sky, perused health records, and GPS ankle bracelets, an epidemic of surveillance-state measures is spreading across the world. It's all done in the name of battling the spread of COVID-19, of course, since every crisis is used to justify incursions into our liberty. But long after the virus has done its worst and moved on, we're likely to be stuck with these invasions of our privacy—unless we push back, hard. The rationales for surveillance are easy to understand, within certain limits. Public health authorities battling the pandemic want to know who is spreading the virus, which people they may have infected, and the movements of those potentially carrying the bug. China, where the COVID-19 outbreak began, leveraged its already deeply intrusive system of social control to force people to install cellphone apps that assigned them a code according to (allegedly) their perceived risk of spreading contagion. Permission to travel or enter public spaces depended on that code even as the software also tracked their whereabouts and shared data on users' phones with the authorities. Democratic South Korea didn't go as far as China, but it still tracked people's cellphones and credit card usage. Officials also used surveillance cameras to monitor the movements of those suspected of being infected. Emulating a Chinese tactic, Spanish authorities turned to aerial drones to detect unauthorized gatherings of people—already a cringe-worthy concept for those of us disinclined to ask permission to meet with friends. Loudspeakers on the drones then ordered violators to return home. Here in the U.S., government officials joined with tech companies to paw through the location data that most of us share with cellphone apps. The idea is to determine if people are staying at home as ordered; if not, the information detects where we're clustering. Privacy rules have also been relaxed to allow easier sharing of patients' medical records with government health officials. And some government agencies are attaching GPS ankle monitors to COVID-19 patients and those suspected of exposure lest they go for a walk in the country or pick up groceries from a curbside. In most cases, Big Brother-ish tactics have been sold as temporary measures intended to battle very real danger from the COVID-19 pandemic. The surveillance is intended to enforce social distancing and track carriers of the new coronavirus so we can end the health crisis and return to normal. But can we take government officials at their word that they'll eventually abandon their new powers? "Government demands for new high-tech surveillance powers are all too familiar," warns Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "This includes well-meaning proposals to use various forms of data about disease transmission among people. Even in the midst of a crisis, the public must carefully evaluate such government demands, because surveillance invades privacy, deters free speech, and unfairly burdens vulnerable groups." TOP ARTICLES 1/5 Banning Alcohol Sales During the COVID-19 Pandemic Is a Terrible Idea "And," Schwartz adds, "new surveillance powers tend to stick around." The EFF attorney isn't alone in his concerns. "I think the effects of COVID-19 will be more drastic than the effects of the terrorist attacks of 9/11: not only with respect to surveillance, but across many aspects of our society," wrote security expert Bruce Schneier. "And while many things that would never be acceptable during normal time are reasonable things to do right now, we need to makes sure we can ratchet them back once the current pandemic is over." Our ability or lack thereof to "ratchet them back" is the key point here for surveillance powers. That's because, as Schwartz suggests, governments tend to expand their reach in response to crises, but only to surrender part of that new authority as danger recedes. "After each major crisis the size of government, though smaller than during the crisis, remained larger than it would have been had the precrisis rate of growth persisted during the interval occupied by the crisis," wrote economic historian Robert Higgs in his 1987 book Crisis and Leviathan. Tellingly, he coined the term "ratchet effect" to describe the phenomenon. Ratcheting back extraordinary surveillance powers becomes even less likely if the crisis drags on—either because of circumstances or because it's convenient for those who like the power it conveys. "COVID-19 will be here for the next 18 months or more," insists former Obama administration health policy adviser Ezekiel Emanuel. "We will not be able to return to normalcy until we find a vaccine or effective medications." Historian Nicholas Mulder predicts—and hopes—that many policy changes to meet the pandemic will become permanent. "Crises have always granted reformist policymakers powers to bypass legislative gridlock and entrenched interests," he notes at Foreign Policy. If surveillance powers continue to grow along with an ongoing crisis, you can only assume that the sophistication and intrusiveness of that surveillance will also grow. Along those lines, the Canadian company Draganfly is touting a drone that "can, from a distance, determine fever, which is much different than determining just temperature, cough detection, respiratory