The Post-Covid-19 World: a Permanent Dystopia
Written in March/April 2020, a.k.a. "I told you so"
(originally published as Chapter 13 in When China Sneezes)
Whatever the nature of the novel coronavirus that hit the world in 2019, global reactions to the pandemic will change—indeed already have changed—life on this planet dramatically. It’s difficult to deny that this was the goal of the national responses by the U.S., UK, and other powerful governments. Coronavirus has been pressed into service on countless levels as a means to an end, a vehicle for cementing control—of global trade and finance, of society, and ultimately of the individual—by powerful interests who have long been working behind the scenes to effect just such results.
However it began, the “planned chaos” of the greater epidemic is geared toward birthing the same new world order old David Rockefeller notoriously spoke about—the new globalist society which figures so prominently in what are pejoratively called “conspiracy theories” by people who believe in a benevolent ruling class. The fingerprints of the recently-deceased plutocrat Rockefeller are all over the events of the last few months, dating all the way back to a publication titled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” a quartet of simulations with a deceptively bland title that the Rockefeller Foundation funded in 2010 in conjunction with the Global Business Network.
The first of the four scenarios included in that publication, called “Lock Step,” lays out a near-future in which a global pandemic has driven the world police-state crazy, in which sheer panic caused by a killer virus (like 2019’s COVID-19, but deadlier) leads even so-called liberal democracies to look to China’s authoritarian response for guidance—and one by one discard their liberal western freedoms in favor of a sanitized, technologically-enhanced Panopticon:
During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified.
If Lock Step was the screen treatment for the film that the 2019 coronavirus outbreak has become, Event 201 was the screenplay. A simulation organized by vaccine enthusiast and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates’ Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with the World Economic Forum, Event 201 was held at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Medicine in October 2019. Prominent figures in business and government came together to participate in a “tabletop exercise,” war-gaming a pandemic in which a novel coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to humans wreaked havoc on the global economy and killed 65 million people. As the real-world events of 2020 began to unfold, the event’s host, the Center for Health and Security, posted a disclaimer on its website warning that projections—that scary 65 million death toll—shouldn’t be taken as a certainty, but did not take down several hours of video highlights from the exercise, which provide a fascinating window on the movers and shakers of Big Business and Big Government discussing how best to “triage” businesses and human beings with limited resources as a virus very much like Covid-19 lays waste to society.
It’s difficult to watch the Event 201 videos without developing a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach, and this may be the point of leaving the videos up on normally-censorious YouTube. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has admitted in internal powerpoint presentations that one way to maximize uptake of a new, untested vaccine, especially in the face of public opposition, is to create a sense of urgency and fear in the populace surrounding the disease it is supposed to prevent. As scientists supposedly scramble to develop a cure-all shot for Covid-19, the notion that tens of millions will die if the vaccine is not widely adopted will no doubt encourage not only individuals to rush to their local clinics, but governments to mandate the inoculation for their citizens. No one wants 65 million deaths on their conscience.
The presence of such “predictive programming” has become all but expected to those who study international crises. American media have leapt to draw comparisons between the coronavirus epidemic and the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, perhaps hoping to set the nation on the desired “war footing” that encourages populations to abandon concern for their civil liberties and embrace a jingoistic, unthinking form of patriotism. CNN’s Chris Cuomo—himself an alleged coronavirus case—ordered his audience to “surrender the ‘me’ to ‘we’” because “we’re in a war”—insisting that complying with an increasingly draconian lockdown was just “doing our part” for the “war effort.” Certainly the government response from the U.S. and its allies has powerful echoes of the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 legislation, even as the “enemy” this time around is supposedly a microscopic virus.
However, drawing the obvious parallels between the two crises should invite other, more troubling similarities. By some counts, as many as 46 “drills” by various government agencies echoing certain elements of the 9/11 attacks were underway in the days and weeks before (and even during!) the real-life attacks. Indeed, Johns Hopkins was behind one of those drills—a scenario called “Dark Winter” which simulated a “covert smallpox attack on U.S. citizens,” closely resembled the anthrax attacks that followed 9/11 right down to its claims that Saddam Hussein was building secret bioweapons labs and the involvement of an “al-Qaida operative” linked to “Usama bin Laden,” and included in its participants notorious WMD propagandist Judith Miller of the New York Times.
While pandemic “preparedness” exercises are not inherently sinister and indeed should be regarded as legitimate preparedness called for by government, the echoes with reality in something like Event 201 or Lock Step are too strong and too numerous to write off as coincidence—and any official “bungling” regarded as deeply suspect given the amount of rehearsals government and other authorities have undergone.
As with 9/11, powerful interests shifted into action as soon as the novel coronavirus epidemic was declared, proposing “solutions” that had clearly been devised in advance. They were able to take advantage of the reigning confusion, smoothly assuming control even as many in their own governments were thrown off balance by the crisis. “Simulations” like Lock Step and Event 201 allow powerful factions within the ruling class government-corporate nexus to ensure their interests are put first in any response to a crisis, laying out roadmaps for action while their adversaries are still scratching their heads trying to figure out what happened. By the time some rogue congress(wo)man has gotten around to demanding answers on how suspending habeas corpus or bailing out bloated corporations addicted to their own stock buybacks helps those dying of an unfamiliar plague, the measure has been rushed through and popular consent manufactured in the media.
