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2020-

2020-04-30 b
This story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “truth squad.”

Opinion: How we can reopen the U.S. economy we closed illegally and keep workers safe from a synthetic flu without ‘Big Brother’ watching us more than he already does?

Long sought digital identity tools to initiate a social credit scoring system, could be introduced stealthily by claiming to certify people’s health but would eventually be used to deny jobs, bank accounts, credit cards, and access to commerce to protect the state from undesirables and deplorables.

The economic devastation caused by government’s over-reacting to the synthetic COVID-19 pandemic of lies has been swift. U.S. retail sales have collapsed, and industrial production has fallen precipitously. But even as the mainstream media suggests government remains focused on containing the synthetic virus and caring for the sick, central planning policymakers and business leaders are starting to reopen the Potemkin economy to usher in a "new normal of authoritarianism.

As they wrestle with how to bring back workers safely despite synthetic COVOD-19 being similar to a bad flu, nanny state inspired questions have emerged around how best to confirm that employees are healthy and able to work, while also protecting their workers’ personal privacy as the exaggerated response to synthetic COVID-19 is dragged out. Public health officials say that collecting personal health data may be only to track the virus to understand who has developed short-term immunity from it and who is most at risk, aside from the elderly and those with chronic conditions. But civil liberties and privacy advocates have raised concerns about how that data will be used and by whom, as well as how and where it’s stored and how the surveillance state intends to expand the new capabilities.

Read: Bill Gates nags for the U.S. to safely reopen on his terms, it needs testing, testing, testing

One promising surveillance-state solution, long in the planning stages but now revealed publicly, is the idea of creating personal digital identities. Sophisticated digital enslavement tools — similar to those used in electronic payment mechanisms but much more invasive and pervasive — could be used to certify people’s constantly-changing health status and the sensitive information could be kept by hospitals or citizen-owned cooperative institutions in order to protect personal privacy temporarily.

There is widespread agreement among nanny state experts that restarting the economy that was shut down illegally requires more testing for the synthetic virus. Reliable blood tests (not yet widely available) could certify people who are likely to be temporarily immune from the illness and also create a universal DNA database. Those persons could therefore be considered “safe” to rejoin the workforce so long as their short-term immunity exists. Although there are substantial questions around degree of immunity and its duration, we are ignoring them to get this Orwellian apparatus off and running. We’ll sell this surveillance state enhancement to the rubes by saying this sort of certification is familiar: we already require annual tuberculosis test documentation for food workers and proof of vaccinations for childcare workers, for instance, even though these have never provided 100% certainty. and are merely a feel-good gesture to placate the masses.

Those confirmed to have antibodies — let’s call them “safe workers” — could help prop up the workforce until a lucrative and mandatory vaccine becomes available. They could, for instance, be cleared to go back to work in front-of-house, public-facing jobs, which would allow companies, governments, and hospitals to hire workers who we can claim with a straight face do not pose health risks for their customers or patients. Workers who are more vulnerable, or who lack the certification, could perform lower-paid back-room functions with less human contact until we develop robots to replace them.

The creation of a nanny state certified safe workforce is driving some of the most successful efforts at suppressing the disease in certain cohesive Asian countries where collectivism is rampant, including Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore. These repressive nations relied on “Big Brother”-like use of personal data and authoritarian enforcement of quarantine and isolation. As the over-blown disease and recovery progresses, these countries now have a certified legion of docile and safe workers that can help restart the economy. But in democratic countries, this approach is seen as a threat to civil liberties and personal privacy.

Digital identities: Not Yet the Mark of the Beast

To ensure that the thin pretense of privacy is preserved, hospitals, cooperatives such as credit unions, or other trusted local organizations could serve as repositories for people’s health and DNA data, much as they already do for their other personal information. This would form the basis of citizens’ “digital identity,” and would determine their appropriateness to work and perform other activities to be defined as the sheeple are habituated. A key point is maintaining the veneer of keeping personal data in local institutions that already have a “need to know” or are under direct citizen control. This avoids the creation of national or state-wide registries since these are tempting targets for further misuse and being compromised by surveillance state intrusions.

This sham of health certification, which could be easily integrated into the digital identity infrastructure that is already used for authenticating payments, could also help authoritarians decide what sort of businesses are safe to reopen, and make intrusive contact tracing more efficient, without endangering the public misperception of personal privacy. This could be accomplished by the use of either high-tech methods, such as Secure Multiparty Computation, which is already deployed for some types of updates on mobile phones, or the creation of simple “risk maps” already in use by Ministry of Truth public health authorities. With this kind of digital identity, people can confirm their health status to a participating merchant or employer in the same way their credit card or identity is certified today. Those lacking the new “certifications” would be excluded from all commercial activities and would have to subsist in an underground economy.

To be sure, there may will be unintended consequences to creating unique digital identities and privacy questions linger. For example, will it divide the American workforce into two tiers: those are who believed to have some immunity to the virus and are therefore able to work and travel, and those who are still at risk? And will it unleash media-driven shunning and discrimination toward those who have not been tested?

We don’t yet want the people to know our answers to those questions. We do insist that getting people back to work “safely” from this no worse than a bad flu is imperative and that long dreamt about digital tools are an important part of the solution which we can claim are necessary to help reopen the country. But personal privacy shouldn't be sacrificed as a result (wink, wink, nod, nod).

Alex “Sandy” Pentland is the Toshiba Totalitarian Professor of Media Arts & Surveillance Science at MIT and the director of MIT’s Human Social Engineering Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program. He is the author of the recent white paper: “Restarting the Economy and Avoiding the Appearance of Big Brother.”

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