Contact Tracing uses cellphone GPS data to trace individuals and groups to a particular location, and your private data will be controlled by county officials. Counties are also considering using infrared technology to “look” inside private homes and buildings to determine the number of people who are gathered. However, the US Supreme Court previously has ruled that it is NOT lawful for the government to use such data to track individuals without a warrant. The Court also has ruled that a government entity must have a warrant to use infrared technology to look inside a private building. For government officers to use cell data or infrared technology to track people, they must have express permission from each person or a warrant for every individual. Otherwise, tracking will be an unlawful search and seizure. Attorney KrisAnne Hall wrote an open letter for citizens to share with county officials advising them of these rulings. She believes citizens would win civil-rights lawsuits based on these rulings. Dr. Pamela Popper is asking anyone whose cell phone has been used to contact trace them to reach out to her to participate in a lawsuit. -GEG
“…The use of cell phones by government entities to geo track people is not a new nor an unsettled issue. Although it may be legal for a hospital or university to purchase such data from a cell phone provider for research purposes, it is NOT lawful for the government to use the data from data scientists to track individuals without a warrant -even though that data comes from a third party. In Carpenter v. U.S.,the Supreme Court held that a government entity MUST have a warrant to use cell data to geo track someone, even when that data comes from a third party.
Additionally, the Supreme Court held in Kyllo v U.S. that a government entity must have a warrant to use infrared technology to look inside a private building and to do so without a warrant is a violation of our rights to privacy.
For government officers to use cell data or infrared technology to track people, they must have either express permission from each person or a warrant for every single individual or that tracking will be an unlawful search and seizure. If our officials use this technology for contact tracing without warrants, regardless of where the data comes from, it will be tantamount to legal negligence. Given the recency of these Supreme Court cases it is highly likely that the counties would lose a civil rights challenge and the taxpayers will foot the bill.”
Read Attorney KrisAnne Hall’s full sample letter here:
If you install updates on your phone without reading the details then you might get an unwanted surprise. The latest involves contact tracking technology.
Contact tracing technology, in theory, will notify users when they have entered the presence of a person with the coronavirus. This project was begun in an effort “to protect people and get society back up and running,” according to an April 10 announcement via Apple’s newsroom. Even if this technology supposedly works, surveys have shown that three in five Americans are either unable or entirely unwilling to use the technology.
Veteran and MMA champion Paul Lazenby condemned this update on Twitter: “Contact tracing slipped discreetly into your latest IOS update. No notice given, no attention drawn to it. I wonder how many people really understand what a terrifying sign this is.”
He acknowledged that there appears to be an option to toggle the tracing technology on and off, but even then, whether the technology would stop tracking you without your consent is unknown.
Google, which is coordinating with Apple to lay the groundwork for this contact tracing system, has a history of tracking users even after they believe they have deactivated tracking technology.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) had previously scorched Google’s senior privacy counsel Will DeVries at a March 2019 hearing for that fact. He complained that Google technology still monitors customers even after they had supposedly turned said technology off. Hawley compared this fact to the iconic lyrics from “Hotel California,” quipping “It’s like that old Eagles song, ‘You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.’”
Ars Technica transcribed the wording of the new update’s description, which includes attributes such as “iOS 13.5 speeds up access to the passcode field on devices with Face ID when you are wearing a face mask and introduces the Exposure Notification API to support COVID-19 contact tracing apps from public health authorities.”
Among the specific features are the “Exposure Notification API to support COVID-19 contact tracing apps from public health authorities” and the “Option” to “automatically share health and other essential information from your Medical ID with emergency services when you place an emergency call (US only).”
Contact Tracing: Your governors, red or blue, are coming after you
A driver gets tested for COVID-19 at a drive-through testing center. CREDIT: Reuters
Red-state governors threaten their own citizens with arrest if they don’t comply with contact tracing investigators — up to six months in jail in Texas!
It was late morning on Tuesday, May 26, when James Daggett heard a knock on the door of his apartment home in Cedar Park, Texas, about 20 miles north of Austin.
