Diabolical — How Digital ID Will Control Your Life
While the media continue to scoff at warnings that vaccine passports are part of a surveillance structure that is likely to become a permanent part of our lives if we allow their implementation, there’s nothing to suggest that this won’t be the case.
In “The Jimmy Dore Show” above, Dore highlights and interviews Max Blumenthal about his article, “Public Health or Private Wealth? How Digital Vaccine Passports Pave Way for Unprecedented Surveillance Capitalism,”1 co-written with investigative reporter Jeremy Loffredo.
The article reviews some of the tragic consequences that can be expected if a global rollout of digital vaccine passports were to succeed. Loffredo and Blumenthal point to India, where a digital ID system has already been implemented.
The database, called Aadhaar, contains the digital identifications of more than 1 billion residents, making it the largest biometric digital ID system ever constructed.
India’s System Illustrates the Dangers of Digital IDs
While not officially described as such, the system is a “de facto social credit system,” the authors say. It’s sold to the public as the key access point to government services, but it also tracks users’ geolocation, employment and purchasing habits.
Indians have no choice but to submit to this invasive surveillance in order to access government services and assistance programs, such as food rations. As you might expect from such a behemoth database, there are glitches, and in India, such glitches have proven deadly. Loffredo and Blumenthal explain:
Diabolical — How Digital ID Will Control Your Life by Dr. Joseph Mercola
The Convenience Trap
Military-Intelligence Org at Center of US Vaccine Pass Push
In the interview, Blumenthal mentions he’ll soon publish another article detailing the military-intelligence organization MITRE’s role in the U.S. vaccine passport push. That article was published on The GrayZone October 26, 2021.12 If you’ve been a fence-sitter, this piece just might push you to make a decision as to where you stand on this issue.
While MITRE is listed as a nonprofit, its leadership consists of military intelligence professionals, and most of its business comes from contracts with the Department of Defense, FBI and national security sector.
“The effort ‘to expand QR code vaccine passports beyond states like California and New York’ now revolves around a public-private partnership known as the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI). And the VCI has reserved an instrumental role in its coalition for MITRE,” Blumenthal and Loffredo write.13
“Described by Forbes as a ‘cloak and dagger [research and development] shop’ that is ‘the most important organization you’ve never heard of,’ MITRE has developed some of the most invasive surveillance technology in use by U.S. spy agencies today.
Among its most novel products is a system built for the FBI which captures individuals’ fingerprints from images posted on social media sites. MITRE’s own COVID-19 umbrella coalition includes In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Palantir, a scandal-stained private spying firm.
Elizabeth Renieris, the founding director of Notre Dame and IBM’s technology ethics lab, has warned that ‘as dominant technology and surveillance companies’ like MITRE ‘pursue new revenue streams in healthcare and financial services … privately owned and operated ID systems with profit-maximizing business models threaten the privacy, security, and other fundamental rights of individuals and communities.’
Indeed, the involvement of the military-intelligence apparatus in the development of a digital vaccine passport system is yet another indication that behind the guise of public health concerns, the U.S. surveillance state could be due to enhance its control over an increasingly restive population.”
What Is MITRE?
So, what is MITRE, and why are they a key player in the VCI? The organization did not reply to “The GrayZone’s” questions for the article; “however, its documented history makes for unsettling reading,” Blumenthal and Loffredo note.
MITRE was founded in 1958 and is based in northern Virginia. The military-intelligence think tank receives about $2 billion a year from U.S. agencies. Initially, it was founded as a joint project of the U.S. Air Force and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to develop command and control systems for nuclear and conventional warfare.
They’ve also been contracted to eradicate cannabis in Mexico using toxic herbicides, a strategy that ended up contaminating large swaths of food crops. More recently, MITRE has worked on surveillance tech for the FBI, collecting fingerprints from people’s social media photos where their palms and fingers are visible, and helped the agency establish the world’s largest biometric database.
MITRE also worked on the FBI’s Modernized Intelligence Database (MIDB) project, which according to the former FBI assistant director William Bayse allowed police to identify the political causes, associates and employers of activists, along with their biometric data, spending and tax information. As if that’s not hair raising enough, Blumenthal and Loffredo note:14
“Through hundreds of FOIA requests and interviews with current and former MITRE officials, Forbes learned that MITRE has designed ‘a prototype tool that can hack into smartwatches, fitness trackers and home thermometers for the purposes of homeland security… and a study to determine whether someone’s body odor can show they’re lying.’
MITRE is also home to the ATT&CK Program, an cybersecurity module which the corporation describes as ‘a globally-accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and [intelligence] techniques based on real-world observations.’
Adam Pennington, the lead architect for MITRE’s ATT&CK, ‘has spent over a decade with MITRE studying and preaching the use of deception for intelligence gathering.’ ACLU staff attorney Nate Wessler has called MITRE’s surveillance projects ‘extraordinarily chilling,’ and warned that they ‘raise serious privacy concerns.’”
These are the same people who are now playing a key role in the U.S. vaccine passport program. Blumenthal and Loffredo go into further depth in their article,15 but I think you get the gist.
The vaccine passports clearly have nothing to do with keeping people healthy and safe from infection, and everything to do with turning our most personal data into a profit center that simultaneously allows them to exercise unprecedented control over everyone’s life.
Make no mistake, sooner or later — and time is rapidly running out — everyone will have to make a choice: freedom or slavery. There’s no middle ground anymore.
And if we say no to slavery, we must be ready to not capitulate, because we can already see that mass protests are doing little to dissuade the World Economic Forum and its partners from pushing for a global digital vaccine ID, along with a centralized digital currency. Together, those two things will give them complete control over our lives. Our children and grandchildren will never experience what it’s like to be free if we let that happen.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Dr. Mercola
Diabolical Digital ID Photo credit: Internet Archive Book Images on VisualHunt.com
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