It is thus impossible to go along with the prevailing narrative that the U.S. somehow “botched” its official response to coronavirus. Having run the simulation (along with representatives from China’s Center for Disease Control and several international corporations) just months before at Event 201, Washington’s point-people on disease response clearly knew what they were doing when they refused the WHO tests, ordered Dr. Helen Chu of Washington to stop testing her flu patients for coronavirus, and dragged their feet declaring a national emergency. Responding competently would not have created the same atmosphere of panic that ultimately developed, a frenzy that saw even prominent members of the typically anti-government “alternative media” demand lockdowns and mouth the propaganda phrases—“flatten the curve,” “social distancing”—that became the scenario’s calling card.
Such a crisis state, after all, is necessary to effect massive societal change—a phenomenon Naomi Klein describes in Shock Doctrine, and which has been used time and time again with resounding success by an international ruling class with its roots in the US, UK, and Israel. The coronavirus epidemic set the stage for a rollout of a nightmarish “new normal” in which everyone is perfectly alienated from their own humanity, outfitted with a biometric ID housing their social credit score and financial data, and wholly dependent on the benevolence of the corporate-state nexus for their next meal.
Emergence of a Police State
Former U.S. President Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once infamously recommended, “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” It would be difficult to imagine an epidemic response better suited to the development of an authoritarian police state than the U.S.’ reaction to coronavirus. Just as Lock Step predicted, the US—like Italy, France, and other European “democracies”—took its cue from China and immediately began claiming authoritarian powers under the guise of a medical emergency. The US’ constellation of federal- and state-level responses to the epidemic has ripped huge chunks out of the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and arguably Third and Eighth Amendments, a shocking impingement not seen since the Patriot Act trampled the “land of the free” into the ground in the name of fighting terrorism. Given the precedents—emergency after emergency has been declared since 2001, never to be officially concluded—it is highly unlikely these rights will be returned to Americans when the epidemic is officially declared over—if the epidemic is officially declared over. And where the US goes, so goes the rest of the world—until they’ve had enough...
Governments—especially those that style themselves as liberal democracies—have pounced on the coronavirus outbreak as a vehicle to accelerate their enactment of levels of authoritarian control with unprecedented speed. The only comparable example of such a grand-scale “problem-reaction-solution” in the last half century for Americans is 9/11, though the tradition dates back at least to World War 1, when the unconstitutional Espionage & Sedition Acts were used to squelch a rising socialist movement by making it illegal to criticize the war. And just as the Patriot Act, written years before 9/11 and placed in a drawer awaiting a “New Pearl Harbor,” was triumphantly passed in the days immediately after the planes hit the towers, so an astonishing array of police state measures have been pulled out of cold storage and introduced—some quietly, and some with much fanfare—in the wake of the coronavirus.
The American government wasn’t alone in whipping out its police-state wish-list as it watched China seal off 40 million people behind a giant cordon sanitaire in Hubei province in January. The UK, France, Italy, Australia, Israel, and many other countries seized various opportunities to ram through unpopular “emergency” legislation of their own. Just as predicted in the Lock Step scenario, much of this took the form of emulating China, which in addition to shutting down entire cities, had adopted unprecedented restrictions on internal movement of citizens, tightened controls on information, and deployed the military, constructing massive new hospitals in a matter of days to tackle the epidemic.
But the Chinese Communist Party did not have to nullify any constitution or otherwise violate its own laws in order to obtain the authority for its actions. A strong current of jealousy crackled through western media’s hostile coverage of the Chinese coronavirus crackdown, even as pundits like Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations gloated that China’s heavy-handed response to the outbreak meant the government was surely on its last legs.
As western governments scrambled to follow in China’s footsteps, they had to sell the outbreak as a legitimate reason to suspend the rights of their people. Fortunately, weeks of shocking videos coming out of China—showing people dropping dead in the street, convulsing on gurneys, and other horrors—had convinced many that the coronavirus was not something to mess with, and fear-primed populations willingly gave up their rights. States of emergency were declared in some areas with just a handful of cases, and the military was soon rolling through the streets of “democratic” cities from Paris to San Diego.
Just as none of the many emergency measures declared in the US since September 11 have been repealed, these “emergency” measures adopted to “fight” the “war” on coronavirus will not vanish when the virus does. A UK law allowing the indefinite detention of individuals on mere suspicion of having the virus remains in effect for two years, meaning not only police but also “public health officers” will—under the bill’s vague wording—have the authority to pull people off the street, break up events, and otherwise behave like a military junta long after the epidemic is over. The legislation was supposedly made necessary when a patient tried to “break out” of a quarantine hospital patrolled by armed guards. Trials by jury were suspended across the UK.