When he answered it, two uniformed officers wearing badges and facemasks stood and stared.
One officer appeared to be a sheriff’s deputy and had a gun holstered on his side. The other wore a white uniform.
They said they had an important document to deliver that required his immediate attention.
The man in the white uniform handed him an envelope containing a letter from the Williamson County health department, demanding that he read it closely and follow its orders. What followed was a barrage of questions about his health, how many others he had living in his home, where he may have traveled recently.
As Daggett, 35, tore open the envelope and started to read the letter, the two men vanished from his doorstep as quickly as they had arrived.
James Daggett lives in Cedar Park, Texas, just north of Austin
These were just two of the foot soldiers in an army of 4,000 “contact tracers” hired by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, according to the Houston Chronicle, who signed a $295 million contract with Albany, New York-based MTX Group Inc., which partners with Google and SalesForce to data-mine the public and store their data forever in the Google Cloud.
The job of the contact-tracer investigators is to build a web, at the center of which are people like James Daggett, who just happened to test positive for COVID-19.
They reconstruct the spokes that come off the central hub – James’s family members, friends, the guy he may have sat next to on an airplane or at the local diner last night, or in the adjoining cubicle at work.
All it takes is to spend 10 or 15 minutes sitting or standing within six feet of another human being who was infected. These are all potentially infected persons who must be tracked down and sent into quarantine, then interviewed to get a list of their contacts.
In the end, one case such as that of James Daggett can ensnare hundreds of healthy, innocent Americans, and send them into lockdown, simply because they happened to breathe the same air that James breathed, or stood next to someone who did.
Contact tracers are trained to make sure all of these people, healthy or not, get thrown into complete isolation, away from their children, spouses and other family members while they get monitored for at least 14 days. Their release date is at the discretion of the public health authorities. The potential for abuse is great and could lead to continued rolling lockdowns throughout the country for months or even years. It is that very potential that has government watchdogs on alert.
As of this writing, every state has plans to exponentially expand their contact-tracing workforces.
………
Bye Bye Fourth Amendment
John Whitehead, a constitutional attorney and founder of the Rutherford Institute, said citizens are not generally required to speak to an officer about anything, much less their personal health.
“But if they have reasonable suspicion that you’ve committed a crime, they can hold someone for questioning,” he said. “Just an intimidation tactic.”
Whitehead said privacy rights are gone in today’s America, as the Fourth Amendment has been “shredded over and over and over again” since 9/11. The Fourth Amendment guarantees Americans’ rights against unreasonable searches and seizures of their personal property, papers and effects.
“The point is, who’s behind all of this? It’s Google and these big corporations,” Whitehead said. “They want to make the money on this. The dangerous thing I’m warning people about in all of this is if they get your DNA.”
He said Amazon, which built the intelligence cloud for all 17 intelligence agencies, “is now handing over your biometric information, your DNA, your fingerprints. There’s no privacy now. They can get whatever they want. And if they have it, either by police records, cases, or Ancestry.com, the FBI has access to that. A lot of this will drill down to this testing, where they get your DNA.”
What’s disappearing in today’s America, he said, is the legal principle of “bodily integrity.”
Once the state has your data and has turned it over to corporations, you will be vulnerable to them targeting you for various medical treatments [vaccine anyone?], as well as the possibility of discriminatory action by your employer.
“Here’s the key and people don’t realize this,” Whitehead said. “Access to healthcare data by big corporations will enable them to build a profile on people’s ailments, and target them for marketing campaigns; they will give that information over to employers and you could end up getting discriminated against. Landlords could ask you to leave their building. And they could also give it over to police. Police will have access to most of this information anyway because most of the police chiefs across the country are being trained by the FBI.”
Further arming the surveillance state
Americans must push back, now, or wave goodbye to their civil liberties.
….
