Think Tank Claims ‘Dramatic Increase’ In Surveillance ‘Price Worth Paying’ To Fight Seasonal Flu

Now that governments and mass media have successfully colluded to create the illusion of a worldwide ‘pandemic’, a U.K. ‘think tank’ headed by ex-Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is trying to convince the beleaguered public that we should now accept massive government surveillance of our lives so that we won’t have to go through another fake pandemic:

A dramatic increase in technological surveillance is a “price worth paying” to fight Covid-19, argues a report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

Governments and private companies can use location data to track the success of lockdown measures, monitor bluetooth signals to help contact tracing efforts, or keep an eye on search queries to help identify new clusters of infection or previously unknown symptoms.

Privacy activists have warned, however, that such extensions of surveillance could be a dangerous precedent that would be hard to roll back once the crisis is over.

The TBI argues in the report published on Friday that those fears are valid, but understate the degree of trade-off that many countries face.

“Carefully applied, technology gives policymakers a possible way through the crisis that reduces otherwise very high costs in terms of lives lost and livelihoods destroyed,” said Chris Yiu, the institute’s executive director of technology and public policy. “But this escape route comes with a price: dramatically increased technological surveillance. Under the right conditions, this is a price worth paying.

“In normal times the degree of monitoring and state intervention we are talking about here would be out of the question in liberal democracies,” Yiu continued. “But these are not normal times, and the alternatives are even more unpalatable. This is quite different from the traditional debate about whether confronting security threats to our way of life merits sacrificing the values of freedom and privacy that define us.

“Covid-19 is not an ideology, and rebalancing the contract between citizens and the state to take advantage of the capabilities of new technologies is not capitulation.”

As a result, governments should consider a number of interventions that might normally cross the line, Yiu said. For instance, states could require technology platforms to share, in aggregate form, search and social media trends, and telemetry from wearables and other connected devices, to help them respond to the crisis. And they could share patient data internationally, to accelerate the search for treatments and vaccines, rather than putting up walls around national health services as they would in normal times.

But the brakes should not be removed entirely. The TBI argues strongly against “coercive” linking of apps and services: for instance, requiring people to use a contact tracing programme in order to receive digital credentials proving they are key workers. “If it is necessary to deem participation in a scheme mandatory,” the report argues, “this should be legislated for.”

Others disagree, however. A joint letter from almost 300 academics working in computer science and privacy rejected the dichotomy the TBI proposed, arguing that technological surveillance would hamper, not help, efforts to fight the coronavirus by wrecking the public trust that is needed for uptake.

The academics wrote: “It is crucial that citizens trust the applications in order to produce sufficient uptake to make a difference in tackling the crisis. It is vital that, in coming out of the current crisis, we do not create a tool that enables large-scale data collection on the population, either now or at a later time. Thus, solutions which allow reconstructing invasive information about the population should be rejected without further discussion. Such information can include the ‘social graph’ of who someone has physically met over a period of time.”

This orwellian Big Brother, Soviet-style total surveillance society and snitch culture is the endgame, and they are going to milk this fake pandemic as long as they can to get the concessions they want toward those ends.

After all, the public has a right to know if you are running a fever or have had your worthless seasonal flu shot — otherwise you could be unwittingly killing people you come in contract with, or some such nonsense.

Yet for all intents and purposes this fake pandemic has run its natural course — as all normal seasonal flus do — and yet Tony Blair thinks we should submit to massive government surveillance anyway.

So how do they make COVID-19 a gift that keeps on giving?  Easy — make absurd claims such as nobody can get natural immunity to this virus through normal exposure — so that only their Franken-Vaccine will make you “safe”.

Apparently, this is the only virus ever discovered in the history of science to which we cannot develop natural immunity.  Let that sink in.

And even that presumes they’ve actually isolated the virus in question — and there’s good reason to believe that they haven’t even done that.

Perhaps the lesson that we should all take awy from this ‘pandemic’ is what Hillary Clinton suggested we should learn from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 — that “we should trust leaders, the press, and experts.”