Things looked even worse on the other side of the Atlantic, where the Justice Department’s requested suspension of habeas corpus, the statute of limitations, and the suspension of other legal protections once included in the Fifth and Sixth Amendment to the Constitution would conclude only upon the “termination of the COVID-19 national emergency or the Chief Justice’s finding that the emergency conditions no longer materially affect the functioning of the federal courts.” Unless the president were to declare the emergency over (something vanishingly rare in recent US history), these rights could be gone for good. When news the Justice Department was considering such an appalling power grab reached the public, the resulting outcry forced a spokeswoman to clarify that it would be the judicial branch, not the executive—unelected, appointed-for-life judges, rather than an elected president—who would exercise the expanded powers. It’s not clear how that was supposed to help Americans sleep easier at night—perhaps the somber black-robed judge is considered a more responsible steward of absolute power than the orange-skinned Commander in Chief.
The Justice Department even invoked the threat of coronavirus-related terrorism, essentially throwing everything it had at the “problem” of resistance to the shredding of the Constitution. Noting that the virus “appears to meet the statutory definition of a ‘biological agent,’” deputy AG Jeffrey Rosen urged law enforcement agencies in a March memo to use “the nation’s terrorism-related statutes” to punish “threats or attempts to use COVID-19 as a weapon against Americans.” Equating coughing on others—or even threatening to cough—to a deliberate act of terrorism wasn’t the limit of the absurdity: the FBI put out a bulletin warning that “white supremacist groups” were urging their members to cough on police and Jews.
People have already been charged under these respiratory-terrorism laws. A New Jersey man faced anywhere from 3 to 7 years in prison for coughing on a supermarket worker, laughing, and telling her he had coronavirus (and that her co-workers were lucky to have jobs); the stupid prank saw him charged with terroristic threats in the third degree, harassment, and obstructing administration of law in the fourth degree. The UK, too, has charged multiple people under stepped-up penalties for malicious display of symptoms, warning anyone who coughs or spits at emergency workers or even threatens to do so that they could be charged with common assault and spend as much as 2 years in jail.
Projecting into the future, it is clear that consent is being manufactured for the permanent suspension of basic judicial rights based on an invisible menace. This opens up a bonanza of opportunities for a police state determined to cleanse its territory of troublesome political dissidents, enabling it to detain people indefinitely merely on suspicion of having a virus or charging them with terrorism for coughing. Quarantine facilities could soon fill up with political activists, detained on the basis of dubious and inaccurate tests like those devised by the WHO and CDC—constantly-shifting lists of symptoms further expand the net until literally anyone on the street can be considered a possible coronavirus patient and dealt with accordingly.
The Trump administration’s decision to frame the fight against the epidemic as a “war” should unsettle any American concerned with what few rights they retain. Wars have historically been cause for imprisoning massive numbers of people—from Japanese-Americans during World War II to black men during the War on Drugs—and in the last half century, the U.S. has failed to win a single one. The War on Poverty, the War on Cancer, the War on Terror—all have exacerbated the problems they claimed to seek to defeat and dragged on for decades, burning up billions (if not trillions) of dollars even as the government insisted there was no money in the budget for healthcare, housing, or education. Wars are cause for shutting down the press, imposing rationing of goods and services, even drafting segments of the population to help in the “war effort.” UK utilities have already warned of potential blackouts, while both U.S. and UK governments have issued calls for retired medical professionals to return to work—essentially a medicalized version of the draft. Putting the country on a war footing also raises the risk that an excuse will be manufactured to swap out the virus-enemy with a real one—Iran, or even China, after both have been softened up by an epidemic that had a curiously voracious appetite for America’s enemies.
Locked Up
The coronavirus has ushered in unprecedented restrictions on freedom of movement—both within countries and across national borders. While some level of border closure is reasonable under the epidemiological logic of quarantine— and, as Lock Step reminds us, “China did it and it worked” with their unprecedented lockdown of some 50 million people in 17 cities in Hubei province—many countries reacted tardily to news of the pandemic’s spread, alternating between foot-dragging and frenzied action, guaranteeing poor decisions would be made too late to achieve anything beyond instilling fear in their citizens. Indeed, one is forced to ask if that was the intent of such haphazard responses in the US, given the almost yearly “pandemic preparedness exercises” which promised something better.
The EU’s refusal to close its borders until mid-March, even as epidemics raged in Italy and Spain, forced hard-hit member countries to institute their own makeshift lockdowns, some riddled with giant loopholes like Spain’s crowded commuter rail, which seemed to defeat the purpose utterly. But internal restrictions on movement reached a pathological extreme on the east coast of the US toward the end of March. Densely-populated New York City predictably became a national “hot spot,” sending residents scattering into surrounding states, where they were briefly declared criminals. Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo issued an order barring New York refugees from her state, warning moneyed Manhattanites that attempting to flee to their homes in the Ocean State would result in having their cars pulled over and ultimately having their homes searched, door to door, by the National Guard. Violators would be forcefully quarantined for two weeks, and those found to be harboring fugitives from the Empire State would be punished with fines and jail time. These disturbingly gestapo-like tactics were only derailed at the last minute by New York’s own governor, Andrew Cuomo, who threatened a lawsuit. Rather than repeal the order entirely, Raimondo merely expanded it to cover all out-of-state visitors. Florida and Texas also set up check-points for out-of-state drivers from “hotspot” states along major highways, and other states eagerly seized the right to pull over out-of-state plates as the epidemic dragged on.