Another red state goes all in for tracing, threatening arrest
In Georgia, GOP Gov. Brian Kemp has hired 1,000 contact tracers. He has given his contact-tracing program a new Orwellian name, “The Healthy Georgia Collaborative.”
In a report by Fox 5 Atlanta, health reporter Beth Galvin stated that she had received her information on Georgia’s contact tracers from the North Georgia Health District. Here’s how Galvin punctuated her May 28 report:
“If you’re in quarantine and you’re supposed to be checking in every day and you’re not, your health district will check in with you, and if you still don’t comply you could face a misdemeanor.”
“All information collected is provided voluntarily, and will be kept confidential according to HIPAA standards,” according to the state’s press release.
In an effort to clarify the state’s position, I called Jennifer King, the public-information officer with North Georgia Health District, who provided the following statement:
“All persons identified as infectious persons are required to comply with the quarantine ordered by the state (please refer to the attached ORDER FOR HOME QUARANTINE). They are required to check in daily while under quarantine in one of three ways: They may choose to have us call them to monitor, they may monitor through the application on their mobile device, or they may call the Georgia Poison Control Center. Information other than this requirement may be provided voluntarily and will be kept confidential according to HIPAA.”
The attached order provided by King states in bold print: “TAKE NOTICE that failure to comply with this Quarantine Order is a misdemeanor offense pursuant to O.C.G.A 31-5-8.”
Governors such as Kemp in Georgia and Jay Inslee in Washington are publicly stating that compliance with their contact-tracing spies will be “voluntary.”
But to say the program is “voluntary” is blatantly dishonest linguistic trickery. Remember how, in the early days of the lockdowns, we were told the draconian rules were just “temporary?”
The politicians and bureaucrats lied about “temporary,” knowing they would later shift to “new normal,” making “social distancing” and “no more handshaking” fixtures in a permanently reordered society.
Voluntary is the new temporary. It’s only voluntary until they say it’s not. It’s only voluntary until you refuse to volunteer. Then it becomes mandatory.
The scenario works something like this: Citizens will be asked to voluntarily quarantine and report daily to the local health authorities. If the citizen fails to submit to quarantine or to check in on a daily basis, the case becomes mandatory.
At that point, your medical privacy rights under the HIPAA law no longer apply. You have become an enemy of the state.
“The information can be given to a public-health agency if the government says it’s required to prevent an imminent threat to public safety,” Whitehead said. “And guess who gets to determine the definition of an imminent threat? The public official who is sitting somewhere far away in an office with drapes and flowers on his desk that we pay for.”
The new normal: Enslavement to the state
With contact tracing in place as part of the “new normal,” very few governors are likely to return to mass lockdowns like they did in late March and early April. They will simply apply the lockdowns to individual persons through contact tracing.
Watch the disturbing video below from a woman in California who went through that state’s training program for contact tracers.
It will actually be possible for some healthy people to go in and out of multiple 14-day lockdowns, depending on who they happen to come in contact with at work, in restaurants, or other places where people gather.
Imagine a salon worker or barber who comes in close contact with dozens of customers per day. If one of them happens to test positive, that barber will get outed and sent into lockdown.
The only way to escape this endless loop is to accept the vaccine being pushed by Bill Gates in his repeated statements to the media that “we cannot go back to normal until the whole world is widely vaccinated.”
Whitehead said the most terrifying aspect of contact tracing is it turns people into government snitches, using fear to encourage a turn-in-your-neighbor mentality.
That’s the mentality that has existed in all totalitarian societies throughout history, from Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia and Communist China. After the state-run media whips up an atmosphere of fear, people are easily led and will turn on each other if they think it will protect themselves or their family.
“Fear builds its own prison walls,” Whitehead said. “Everybody becomes a suspect and this time we are using the word “lockdown;” that’s prison terminology. We are prisoners in our own homes now. We can be reported by a neighbor if you cough, you don’t wear a mask.”
How did people end up in the Nazi camps? Whitehead said he was curious so he studied history to find out.