rate, heart rate, and blood pressure." The goal is to remotely detect potential COVID-19 cases. In the U.S., local public health authorities already scrape social media for information about foodborne illness to target and close suspect eateries. Albert Fox Cahn and John Veiszlemlein of the The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project say we should expect the same technique to eventually be applied to the pandemic. The future looks very closely scrutinized, all for our own health. Unfortunately, our liberty and privacy will die slow and unpleasant deaths in the process. That is, unless we start to actively oppose efforts to monitor our activities. China, the most pervasive surveillance state on the planet, has fueled as much innovation among those seeking to evade scrutiny as among those exercising it. People learned to install anti-spyware software on their phones or, more simply, to carry two devices—one for mandated apps and ID checks, and the other for unapproved uses. If cellphones really do become tracking devices, we might even leave them at home when out and about and in need of privacy. The withdrawal would be tough at first, but we can console ourselves with the knowledge that public health authorities would be keenly aware of the location of our coffee tables, and not of us. We could even back away from posting every detail of our lives, including our health, on social media. As for drones… If only there was some technology appropriate for knocking flying objects out of the air, and available in a variety of shot sizes. It would be best if government officials learned to back off and abandon truly temporary measures after the precipitating crises disappeared. But that's probably a lesson that they'll have to be taught rather forcefully. (source; reason.com) FACEBOOK TWITTER PERMALINK TECH Here’s How Apple and Google Plan to Track the Coronavirus Through Your Phone The idea requires widespread adoption and broad testing of potentially infected people; it isn’t clear whether government and public-health officials will get behind it The plan that could potentially cover most of the world’s smartphones almost surely will be controversial for privacy and other reasons. PHOTO: ANGELA WEISS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES By Sam Schechner and Rolfe Winkler April 11, 2020 11:14 am ET PRINT TEXT 129 Do Apple Inc. AAPL 0.72% and Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG 0.10% Google hold the key for tracking the spread of Covid-19 and possibly reopening the global economy? The tech giants on Friday said they will release tools for software developers to create so-called contact-tracing apps that record when smartphones come into close contact with each other. Such apps could warn users if they were nearby someone later diagnosed as positive for Covid-19. The plan, which could potentially cover most of the world’s smartphones, is ambitious and almost surely will be controversial in certain quarters for privacy and other reasons. To work, it requires widespread adoption, as well as broad testing of potentially infected people, and it isn’t yet clear whether government and public-health officials will get behind the idea.

WSJ NEWSLETTER Apple and Google’s efforts put the two companies at the center of a push to use technology to limit the spread of the virus, positioning them as potentially unavoidable partners for governments. That could have an impact on the effort’s effectiveness, as certain countries in Europe have long sought to limit the power of giant technology companies and viewed their initiatives with skepticism. President Trump said Friday that the White House will take a “very strong look” at the plan. Apple and Google don’t intend their infrastructure to be used by a wide variety of app developers to build on, according to a person familiar with the project. Ideally they hope for one app per country to support a coordinated response by national governments, though the team is still working through details, the person said. The companies plan to vet apps closely and limit those that can use the new protocol. As a result, the two companies might wield a strong influence over the types of contact-tracing apps that are released around the world. In the traditional contact-tracing model, epidemiologists ask the newly diagnosed to recall where they have been and who they came into contact with. The goal is to identify, test and isolate those contacts quickly enough to slow an outbreak. It is less effective for fast-spreading diseases because conducting interviews and reaching contacts takes time. With A Trace How Google and Apple's proposed tracking technology would work. Karen and David meet in person for a 10-minute conversation. David later grows feverish and tests positive for Covid-19. He voluntarily enters the result into an app. 1 2 A few days later... Their phones, using Bluetooth technology, exchange anonymous identifier beacons which record that they have been proximity. David’s phone uploads the last 14 days of data for his broadcast beacons to the cloud. POSITIVE TEST 15min. 15min. SUBMIT Karen receives a notification on her phone. Karen continues her day-to-day life, unaware she was near a potentially contagious person. 