by Daniel Greenfield
But will they be able to stay off the “national server” if the Democrats take over?
When the NHS, Britain's socialized medicine system, debuted its
contact tracing app, six million eagerly rushed to download it. After a
few days, 10 million had downloaded and installed the app, and after a
month, around 40% of smartphone users had put a monitoring device on
their phones that would trace their social interactions and could tell
them to isolate at any moment.
In October, Governor Cuomo launched a New York contact tracing app based on technology from Google and Apple, and some assistance from Bloomberg’s organization.
"It’s going to not only bring contact tracing to a new level," Cuomo
boasted, while claiming that it wouldn't violate anyone's privacy.
Few New Yorkers seemed to believe him. Despite being available in
Spanish, Chinese, Bengali, Korean, Russian, Haitian Creole, and, even
more unexpectedly, English, the app hasn’t taken off and Cuomo’s regime
has refused to reveal the data that would actually show if it’s tracking
positive cases. The lack of data transparency has been the second
biggest story about Cuomo’s mismanagement of the pandemic, after the
deaths of 11,000 nursing home residents when his administration forced nursing homes
to accept infected patients. The numbers are likely higher, but the
Cuomo administration, in its typical fashion, is refusing to release the
data.
After a month, only 5% of New Yorkers have downloaded Cuomo’s spy app. That’s far short of the 60% that’s needed for contact tracing to work.
Even Europeans haven’t hit that 60% target. Few outside Communist China have.
Apple and Google claimed that they needed at least 15%. Only a few
states in America hit that bar and they tend to have small populations
that lean leftward. Most Americans have opted out.
Governor Murphy launched
his state’s contact tracing app to great fanfare, urging a, “shared
sense of personal responsibility to support our contact tracing
efforts”. Only 4% of New Jersey residents decided to take up the former
Goldman Sachs tycoon on his modest proposal.
Murphy, like Cuomo, had forced nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients. Some of the state’s deadliest outbreaks had also taken place in state hospitals for veterans.
Pennsylvania's Governor Wolf and Secretary of Health Richard Levine, debuted their contact tracing app in September.
“We won’t know who has downloaded the app, who has received
notifications and who used symptom check,” Richard (Rachel) Levine, who
had taken his mother out of a nursing home and into a hotel, while forcing nursing homes to take in infected patients, assured Pennsylvanians.
Only 4% of Pennsylavanians were convinced. Richard Levine has begun
pleading with 13-year-olds to download the app. If there’s anything
that’s bound to reassure state residents, it’s a strange man in a blonde
wig urging their children to download an app to monitor them.
Contact tracing app adoption in America isn’t likely to get much better even with more time.
Governor Northam rolled out a contact tracing app in Virginia back
in August. After half a year, the state has passed Google's 15% bar with
an estimated 19% of smartphone owners having installed the app.
But few people are actually using it.
Only 553 people submitted their positive results out of 100,000 positive tests in the state.
While Democrat governors and their European counterparts have
brandished download figures, many people download apps and then
uninstall them. Or leave them on and then pay no further attention to
them. The actual utilization of contact tracing apps is laughably
miniscule.
Virginia’s 800,000 plus downloads figure still only comes out to 553 people submitting results.
That’s why Governor Cuomo in New York and the NHS in the UK refuse
to release their impact numbers. Considering the performance of contact
tracing apps in Europe, it’s not hard to guess what they’re hiding.
Italy's Immuni app was
downloaded by 14% of the population, but only had 155 positive results
submitted in three months. In France, after 2.3 million downloads, only
72 risk contacts were flagged.
A lot of people can be badgered into passively downloading an app,
but when it comes time to upload their results and have the system
notify everyone they’ve been around, they just as passively choose not
to do it and the system fails.
After a year of touting contact tracing as the answer, the assault on privacy has stalled.
Contact tracing apps have failed miserably in New York, New Jersey,
and Pennsylvania. California only got around to launching its contact
tracing app now. The numbers are worse in much of the rest of the
country with only 8 million Americans actually using contact tracing apps.
Trust is the biggest factor in the adoption of contact tracing apps.
And very few Americans trust Big Tech, the government and its public
health experts with tracking their lives and the lives of those around
them. The NHS app intends to start asking users
about their personal lives to "score" their lifestyles for coronavirus
risk. It's easy enough to see this sort of thing as not only a privacy
violation, but as an echo of China's public surveillance and social
credit system.
In a socialized medicine system where people are already penalized
for their risk factors by being denied access to medical care, leaving
them with few options except emigration or death where age or obesity
can mean a denial of medical care, and where babies can be killed
because saving them is not deemed to be the best use of resources, a
“score” isn’t just a score.
Few people want to be denied medical treatment because they failed the social credit system.
Conservatives are the most likely to see the downside of such
calculations and the more conservative parts of the United States have
the lowest utilization rates of contract tracing apps.
Nevada's contact tracing app was only downloaded 70,000 times, as of last month, and zero exposures were registered in September. In Wyoming, its app only managed 5,000 downloads.
South Carolina’s legislature banned the use of contact tracing apps by government agencies.
But all of that may be about to change if the Democrats succeed in
their plan to place Biden in the White House. Biden's team is filled
with Big Tech lobbyists and strongly favors a national contact tracing
app infrastructure. While the Trump administration allowed states to
define their own policy, the Democrat plan has been to nationalize the
crisis and control the response.
Key to their plans is the creation of a national server that would
store information across state lines, and allow national authorities to
monitor everyone’s movements even if they leave a state.
Ten states have already moved their codes to Microsoft’s National
Key Server maintained for the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
Another five are following suit. As of now, virtually every state and
area, such as D.C., with a contact tracing app, is on the National Key
Server. That includes heavily populated states such as California, New
York, and Michigan.
The hodgepodge of apps and approaches will be replaced by one system to rule them all.
Scott Becker, the CEO of the Association of Public Health
Laboratories, has also been touting Biden’s plans for app contact
tracing. A national server will make a national contact tracing app much
easier to implement. Google, which is also involved in the national
server using its own cloud system, has, along with Apple, rebranded
“contact tracing” as “exposure notification”.
Big Tech decided that people were leery of “contact tracing” so they gave it a new name.
Meanwhile, Biden’s people have been coordinating with the Rockefeller Foundation on testing plans.
"Policy makers," the Rockefeller Foundation had urged, must "allow
the infection status of most Americans to be accessed and validated in a
few required settings and many voluntary ones."
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito recently warned that the
"pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on
individual liberty".
Despite that, under President Trump, Americans have still enjoyed an
oasis of human rights compared to the brutal restrictions and measures
in the rest of the world. Red states were able to choose less
restrictive and abusive routes for tackling the pandemic, even while
blue states relentlessly violated civil rights under the guise of a
public health emergency.
All of that may be coming to an end.
The near future may be a mandatory national app based either on the
existing Apple or Google architecture embedded into virtually every
smartphone, or, worse, GPS tracking like Norway’s app which was
withdrawn after being panned by Amnesty International, linked to the
National Key Server, which will serve as a key element of a national
pandemic social credit system.
Americans rejected contact tracing, but a Biden administration won’t take no for an answer.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/americans-said-no-coronavirus-contact-tracing-spy-daniel-greenfield/
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