“Almost 85 percent of people who wound up in the camps were reported by their neighbors,” he said. “That’s where we are going. We’re following that model. Everyone is going to be nervous. You’ll be afraid to speak. First Amendment rights are dwindling. Anybody who speaks the truth today is going to look like a rebel or a radical.”
That’s why the Fourth Amendment was written, he said, to protect Americans against such abuses. But today’s politicians and judges have little respect for it.
“All my research and study shows that we’re headed down a really bad path and I’m afraid that people are going to give in,” Whitehead said. “We are being psychologically re-engineered to accept really tight control over our movements, how we think, and how we relate to other human beings.”
What to do if you are called by a contact tracer?
“If people want to take a Fourth Amendment stand, they don’t have to give over any information, their name or whatever when asked. They’re not required to. One question I would ask is: ‘Am I being charged with a crime? Why would you be contacting me?’ If they show up at the door, you can say the same thing.
“Now, the caution is that you could get arrested, but the only thing that’s going to change things around in this situation is either the people stand up and say ‘I’m not going to take it,’ or they take it. If you take it, it’s going to get really bad. But I’m afraid that, this is what I see generally, most people believe what they see on the mainstream media; they’re going to fall into the game.”
One man who has decided not to “take it” is James Daggett in Texas.
“People need to understand that this is how they’re handling this,” Daggett said. “It’s very heavy-handed…That’s what tyrants depend on. People wilting in the heat of the moment. If I am in any way impeded from carrying out my normal life, then I am going to contact an attorney.”
Americans need to know that the warnings being given about contact tracing are not some vague conspiracy theories.
“It’s reality,” he said. “There were guys with guns at my door.”
As Whitehead says, the only way to tip the scales and turn things away from tyranny is to take a stand and refuse to cooperate with the burgeoning army of health spies.
The time to make that stand is now.
Leo Hohmann is an independent freelance journalist and author of the 2017 book “Stealth Invasion.” If you appreciate the research and reporting of LeoHohmann.com, please consider a donation of any size.
Harvard prof with $4 million home imagines future without yours
Friday, May 15, 2020
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Bob Kellogg, Billy Davis (OneNewsNow.com)
A constitutional law professor who teaches at Harvard says the COVID-19 pandemic provides a great opportunity for America: Replace the U.S. Constitution with a more “common-good” document and a more powerful government to enforce it.
Writing in The Atlantic, Harvard Professor Adrian Vermeule says the U.S. Constitution has “outlived its utility” and now the time has come for government to claim a more centralized role in people’s lives.
In the scholarly article, Professor Vermeule writes:
As for the structure and distribution of authority within government, common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law’s inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity. The bureaucracy will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule.
It’s not clear from the article why this new self-described government “bureacracy” will not be seen as the “enemy” of the public nor what happens to people who do hold such a view of government’s “inner morality.” But there are some estimates about past results in history.
Elsewhere in the article, the professor imagines this newly realized American society would mean “Libertarian” concepts such as property rights and economic rights “will also have to go, insofar as they bar the state from enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources.”
A footnote to the article states it is part of “The Battle for the Constitution,” an ongoing project of The Atlantic that invites debate on the topic.
“He’s actually saying some things that I think are really, really scary,” observes civil liberty attorney John Whitehead, “like doing away with property rights, redistributing resources by the government.”
If the Harvard professor ever gives up his own property, he would be surrendering a nice accommodation: the professor lives in a 4,078-square-foot, five-bedroom home in Cambridge with an assessed value of $4.7 million, the City of Cambridge website shows.
Whitehead, a longtime advocate for constitutional liberties, and his Rutherford Institute often represent clients in cases where 4th Amendment rights are threatened by a bullying police officer, for example, or a school administrator has punished a child for exercising his 1st Amendment rights.
During the current pandemic, Whitehead is witnessing some of his worst fears being discussed — mandatory contract tracing, tip lines for snitching on neighbors, and screening checkpoints — in the name of public safety.
