The Digital Panopticon

BY Aaron KheriatyAARON KHERIATY MAY 5, 2022 LAW, POLICY, TECHNOLOGY 4 MINUTE READ

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

Vice has broken the story that during the previous two years, as the headline announced, “The CDC tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders.”

According to documents obtained by Motherboard, the CDC used phone location data to monitor schools and churches, and wanted to use the data for applications beyond covid: “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 recovered CDC documents, dating from 2021, state that the 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 contain a long list of what the CDC describes as 21 different “potential CDC use cases for data.” These include, among others, monitoring curfews, neighbor-to-neighbor visits, visits to churches and other places of worship, school visits, and “examination of the effectiveness of public policy on [the] Navajo Nation.”

Other use cases mentioned in the documents include public health issues beyond covid, such as “research points of interest for physical activity and chronic disease prevention such as visits to parks, gyms, or weight management businesses” as well as “exposure to certain building types, urban areas, and violence.”

Although the data the CDC purchased from the controversial broker, SafeGraph, was aggregated and designed to show trends, “researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people.” Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that that unmasking specific users from these aggregated human mobility datasets is possible.

One research team studied fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and published their results in Nature: Scientific Reports: “In a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the [mobile phone] carrier’s antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.” They coarsened the special and temporal data and still found “even coarse datasets provide little anonymity.”

“SafeGraph offers visitor data at the Census Block Group level that allows for extremely accurate insights related to age, gender, race, citizenship status, income, and more,” one of the CDC documents reads. Due to its questionable practices, SafeGraph was banned from the Google Play Store in June 2021, which meant that meant that any app developers using SafeGraph’s code had to remove it from their apps. The company includes among its investors the former head of Saudi intelligence. This is where the CDC went to get its tracking data, paying SafeGraph $420,000 for access to one year of data.

Evidence also emerged recently that the CIA, like Israel and Canada, has been similarly using unauthorized digital surveillance to spy on Americans. After supporting vaccine mandates in 2021, the ACLU finally took an interest again in civil liberties in 2022. They expressed alarm when newly declassified documents revealed that the CIA has been secretly conducting massive surveillance programs that capture Americans’ private information.

Like the Israeli spy agency Shin Bet, our federal intelligence agency was spying not on suspected terrorists but on ordinary Americans, with no judicial oversight and without congressional approval, as the ACLU noted: “This surveillance is done without any court approval, and with few, if any, safeguards imposed by Congress to protect our civil liberties.” They concluded: “These reports raise serious questions about what information of ours the CIA is vacuuming up in bulk and how the agency exploits that information to spy on Americans. This invasion of our privacy must stop.”

Though ACLU arrived a bit late to the party, as the old saw has it, better late than never.

U.S. Senators Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, both Democrats and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for declassification of relevant CIA documents. In a letter of April 13, 2021 which they made public, the two senators expressed concern that the CIA program was “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection [of data], and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes from [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—FISA] collection.”

Despite Congress’s clear intent, with the support of the American people, to limit warrantless collection of Americans’ private records, the senators warn, “these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context.”

There is a broader legal context for these extra-legal developments in mass surveillance of civilian populations. Since the war on terror began, Western nations have legislatively scaled up their increasingly intrusive networks of mass surveillance (often referred to with the euphemism “bulk collection”).

The last decade has seen such measures passed in the U.K., France, Australia, India, Sweden, and other countries—not to mention the AI and facial- and gate-recognition enabled surveillance in China, technology that Xi is already exporting to eager rogue regimes around the globe.

Author

Aaron Kheriaty

Aaron Kheriaty

Aaron Kheriaty, Senior Brownstone Scholar and 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is a psychiatrist working with the Unity Project. He is a former Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, where he was the director of Medical Ethics.

Views: 71

Reply to This

"Destroying the New World Order"

TOP CONTENT THIS WEEK

THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING THE SITE!

mobile page

12160.info/m

12160 Administrators

 

Latest Activity

Burbia posted a video

A few reasons I don’t like jews. It’s not complicated.

These are the reasons I became antisemitic. It’s not complicated. Sure, I could go on for days, weeks, months outlining everything, but I don’t need to. This...
5 hours ago
Doc Vega posted blog posts
8 hours ago
Doc Vega commented on Doc Vega's blog post Unusual Discoveries and Headlines
"Less Prone, Thanks Buddy! I'd like to volunteer as a historical reconstructionist! "
9 hours ago
Less Prone left a comment for t.me/TheIntelligenceLibrary
"Welcome to a revolutionary concept in public communication, the truth."
10 hours ago
pohonemas33 team is now a member of 12160 Social Network
10 hours ago
Less Prone favorited cheeki kea's discussion Tartaria
10 hours ago
tjdavis's 2 blog posts were featured
14 hours ago
Doc Vega's 7 blog posts were featured
14 hours ago
Less Prone commented on Doc Vega's blog post Unusual Discoveries and Headlines
"Some incredible pieces of history!"
14 hours ago
Less Prone favorited Doc Vega's blog post Unusual Discoveries and Headlines
14 hours ago
tjdavis posted a blog post
yesterday
Doc Vega commented on Doc Vega's blog post Government Issued Wearables? What’s Wrong With this Picture?
"cheeki kea Ha! Good one!"
Friday
tjdavis posted a video

This is Paris Now… You Won’t See This in the Tourist Brochures

In this video, I take you through Marché Barbès and its surrounding neighbourhoods — an area that reflects the modern, complex face of Paris most tourists ne...
Friday
Doc Vega posted a blog post

Trump's Big Beautiful Bill Passes Amidst Democrat Lies About a Tax cut for the Rich Being Averted

AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.It’s over, folks. President Trump and congressional Republicans aimed to…See More
Thursday
Doc Vega posted blog posts
Wednesday
cheeki kea commented on Doc Vega's blog post Government Issued Wearables? What’s Wrong With this Picture?
"I wonder what wearables must have been like before the last reset. "
Wednesday
Burbia commented on Burbia's video
Tuesday
Doc Vega commented on tjdavis's blog post National Blueprint For Biodefense
"Another scare tactic to push people into anew regime of vaccinations! Either that, or this is a…"
Tuesday
Doc Vega posted blog posts
Tuesday
Sandy posted a video

Dr. Mike Yeadon Speaks Out Against Digital ID, CBDCs, and Agenda 2030

Dr. Mike Yeadon, ex-Pfizer VP, urges public rejection of digital ID, CBDCs, and Agenda 2030, warning of future restrictions on freedom and privacy.
Jun 30

© 2025   Created by truth.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service

content and site copyright 12160.info 2007-2019 - all rights reserved. unless otherwise noted