3 4 ALERT: You have recently been exposed to someone who has tested positive for Covid-19. Tap for more information -> Sometime later... Karen’s phone periodically downloads the broadcast beacon keys of everyone who has tested positive for Covid-19 in her region. Once David tests positive, her phone is notified. Karen is not told the identity of the positive test. She receives information on what to do next, provided by a public-health authority. Anonymous identifier keys are downloaded periodically. A match is found. Source: Google Some experts believe that approach remains best, including an influential group from Duke University that issued a report on the topic this week. As a counter, a growing patchwork of tech companies, governments and researchers have been developing their own approaches to facilitating this process, but the differences in how they work matters to both doctors and privacy activists. Some countries in Asia have tapped into cellular-network data for location information to track the close contacts of infected people. Other places, including Catalonia, in Spain, have released voluntary apps that send users’ symptoms, and frequent location pings, back to a government health authority, according to health officials and the app’s developer. Privacy activists have taken issue with the use of location data even in fighting an epidemic because it can reveal very sensitive information, stigmatizing people and discouraging cooperation with public-health authorities. Instead of tracking devices’ specific locations, apps using the new protocol from Apple and Google would track proximity to other devices. To do so, they would rely on a technology built into smartphones called Bluetooth that is normally used to connect wireless headphones or transfer files to nearby devices. STAY INFORMED Get a coronavirus briefing six days a week, and a weekly Health newsletter once the crisis abates: Sign up here. In a diagram Google published Friday showing how the system would work, a woman sits next to a man on a park bench. Their phones each broadcast anonymous identification numbers, and each log the number the other broadcasts. The ID numbers change every 15 minutes, protecting each user’s anonymity. The man later marks a positive Covid-19 test in the app, which then uploads keys to a server that match with the ID numbers his app has broadcast the prior 14 days. The app on the woman’s phone regularly downloads keys for people who have tested positive. Her phone finds a match with the man’s key. The app then gives her guidance on what to do next—such as self-isolating, notifying health officials and getting tested. –– ADVERTISEMENT –– The app wouldn’t tell the woman the identity of the person she came into contact with who tested positive. Also to protect her privacy, and those of other users who never come in contact with a confirmed coronavirus case, the list of ID numbers she has come into contact with never leaves her phone. The companies’ plan aims to keep information about who people come into contact with on personal devices rather than collecting that data and storing it on servers. Epidemiologists say they eventually would want to know the identities of people who had come in contact with a confirmed case. The system Apple and Google are building wouldn’t be able to do that centrally, but apps could be built on top of it that ask users if they want to notify health authorities once a match is made. Apple and Google’s plan “appears to mitigate the worst privacy and centralization risks,” Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement released Friday. Among other things, she said, the organization hopes to make sure the data collection remains voluntary and that it is used only for public-health purposes. Not yet clear is who will build these apps for public-health authorities, who will also have to determine a process for logging positive tests. A self-reporting system would be open to widespread abuse. Will doctors log positive tests? How will they authenticate themselves within the app? There is also the risk of potential false positives if, for instance, Bluetooth registers a contact with someone on the other side of a window or wall. Despite the uncertainty, including over what apps Apple and Google will approve, developers are moving forward. Dana Lewis and her husband began developing a Bluetooth contact-tracing app called CoEpi, short for Community Epidemiology in Action, in late February. Ms. Lewis, 31 years old, has Type 1 diabetes and wanted an app that would let a user report symptoms such as dry cough that could be relayed to others they had been in close contact with before the person receives results back from a Covid-19 test, a process that can take days if the person can be tested at all. CoEpi is part of the Temporary Contact Number coalition, a group of developers working on Bluetooth contact tracing. Accessing the Bluetooth functionality of smartphones will be easier, she said, after the Apple-Google protocol is released in May, especially on iPhones, which Apple controls more tightly than Google controls Android devices. Ms. Lewis says CoEpi is working with health organizations and hopes her app, because it focuses on symptoms rather than positive tests, would be approved. (Source; Wall Street Journal)