“As long as ‘we the people’ continue to allow the government to trample our rights in the so-called name of national security,” Whitehead writes, “things will get worse, not better.”
OneNewsNow reported this week that the health director for Ventura County, California announced COVID-19-posititive people would be removed from their homes if there are not enough bathrooms to keep family members separate.
“I’m telling you,” Whitehead tells OneNewsNow, “they’re using this coronavirus pandemic situation to push their agenda and it’s one of the most dangerous agendas I’ve seen in recent years.”
Regarding the professor’s open call for more government and less freedom, Whitehead says he was alarmed by the communist-sounding demands. It is even more alarming, he adds, that such beliefs are likely being taught to impressionable law students at the Ivy League school.
“If you don’t have property rights,” Whitehead warns, “that means you are the property of the government.”
The world has been turned upside down with draconian government orders to “flatten the curve” with what is called Social Distancing. Schools have been closed for months, businesses have been involuntarily shut down and travel restrictions have idled 90 percent of the airlines. The net result is over 36 million American’s are unemployed and the number is rising.
Now we learn the whole social distancing lockdown that has paralyzed the nation comes from a very surprising source. A May 2nd article in the Albuquerque Journal reveals social distancing hysteria is NOT based on scientific evidence or clinical medical trials for that matter. (Emphasis added)
How would you feel if you learned your normal way of life had been completely upended based on a computer model created by a 15 year old Albuquerque New Mexico High School student named Laura Glass?
Glass, along with her Dad Robert (a government scientist then working at Sandia National
Laboratories) cooked up a home brew computer model for a science and engineering fair in May, 2006. Robert Glass had been working on computer models for the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center at Sandia and often worked from home.
Part of his work entailed computer models showing how people come into contact with each other during everyday life. Laura Glass used that data to project how high school students could possibly transmit infectious diseases. Her “model” suggested high school students could easily infect huge swaths of a population so putting a stop to those contacts would hypothetically “save lives.”
Miss Glass appeared to have no understanding of the benefits of herd immunity. She didn’t seem to know that most healthy people with strong immune systems naturally fight off viruses and build up antibodies against future infections. According to a variety of medical experts herd immunity should be the primary tool to fight off viral infections and only the sick and elderly should be quarantined. But I digress . . .
A call from Homeland Security
Her efforts earned her third place in the Medicine and Health category of the science fair.
That would probably have been the end of it but for Robert Glass’s government connections. While High School sophomore Laura Glass was creating her contagion computer model the George Bush administration was feverishly working on bio-terrorism countermeasures.
Somehow news of Laura Glass’s high school science project wound up in the hands of US Department of Homeland Security. You know those skilled airport security professionals highly trained in the art of patting down wheelchair bound grandmas and creepily fondling their victims’ genitals.
Glass received a call from Homeland Security requesting a brief for Secretary Michael Chertoff. The Bush White House was holding a cabinet level counter bio-terrorism briefing and no idea was too loony to consider. Glass’ briefing suggested that whole segments of society should be shut down based on his daughter’s computer model.
The idea of locking down huge swaths of the nation in the event of a virus outbreak met with considerable push back. But ultimately the Centers for Disease Control made social distancing official policy in February 2007. They call it Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPI) and this is the first time it’s been implemented but will definitely not be the last.
So shutting down the entire nation based on flawed computer models is now official government policy. Robert Glass is now retired and enjoying a generous government pension. He was interviewed for the article by phone while relaxing in his second home in northern Idaho.
Mr. Glass waxed philosophical about the carnage wrought by his and his daughter’s lock down computer model. “Anything new is difficult,” he said. “You have to train people to do this well, without freaking out and calling each other names. . .”
That’s easy to say when you’re pulling down a fat government pension every month. Enjoy a comprehensive health care package, all paid for by the little people freaking out and calling each other names as they struggle to feed their families. Odds are this lockdown is just the beginning of many more power grabs by our increasingly totalitarian overlords – IF we let them.
