CDC spied on millions of Americans during COVID by tracking cellphones

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CDC spied on cellphones COVID

CDC spied on millions of Americans during COVID by tracking their cellphones

From the very beginning of COVID tyranny, the push for vaccine passports has been nothing but a backdoor way of using the so-called pandemic to build an Orwellian police state, and with recent revelations that the CDC spied on millions of Americans by tracking their cellphones, it looks like Big Brother is well on the way of reaching that goal.

Newly released documents reveal the CDC spied on Americans by using COVID as an excuse to obtain cellphone location data in order to monitor schools and churches to see who was or wasn’t complying with lockdowns and other mandates. Additionally, the documents show that the CDC intended to use it for more-general purposes (via Motherboard):

The documents reveal the expansive plan the CDC had last year to use location data from a highly controversial data broker. SafeGraph, the company the CDC paid $420,000 for access to one year of data to, includes Peter Thiel and the former head of Saudi intelligence among its investors. Google banned the company from the Play Store in June.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more general CDC purposes.

The CDC used the data for monitoring curfews, with the documents saying that SafeGraph’s data “has been critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring.” The documents date from 2021. (Emphasis mine)

This news follows revelations back in January that Canada’s federal government was secretly surveilling 90% of its population during the COVID lockdown by tracking 33 million phones. And just like the CDC, Canada’s health organization plans to continue tracking population movement for at least the next five years to control “other infectious diseases, chronic disease prevention and mental health.”

The CDC is simply the latest U.S. government agency caught spying on Americans via their cellphones thanks to Donald Trump and his bought-and-paid-for Republican Party.

For example, BuzzfeedNews.com reported in October 2020 that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — the post-9/11 creation of George W. Bush — was using real-time cellphone geolocation data to track people, a practice DHS claimed was perfectly legal and required no warrant.

DHS purchased consumer cellphone data that made it possible for authorities to track immigrants trying to cross the southern border, a practice privacy advocates warned could lead to a vast “surveillance partnership” between the government and private corporations.

In an internal memo, DHS’s top attorney, Chad Mizelle, outlined how ICE officials were able to look up locations and track cellphone data activity to make decisions on immigration enforcement.

In defense of the practice, Mizelle stated his belief that DHS can obtain and use the data without a warrant or violating the Fourth Amendment — which protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures — That logic could lay the groundwork for the government to use the same data to track everyday Americans, raising red flags among privacy advocates.

A little over a year ago, we learned how the Defense Intelligence Agency — there’s a contradiction in terms — manipulated parts of the PATRIOT Act and created a program making it possible for them to spy on us via our cellphones without a warrant.

Revelations about how the CDC spied on millions of Americans by tracking their cellphones didn’t happen in a vacuum; the agency laid the foundation for it with its push for vaccine passports.

In July 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky suggested that a “health pass system” (vaccine passports) allowing special access to certain venues for vaccinated individuals like those used in France and Italy — not to mention Nazi Germany — could be adopted in the United States.

Earlier this year, Joe Biden announced a plan to give one billion COVID test kits to Americans for “free.” Besides the obvious fact that his “free” tests would be paid for with taxpayer money, Biden’s benevolence was, in reality, another backdoor method for gaining access to your cellphone; and eventually, the ability to track your every move.

“At home COVID tests have been made available to every congressional office, but these are the kind that require a smartphone to report results, and ‘tests results are reported to relevant public health authorities.’ We have developed a work around to the surveillance state.” (Emphasis mine)

In other words, once you use the test, government not only knows the results, but it will also has created backdoor access to your device. A COVID tyranny win-win.

As mentioned above, the CDC said in another section of the document that it wants to use cellphone location data for non-COVID-related purposes:

“CDC also plans to use mobility data and services acquired through this acquisition to support non-COVID-19 programmatic areas and public health priorities across the agency, including but not limited to travel to parks and green spaces, physical activity and mode of travel, and population migration before, during, and after natural disasters,” it reads. “The mobility data obtained under this contract will be available for CDC agency-wide use and will support numerous CDC priorities.” (Emphasis mine)

In March 2020 — well before vaccine mandates and passports — I wrote that COVID might lead to the end of liberty and the race toward tyranny. In the piece, I referenced an article written by John Whitehead, the founder and president of the Rutherford Institute, who believes (as do I) that COVID tyranny is leading to the creation of a full-blown police state:

“This coronavirus epidemic, which has brought China’s Orwellian surveillance out of the shadows and caused Italy to declare a nationwide lockdown, threatens to bring the American Police State out into the open on a scale we’ve not seen before.

“If and when a nationwide lockdown finally hits — if and when we are forced to shelter in place — if and when militarized police are patrolling the streets — if and when security checkpoints have been established — if and when the media’s ability to broadcast the news has been curtailed by government censors — if and when public systems of communication (phone lines, internet, text messaging, etc.) have been restricted — if and when those FEMA camps the government has been surreptitiously building finally get used as quarantine detention centers for American citizens — if and when military “snatch and grab” teams are deployed on local, state, and federal levels as part of the activated Continuity of Government plans to isolate anyone suspected of being infected with COVID-19 — and if and when martial law is enacted with little real outcry or resistance from the public — then we will truly understand the extent to which the government has fully succeeded in recalibrating our general distaste for anything that smacks too overtly of tyranny.

“This is how it begins.”

When all of this began a few short years ago, people wrote you off as a conspiracy theorist or tinfoil hat-wearing nut job if you expressed concerns about COVID tyranny leading us to an Orwellian surveillance or police state, but these new revelations about how the CDC spied on millions of Americans during COVID by tracking their cellphones appears to validate those concerns.

 

David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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