Lest anyone get the idea that the quarantine restrictions were optional, Cuomo set the militaristic tone of the official response with the epidemic barely arrived in the U.S., sending in the National Guard to police a “containment area” within the city of New Rochelle, 20 miles north of Manhattan. The “containment” wasn’t rigid—residents could still come and go—and the Patient Zero of the cluster had already exposed countless people commuting back and forth from his job in midtown before his diagnosis. At first there appeared to be little epidemiological purpose to the military presence. But as Trump mulled cordoning off the city entirely, then backed off building his wall around the city that never sleeps, local government stepped in where federal will fell short. Nearby New Jersey cities of Newark, East Orange, Orange, and Irvington locked themselves down. Residents, forbidden to so much as sit on their stoops, were also banned from traveling between the municipalities. “It’s dangerous to come out,” Newark mayor Res Baraka told reporters.
Some of the newly-defined “crimes” within the pandemic police state seemed designed with the idea of quashing protest against the first round of draconian measures. “Social distancing”—alienation by another name—required individuals to keep more than six feet away from one another and forbid more than a handful of people from deliberately gathering. Mandated by most governments (with a few outliers like Sweden and Belarus), fines for violations could be steep. A British man who failed to “self-quarantine” upon arrival on the Isle of Man was threatened with a £10,000 fine and three months’ prison. Australia warned citizens caught out without one of 16 pre-determined “excuses” for leaving their homes could be fined as much as $11,000 or jailed for six months in New South Wales, fines that could go as high as $19,800 in Victoria. The government banned gatherings of more than two people even as infection numbers there declined by half.
Enforcement of such measures—not only in Australia but in nearly every country where fines have been rolled out—has been uneven. Individuals com- plained of being cited for nonexistent violations, and even in the most heavily-policed cities, there were not enough police to arrest or fine everyone who violated “social distancing.” The arbitrary nature of enforcement encouraged the development of a resigned awareness that even following the rules to the letter was not enough to “save” a person from fines they certainly cannot afford.
The stay-at-home orders didn’t just stop people from partying or protesting. Most countries and municipalities restricted workers involved in “non-essential” industries or occupations to working from home, permitting only travel to supermarkets, pharmacies, medical facilities, and exercise. Which industries were deemed “essential” varied by country—US states closed their few remaining bookstores but kept marijuana dispensaries open. Some countries even required citizens to carry documents verifying their “right” to be out of their home—even if, as in France, they could print or hand-write the documents themselves. The idea seems to have been merely to get populations accustomed to producing papers on demand—to ask permission to exist in public space.
In Tunisia, the government deployed tank-like surveillance robots to patrol the streets of the capital, and video posted to social media appeared to show one of the dystopian enforcers scanning a woman’s “papers.” It’s a chilling window on learned helplessness—the ’bot appears to be equipped with facial recognition, so she knows that even though she can outrun it there’s no use, she’s been spotted. She rummages around, produces her papers, and even thanks the inanimate object as it goes on its way, satisfied she is allowed to be outside.
Quarantine-enforcing robots were not confined to the streets, either—contagion proved a golden opportunity to step up the rollout of robotic patrols of land and sky. Since the epidemic exploded in Wuhan, drones were used to scold quarantine-breakers, and while the concept was sneered at as Orwellian when it debuted in China, parts of the U.S. and Europe quickly embraced the airborne proximity police. Less than two years after buying its first drones and promising citizens they wouldn’t be used for routine police patrols or warrantless surveillance, the New York Police Department was doing just that, proudly flying them over Central Park, looking for social-distance violators and bragging about the “nearly 100% compliance” it was seeing. Residents of Western Australia posted video to social media of a hefty black drone outfitted with red and blue lights and a mechanical voice reminding locals to maintain “social distancing” at all times.
Another line of drones, made by the U.S. company Draganfly, was rolled out by the University of Southern Australia with the ability to detect fever, cough, respiratory and heart rates, and blood pressure from a distance. While nothing currently on the market couples these capabilities with the ability to “neutralize” the infected, the U.S., through IARPA (the intelligence equivalent of DARPA), had been working on technology to identify targets via facial recognition since before the pandemic began. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence put out a call in September 2019 for solutions to facial recognition and other biometric recognition technologies’ weaknesses at distance—currently an obstacle on the path toward AI-enabled drones that will eventually be able to identify a target from the air and decide, without human input, whether or not to destroy it.
Even in those countries whose lockdowns didn’t require citizens to carry and display “papers,” the conditioning still pointed toward a submissive, permission-oriented model of domestic movement. Australians were forced to choose from 16 authorized “excuses” to be outdoors. The UK warned as March turned into April that being caught out “without a reasonable excuse” would trigger a fine that doubled with every offense. In a disturbingly vague order, police were given the authority to “ensure parents are doing all they can to stop their children breaking the rules” or face quarantine—presumably without their children. When the hashtag #FilmYourHospital was trending on social media, with many convinced the whole epidemic was a hoax after comparing news reports showing packed hospitals and busy ambulance bays with the tumbleweeds blowing through the empty ERs and parking lots they saw at their own local facilities, a British man was shamed in the media and supposedly jailed for “bragging” about filming an empty hospital in Aylesbury.