Contact tracing which is nothing more than constant real time monitoring of citizens every move by government stooges is being implemented right now. Untested, unproven, possibly deadly vaccines are being “warp-speeded” into production. President Trump has assured the nation that he will authorize the military to distribute the vaccine across the land quickly once it becomes available.
Constitutional Lawyer and Jeffrey Epstein guest (who assures us he kept his underwear on during massages on Lolita Island,) Alan Dershowitz, says that the state has full authority to vaccinate any person it deems necessary. This comes from a video interview by Jason Goodman released May 16th on Youtube.
Our inalienable rights of freedom and liberty are under assault by a totalitarian state like never before. The words of Thomas Jefferson come to mind.
When Government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.
Mr. Jefferson also said:
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
The political class has a choice to make. Either honor the oath they all took to uphold the Constitutional rights of the people or face the consequences. I pray they make the right choice for all our sakes.
* * *
References:
Social Distancing born in ABQ teen’s science project, Albuquerque Journal May 2nd, 2020
Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense strategy, Practice and Science. Vol. 4, Number 4 2006
The 2006 Origins Of The “Lockdown” Idea, Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research May, 18, 2020
Representative Bobby Rush (D-Il) introduced on May 1st H.R. 6666, a piece of Orwellian legislation that could create a national surveillance and quarantine program, allow government entry into our homes to test for Covid-19 and even grant the authority to remove Americans from their homes by force.
Also called the TRACE Act (Testing, Reaching and Contacting Everyone), the bill was co-sponsored by 58 house democrats and touts that it would allow the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to provide grants to some hospitals, schools, and nonprofits to help fight the coronavirus.
“This bill authorizes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to award grants for testing, contact tracing, monitoring, and other activities to address COVID-19 (i.e., coronavirus disease 2019).” [SOURCE]
However, the law would also give these organizations the power to test Americans for Covid-19 “as necessary, at individuals’ residences, and for other purposes,” and give the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) the authority to forcibly remove Americans from their homes if “necessitated by the circumstances of the declared emergency.” [SOURCE]
This bill is in clear violation of the fourth amendment, which guarantees, “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The key word here is ‘unreasonable’, however, meaning if the Supreme Court classifies it as ‘reasonable’, these home invasions will remain legal despite being clearly against the spirit of the law.
The push for forced entry echoes remarks made by the World Health Organization’s Dr. Michael Ryan in early April.
“In some senses, transmission has been taken off the streets and pushed back into family units, now we need to go and look in families and find those people who may be sick and remove them, and isolate them, in a safe and dignified manner.” – Dr. Michael Ryan [SOURCE]
The Queen of England voiced her support for forced entry as she compared it to British evacuations prior to the London bombings of WWII.
“[Citizens were]evacuated from their homes and sent away for their own safety. Today, once again, many will feel a painful separation from their loved ones but now, as then, we know, deep down, it is the right thing to do.” [SOURCE]
The TRACE Act has a keen focus on ‘contact tracing’, a term that effectively means government surveillance of our everyday behavior. Its purpose is to test for who has the coronavirus and to whom they may have come in contact. In Washington State, the government will soon require restaurants catalogue the phone numbers, emails, and time of arrival of every customer.
You may want to think twice if you believe that these programs will ever go away once enacted. Governments rarely give up power without incredible pushback from voters. Edward Snowden articulated this brilliantly while the pandemic was still in its early stage.
“Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what is being built is the architecture of oppression.” – Edward Snowden [SOURCE]
Interestingly, Bill Gates was recently awarded patent #060606 for a, “crypto currency system using human body activity data.” In layman terms, it’s a patent for a digital tattoo microchip which can detect ‘body activity.’ Millions of dollars have already been awarded to companies for similar technologies by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Watch Luke Rudkowski discuss the larger agenda behind the TRACE Act on Bitchute:
About the Author
Phillip Schneideris a student as well as a staff writer and assistant editor for Waking Times. If you would like to see more of his work, you can visit his website, or follow him on the free speech social network Minds.