Violating a quarantine order even cost several citizens their passports in Singapore. The city-state adopted especially Orwellian measures to fight the epidemic, criminalizing “spreading rumors” about Covid-19, seizing vehicles found in quarantined areas, and threatening jail time to those who repeatedly violated social distancing guidelines. The latter measure popped up in the US, UK, and other “democratic” governments as well, even though processing social-distancing violators by sending them to already overcrowded jails is positively Kafkaesque in its absurdity. Some accounts of these arrests came with public-shaming-ready stories—a man running a speakeasy in south Brooklyn, a man holding a 60-person party in Charles County, Maryland—but never did they explain what purpose was to be solved by moving the offender from one overly-crowded circumstance of their own creation to another of the state’s.
Mayors and prosecutors in several cities, including New York and San Francisco, made a point of releasing hundreds of supposedly low-level offenders to reduce the risk of disease spreading behind bars. Some municipalities, including Baltimore and Fort Worth, also announced they would no longer be arresting people for certain offenses. Philadelphia even released a list, which included “personal, retail, and vehicle theft,” prostitution, and “all narcotics offenses.” Outbreaks of joyful looting in stores that hadn’t yet been forced to close their doors were filmed and shared on social media for millions to watch in disbelief, as if the latest Purge film was unfolding in real life.
It may seem pointless to release low-level offenders only to fill the jails back up with different low-level offenders, but there was method to their madness—articles surfaced almost immediately from the Republican nemeses of these (largely Democratic) mayors, alerting the public to the sex offenders, violent criminals, and other fear-inducing types being released despite the governments’ reassurances. The knowledge that such Bad People were roaming around served to encourage ordinary folks to not only remain indoors but to trust their local police force, even if its members had gone mad with the expanded power newly delegated to them by the state. Even when a veritable army of some two dozen police marched in formation on a little girl’s birthday party in Los Angeles, commenters praised the show of force.
This push to embrace Big Brother was concerted and deliberate. Every tightening of control on movement was accompanied by a hint that it was the people’s own refusal to “behave”—to meekly stay indoors, waiting for orders from above before they dared stick their heads outside—that had made the crackdown necessary. This is for your own good, every order reminded them. The aim is to program the populace to think of the government as a stern, but loving parent, determined to use “tough love” to protect them from the mean nasty virus (and terrorists, and communists, and whatever other bogeyman happened along) outside.
The pandemic powerfully cemented the relationship between Big Brother and Big Tech. Government reached out to the tech platforms for help with enforcing quarantines and gathering restrictions, and Big Tech did not disappoint. Corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have long operated hand-in-hand with the US government (and to a lesser extent its allies), serving as a private-sector backchannel allowing agencies still theoretically subject to the restrictions set forth in the Constitution against suppressing free speech and warrantless search and seizure to circumvent those pesky protections. With coronavirus already in use in other areas of government to justify the detonation of all remaining civil rights, agencies didn’t have to apply much pressure to gain access to mineable data on all citizens.
Just weeks after the western media excoriated China for the intrusive smartphone apps it was using to track coronavirus patients’ quarantine compliance and possible exposure routes using cellphone location data, Israel publicly announced it was doing the same, enlisting its Shin Bet intelligence agency to surveil potentially infected individuals and trace their contacts over time in what PM Benjamin Netanyahu claimed was a method used to track terrorists that he’d never before turned on the civilian population. Israelis, unused to being treated like Palestinians, were furious, gradually coming to realize they may be stuck with Netanyahu as dictator-for-life (the conveniently-timed outbreak had prevented his prosecution on multiple bribery and fraud counts). Other countries went down the same technological path, albeit via the public-private partnership route. Finding themselves flush with money (the US CDC got $500 million in the first coronavirus stimulus bill to build a “public health surveillance and data collection system”), health authorities were lured by the siren call of companies with expertise at building Orwellian surveillance systems. Police state cheerleader Peter Thiel’s Palantir inserted itself into nascent coronavirus tracking systems in the US, UK, France, Germany and Switzerland. Facebook and Google met with the Trump administration to discuss drafting Americans’ phone data into the fight against the virus. Google’s sister company Verily built a coronavirus testing advisory platform in the U.S., while Amazon went one further and unveiled a program to deliver and test Seattle area residents (in partnership with the ubiquitous Bill Gates, who told anyone who’d listen that he wanted “digital certificates” attesting to the bearer’s coronavirus—and vaccine—status for everyone).
But location data isn’t the only way the police state can surveil individuals within their homes. Amazon taught its AI voice assistant Alexa how to answer questions about the epidemic, announcing by the end of March that the device could now evaluate users’ symptoms and advise them on whether or not they should get tested. Whether or not it will report back to HQ on whether the user heeded its advice—and whether it has yet been trained to listen for the telltale “dry cough” that is supposed to be a hallmark of coronavirus—remain to be seen, but all “AI voice assistants” are likely to be pressed into service in the rush to surveil potential coronavirus patients. Israeli startup Vocalis Health was already hard at work on such a system by April, announcing it was working on a program that would diagnose the disease based on vocal samples—a technology that would allow the disease to be diagnosed over the phone, with or without the awareness of the individual on the other end of the line. Being ratted out as a coronavirus case by an overzealous AI practitioner of “telemedicine” is one thing, but the potential for worse abuses—say, a pharmaceutical company’s robocalls “phishing” for coronavirus sufferers and profiting off their referrals to a local hospital—is huge. Given that legal experts have recommended that lawyers working from home bury their “smart” speakers deep in their backyards to avoid running afoul of confidentiality rules, trusting Alexa, your phone, or any other electronic device not to report you to the authorities for coughing the wrong way is like trusting the government to safeguard your data.
The coronavirus-data gold rush eventually hit such a fever pitch that even the media establishment seemed to balk (“Today’s Covid-19 data will be tomorrow’s tools of oppression,” warned the Daily Beast). But their concern turned out to be mostly for those sad benighted people in “non-democratic countries” the US would like to regime-change. In one breathtakingly naive piece, The New York Times lamented that “As coronavirus surveillance escalates, personal privacy plummets,” earnestly suggesting that Americans “learned their lesson” from 9/11 about how temporarily “ratcheting up surveillance...could permanently open the doors to more invasive forms of snooping later.” Apparently, the only Americans who have learned this lesson are those in the government who believe it’s a grand idea.
Nothing says dystopian police state like a population outfitted with must- wear tracking armbands. Europe embraced the Chinese model of virus-tracking, though its Pan-European Privacy Preserving Proximity Testing (PEPP-PT) supposedly colors within the lines of EU privacy law by calling for “anonymous and voluntary use” of Bluetooth instead of tracking citizens via their location data. Its creators admitted the app would require at least 60% of any country’s population to install it in order to have an effect, but they had a shockingly tone-deaf solution: “Those without cell phones could wear Bluetooth-enabled armbands,” as a wide-eyed Reuters report put it. Given that the Germans least likely to have cell phones are also the oldest and most likely to remember the last time Germans habitually sported armbands, this seems like someone’s idea of a sick joke, but it might be in the interest of a group conducting wide-scale behavioral reprogramming of a society to see how far it can push that society.
There was no mention made of what might happen if less than 60 percent of any given country were willing to download the app. The UK’s National Health Service developed its own coronavirus-tracing app, assuring Britons the opt-in service would work just fine as long as more than half the population downloaded it. Users are supposed to upload their diagnostic information to the app, which then interacts with nearby phones via Bluetooth, alerting individuals when someone who has tested positive passes within the vicinity. Given the social stigma of sporting such a scarlet letter, it’s difficult to imagine anyone voluntarily uploading a positive diagnosis. Coronavirus fraud will no doubt take off as a cottage industry among Britain’s newly-unemployed should the quarantine ever end. Social shaming is powerful, but self-preservation is a difficult instinct to overcome. Google and Apple devised a similar collaboration for the U.S., announcing the contact-tracing function would eventually be integrated into both operating systems—easily hacking a shortcut through the thorny issue of regaining customers’ trust after violating their privacy again and again.
Police-state tech need not be high-tech. Former New York mayor and billionaire failed presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg, who notoriously called the New York Police Department his own private army, apparently couldn’t resist the urge to command another army, and invested $10 million in the hire of human contact-tracers to blanket the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey and Connecticut) and sniff out people who’d come into contact with infected individuals. Deputizing thousands of laid-off “citizen snitches” through the most densely populated parts of the East Coast was bound to be unpopular, but owning a major media outlet to spin it positively no doubt helped, especially given that the Bloomberg-endowed School of Public Health hosted the Event 201 simulation that seemed to spawn so much of the policy implemented in the wake of the pandemic.
Nor did low-tech enforcement even require such well-paid “private armies.” Karnataka state in India issued an order requiring all individuals under home quarantine to send in selfies hourly to the government to prove they were staying at home. The notice—simple, yet chilling—warned that attempting to fool the system with a doctored photo—photos taken with a smart phone include a bounty of identifying information, from geographical coordinates to date and time— would land the offender in “mass quarantine” and that government teams would be conducting random spot-checks to verify the quarantined individuals were in fact staying at home.
The simple, elegant, yet wildly disturbing variants on house arrest make the quarantined subject complicit in their own imprisonment, manufacturing consent by force in order to resolve an intense cognitive dissonance. Such a dynamic, however, is already present to some degree in any surveillance system that requires its “victim” to “voluntarily” download an app, the paradigm first set forth in Wuhan.
For those populations that won’t accept technological solutions voluntarily, there’s always force. Louisville, Kentucky outfitted some quarantine-violators with the type of geolocating ankle bracelet typically given to house-arrest prisoners after one was spotted going shopping against court order. Infrared “fever guns” became ubiquitous in China, wielded by authorities at train stations, markets, office buildings, and other public places; smaller versions were even installed at the entrance to apartment complexes, connected to alarms that would summon police if someone with a fever passed by. It’s easy to imagine this technology being integrated with a locking mechanism to confine repeat quarantine violators in the manner that someone convicted of drunk driving must blow into a breathalyzer before they can start their car. As technology advances—the Bill Gates-funded ID2020 project to outfit every individual with a “portable biometric identity” is already underway—the sky’s the limit with regard to digitizing the ball and chain.