French Doctors Speak Out Against New Contact Tracing
Pam Barker | Director of TLB Europe Reloaded Project
A somewhat emotional video from a young practicing physician on Youtube, republished below, alerted us to this topic of medical snooping by the French government in order to allegedly stop / control / monitor the chain of infection (and us). Overall, this practice may become the next reason why we shouldn’t be visiting our family doctor or the local hospital starting from tomorrow, May 11, when our two-month(!) lockdown officially ends.
An MSM report of the French situation may be found here, but below are two actual doctors giving their feedback, one on video and one anonymously in writing. Readers may also be interested in this US article by Daisy Luther via Zerohedge on the rollout of contact tracing titled “Contact Tracer” And “Disease Investigator” Jobs Spring Up Across The Country.
So from tomorrow, the French family doctor (and the hospital doctor) will be the initiating person to identify a patient supposedly with covid, ask for the names and contact numbers of those people the patient has been in contact with (both within and without the immediate family), enter the information given into a centralized database, and do (unreliable) testing on the patient. At which point the non-medical staff of the French health insurance system will take over and send teams of people to test those contacts, hoping to find patient zero along the way. The initiating doctors themselves will get 55 euros instead of the regular fee of around 25 euros, plus 2 (or 4) extra euros for each contact name with a phone number.
The infection has likely been in France since at least October/November; confirmed cases were predicted to be going down around the time lockdowns were enforced in France (March 16) and the UK (March 23); Public Health England downgraded the severity of the disease on March 19. So is this all a case of a system and government justifying themselves to the public when, originally, they did absolutely nothing, telling us via the media that it was a Chinese problem? Likely the infection has been doing the rounds here for a while although it remains to be seen what kind of spike in cases will happen post-lockdown. Some government heads are expected to roll following the resumption of ‘normal’ life, so they must be anxious to be seen to be doing something. As well as finding a reason to implement Big Data surveillance systems on us.
The anonymous doctor below raises concerns about doctors being motivated to participate with a fee incentive; the reliability of the diagnostic tests (presumably the PCR test); confidentiality of a patient’s medical data by administrative, i.e. non-medical, staff; use and security of patient data entered in the system once it’s all finished; retaliation by people named as contacts who may be subject to confinement. And overall, the ethical problem of doctors turning in their patients to a bigger, data-driven system outside the normal bounds of doctor-patient relationship, as well as turning in names of people to the government who are not even their patients.
The doctor in the very short video below raises some additional points:
Covid is a notifiable disease so reporting these cases in and of itself isn’t a problem. (ER: It is in the UK, too, but should it be? Should covid, with a death rate comparable to ‘flu and mild or no symptoms in the majority of the population, be put in the class of diseases like cholera and TB?)
Yet a government bill is in the pipeline to create a new system of health data in the context of this crisis, without our input. Patient health information cannot be kept for more than a year, but it is likely to become a permanent system.
The national platform of patient data will be kept on Microsoft servers; the data will be drawn from hospitals, pharmacies, and patient files.
Will this result in health insurance costs going up for people? Will banks refuse loans to people? Will employers not re-hire people because their health data is accessible?
The young guy’s overall point below is – I’m a doctor, not a cop.
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Philippe Jandrok’s Blog, 7 May 2020
Message from a Doctor Who Wishes to Remain Anonymous
ATTENTION! … TO BE WIDELY DISTRIBUTED! NEW DRAMATIC DIRECTION IN THE ONGOING MADNESS!… The total compromise of the SS in this so-called state of emergency, totally falsified and allowing all the most Orwellian excesses!
What I am reporting here is taken from a communication from the CGT Union of social security funds following a meeting with the national director of the fund, Mr. Nicola Revel, dated May 5, 2020.
It concerns the plan to mobilize the fund’s administrative employees (and not the fund’s medical personnel, who are supposed to be trained and protect the notion of medical secrecy!) to supposedly limit the spread of the post-lockdown virus.