The international mobile phone industry may be one-upping even the most intrusive governments on surveillance, crafting a system that transcends national borders in the name of fighting the pandemic. Standards-setting body GSMA denied reports it is working on creating a global virus-tracking system, based on contact-tracing and location data sharing, but rumors persisted. The supranational system would no doubt continue to be used long after the coronavirus was a distant memory, a key player in the post-pandemic “new normal.”
Americans who try to hide from this Panopticon-on-steroids may find their usual technological disguises no longer apply. Capitalizing on the U.S.’ distracted populace, Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal took aim at encryption—a technology the Five Eyes intelligence consortium declared Public Enemy Number One back in 2018—with the EARN IT Act, which would effectively ban the technology without literally outlawing it. Introduced in March, the law would force tech platforms to adhere to a series of “best practices” drawn up in the service of “saving the children” from sexual exploitation, mostly focused on stepped-up policing of content. Platforms would be held liable for any exploitative content (or anything else the panel decided to declare off-limits, like political dissent) and potentially hauled into court, strongly incentivizing them to preemptively ban users considered likely to offend. Actual experts on child sexual exploitation saw through the ruse, panning the law as the “political theatre of child protection,” and pointed out the futility of focusing on enforcement over protecting kids from being exploited in the first place. EARN IT constitutes a full frontal assault on the First Amendment that will hit independent journalists and any other political dissidents who do their work online particularly hard. The police state does not want to take any chances that some inconvenient truth might escape the cage it is building for the minds of its citizens.
It isn’t just freedom of speech facing certain destruction at the hands of the “new normal”—freedom of religion is uniquely targeted by the pandemic police state. Churches, synagogues, and mosques were threatened with closure in some areas as their proprietors stubbornly persisted in holding services, reasoning (quite logically) that their flocks need God in the middle of the crisis more than ever. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio warned he would “permanently” shut down any church that insisted on holding in-person services after being told to disperse.
Megachurch pastor Rodney Howard-Browne was briefly detained and charged with breach of public health regulations for holding two massive Sunday services just days after Hillsborough County, Florida issued a “safer-at-home” (light lockdown) order. The hallowed western tradition of separation of church and state, one of the founding principles of American jurisprudence and a fact of life even in many nations where it isn’t expressly written into the constitution, was quietly shelved in favor of the pandemic society’s new God: “flattening the curve.”
The post-pandemic order preying on citizens’ minds and souls hasn’t forgot- ten about their bodies, of course. The social distancing diktat has had the effect of chilling existing protest movements out of existence, a rosy outcome for the Macronist government of France, which has struggled to keep the Yellow Vest movement (and the General Strike that followed on its heels in early 2020) from spiraling out of control. In the days following PM Emmanuel Macron’s declaration of lockdown, the movement held one protest, but there was little to no chatter about further demonstrations on social media. Less than a week after declaring the quarantine, almost 39,000 people had reportedly been fined for failing to produce their glorified permission-slips, a phenomenon that wasn’t limited to France. In the three days following Italy’s similar declaration, its Department of the Interior revealed it had cited some 35,506 individuals for being outdoors without their “papers,” which like France’s constituted a sworn statement detailing their reasons for being outdoors.
The military are joining the police on many countries’ streets, absurdly deployed against a microscopic “enemy.” While not every nation explicitly declared martial law, the psychological effect in western “liberal democracies” of seeing the streets and transit flooded with military assets is unnerving—perhaps deliberately so.
Videos showing hundreds of tanks being shipped up the coast of California and armored trucks rolling through the streets of Paris were widely shared on social media, belying governments’ insistence that the military activity planned for the coronavirus response merely constituted building field hospitals and delivering bag lunches for the quarantined elderly.
The U.S. has long been gradually reorienting its prodigious military resources toward training soldiers for urban warfare, with Pentagon-produced videos explaining how the notion of fighting wars against an enemy that has willingly separated itself from civilian populations is a thing of the past. And military exercises have shifted accordingly, from something conducted in uninhabited areas to hiding in plain sight. North Carolinians were warned in February 2020 that they might catch a glimpse of an “unconventional warfare exercise” called Robin Sage, in which Special Forces troops dress up as “guerrilla freedom fighters” and engage with civilian volunteers across multiple counties.
Conducting urban warfare drills during a period of de facto martial law is a remarkably unsubtle show of power. Such in-your-face flexing has been going on for years, but has recently intensified: Los Angeles residents were terrified in February 2019 by an unannounced military exercise that saw dozens of helicopters buzz the city, flying between buildings and in one case even landing in the middle of the street—without informing locals in advance. A similar “classified” exercise planned for Washington, DC was inadvertently revealed in a Pentagon budget request to Congress just a few months later.
The Robin Sage exercise strongly resembled Jade Helm, the controversial 2015 military exercise that so disturbed the Texas governor that he dispatched volunteer National Guardsmen to monitor it (a brouhaha that was retroactively written off as a product of “the alt-right and Russian bots” by notorious perjurer and former CIA director Michael Hayden). Jade Helm was an “unconventional warfare” exercise that featured military personnel (again, identifiable by armbands alone) descending on civilian areas to retake them from “hostile” militants—with Texas, Utah, and southern California mapped as enemy territory. While the military insists it has run both exercises for years, so little is known about either by civilians that a Special Forces soldier participating in Robin Sage was actually shot and killed in 2002 by a sheriff’s deputy who thought his weapons were the real thing and believed he was acting “suspicious.” Americans have a deep-seated distrust of even their own military operating on US shores, as the frenzy over Jade Helm proved, and events like the coronavirus pandemic will have their hands full trying to reverse that feeling.
That would assume the goal was to endear the military to the population, of course. But the primary aim of flooding the streets with military personnel, as it has been ever since September 11 made M16-toting troops a common sight in train stations and even subways, was to instill fear. No doubt those American soldiers stationed in Europe after World War II, who took personal pride in the fact that their home streets were not under military occupation, are rolling over in their graves. And while the US was not formally in a state of martial law as of the beginning of April, the president’s order to authorize up to a million National Guard and Reserve troops for deployment by the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security coupled with the various state-level emergency invocations meant Americans were now living under martial law in everything but name.
U.S. troops who served overseas might have felt a sinking sense of deja vu as they were pressed into service kicking in doors in the good ol’ US of A. In addition to the Rhode Island National Guardsmen deputized to sniff out refugees from New York, the Texas National Guard was detailed to go door-to-door coronavirus-hunting in the Dallas area in late March. The governor later tried to dispel “conspiracy theories” by insisting any military visitors would definitely be nurses on a “medical mission”—but still interrogating people about whether they’d had contact with any coronavirus patients. The clarification wasn’t particularly reassuring, given that Tarrant County, Texas’ emergency orders permitted the government to “commandeer or use any private property” and “temporarily acquire, by lease or other means, sites required for temporary housing units or emergency shelters for evacuees”—theoretically allowing a violation even of the rarely-mentioned Third Amendment forbidding the involuntary quartering of troops.
As the uniformed men with guns took to the streets, Congress was targeting civilians’ own right to bear arms amid the largest surge in gun purchases since the U.S. started keeping track of background checks in 1998. Democratic congressman Hank Johnson introduced a bill in March rolling together some of his party’s favorite gun control restrictions, including a universal background-check measure that would require the identities of gun buyers who failed a background check to be turned over to local law enforcement. Congress would allow the government to arbitrarily deny citizens the right to a gun license—even in the absence of criminal convictions or mental health issues. Adding insult to injury, the bill would slap a 50% tax on guns and 30% on bullets and prohibit the purchase of a gun by anyone who’d bought one in the preceding month. Some parts of the country weren’t even willing to wait—as the state of California declared an emergency, Los Angeles County shut down gun stores as “nonessential businesses,” landing the county sheriff in court. Other states made their own, subtler incursions into Second Amendment territory, slow-walking background checks. Dick’s Sporting Goods chose the middle of a pandemic to stop selling guns at 440 stores. It’s clear many lawmakers are itching for an excuse to start confiscating firearms, and it won’t require much of a trigger, especially with the military conducting door-to-door “wellness checks”—and hunting down those rogues who dare cross state borders.
Even before the coronavirus outbreak kicked off a cascade of state-level (and finally federal) emergency declarations, the U.S. Justice Department was quietly chipping away at habeas corpus in the name of stopping mass shootings. By December, Attorney General William Barr had rolled out a Minority Report-esque pair of initiatives that made the Patriot Act look positively restrained. One program, the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA), would harvest data from an individual’s electronic devices—including fitness trackers and AI voice assistants—to assemble a psychological profile with the help of machine learning, hunting for signs of mental illness that could be used to justify “pre-crime” intervention. The other, the Disruption and Early Engagement Program (DEEP), would intervene against individuals deemed to be “mobilizing toward violence,” deploying “court ordered mental health treatment,” electronic monitoring, and every other tool in the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-detention toolbox against individuals who’ve literally done nothing except worry law enforcement. Given that all one has to do to be considered a dangerous extremist or “mentally ill” in the U.S. in 2020 is post what are regarded as “conspiracy theories” online (or cough in the wrong direction), political dissidents are uniquely at risk in the post-pandemic police state. “Pre-crime” algorithms are already a reality, and armed with all the data gleefully harvested from individuals’ phones in the coronavirus gold rush, they are becoming much more powerful. Entire behavioral patterns will be criminalized if they can be said to resemble too closely those of “known subversives”—to say nothing of the guilt-by-association arrests that will be made through the enhanced contact tracing the new virus-tracker apps provide.
Since the Reagan years, the U.S. has kept a massive database of “unfriendly” citizens to be rounded up in case of ever-more-loosely-defined emergency, called Main Core. The list, which contained 8 million names by 2008, was reportedly a favorite of the Bush administration in deciding whom to target with its then-novel Patriot Act surveillance powers. While Main Core’s capabilities include cutting-edge AI capability to predict targets’ next move, allowing for “almost instantaneous” arrest of targets, nationwide near-total lockdown places most Americans in their homes, meaning it’s never been easier for authorities to “black-bag” inconvenient activists with no one being the wiser. Even when the quarantine is lifted, the powers seized under the cover of pandemic response set the stage for an appalling assault on dissent in the country that has the gall to still call itself the land of the free.
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