It consists of the creation of a “brigade” (sic!) in the form of a telephone platform of 6,500 people at the national level, which they cynically call the “Guardian Angel Brigade” BAD (… Really, what a sense of humour!) supposed to carry out large-scale epidemic detection of the famous “contact cases,” identified by family doctors on the declaration of their Covid patients.
In order not to get rid of the increasingly invasive anglicisms, it is called “contact tracing”!
These agents will be employed 7 days a week, this by freezing their collective agreement, and with compulsory overtime, but not eligible for the scheme in question from 8am to 7pm .
I remind us all once again (we can never hammer it home enough) that the covid tests have no validity, with a positive predictive value between 30 and 50%, which means that one can be a carrier of the virus and negative on the test, just as one can be declared positive even without having contracted the virus!! It is, however, on this basis that the policing will be carried out with an insane stigmatization of anyone!
But in high places, it causes no remorse!
The “contact tracing,” in fact, is old-fashioned: the family doctor diagnoses an infected patient. He tests him with a virological test, takes care of him and organizes his confinement as well as that of his close entourage. 3,000 to 5,000 cases will be expected per day starting May 11th according to Santé Publique France.
The doctor registers his patient in Ameli Pro, with his consent within 24 hours.(ER: Ameli.fr is the website portal for all health insurers in France.)
He receives 55 €, plus 2 € per individual name (4 € with a phone number) entered in Ameli Pro, with whom the patient has been in contact, outside the rules of physical distance and protection.
(ER: From another report, the 55 euros includes the normal 25 euro family doctor consultation fee.)
Mr Revel considers that the professional secrecy to which the employees of the Sécu are bound is sufficient to guarantee data protection. No details are given on what will happen to the data collected on Ameli Pro after the crisis is over.
On the other hand, it is confirmed that its twin, the SITEP tool (operated by DGS/AP-HP/Santé Publique France) will (together with the results of serological tests carried out in laboratories) make it possible to carry out epidemiological studies under cover of anonymity. As the CNIL has not given its opinion on the nature of the files created, it will arrive after the battle. So much the worse, when it comes to health data, as well as labour law – it is a matter of urgency!
Behind Ameli Pro, the agents will take over from the doctor to contact the “contact cases” by telephone. Their mission will be to convince everyone to get masks from the pharmacy, do a laboratory test and go into isolation while waiting for the results, with a work stoppage as backup.
In addition to the research and the relationship with the “contact cases”, the colleagues will also issue work stoppages.
Unanticipated risks to patients zero :
Patients (“patient zero”) who are the source of the trace will have the right to have their identity withheld from individuals who will be identified and quarantined. But only if they ask their doctor not to check the “does not wish to be identified” box in Ameli Pro. There is a risk there.
If claiming to be a known person (ER: an ‘infected’ person?) can make it easier to quarantine a third party, it could lead to retaliatory measures. There are environments where “snitching” is a serious thing. You have to be aware of this reality when you’re doing population tracing.
I’ll stop here. It’s edifying enough for anyone who still has their common sense. Not to mention that if medical ethics still had any meaning that was not misused, all doctors would have to resist and oppose the implementation of such a nightmare. But hey, most of them have seen their incomes drastically reduced during this epidemic! Yes, they have! It’s strictly attested to! And so… A big increase in income after a famine, it can be tempting!!…
He acknowledged that there appears to be an option to toggle the tracing technology on and off, but even then, whether the technology would stop tracking you without your consent is unknown.
A constitutional law professor who teaches at Harvard says the COVID-19 pandemic provides a great opportunity for America: Replace the U.S. Constitution with a more “common-good” document and a more powerful government to enforce it.
“He’s actually saying some things that I think are really, really scary,” observes civil liberty attorney John Whitehead, “like doing away with property rights, redistributing resources by the government.”
“I’m telling you,” Whitehead tells OneNewsNow, “they’re using this coronavirus pandemic situation to push their agenda and it’s one of the most dangerous agendas I’ve seen in recent years.”
