(LifeSiteNews) – According to a report by Vice, documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show that the CDC bought access to location data for tens of millions of phones to track compliance with COVID measures among U.S. citizens.
As stated in the report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bought location data harvested in America to analyze movement during the COVID restriction era, including tracking patterns of people visiting schools, churches, grocery stores, and a number of other common destinations.
Among the 21 different “potential CDC use cases for data” listed in the documents, include the “Examination of the correlation of mobility patterns data and rise in COVID-19 cases” with respect to the “opening/closing” of “schools,” major retail destinations, and even “places of worship.”
The report states that the CDC purchased the one-year access pass to the data from data company SafeGraph for $420,000, a company which includes the former head of Saudi intelligence and tech billionaire Peter Thiel among its investors.
The CDC documents also claim that the SafeGraph 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 sort of data the CDC bought was aggregated—meaning it was designed to follow trends that emerge from the movements of groups of people — but researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people,” wrote Vice in an analysis of the documents, adding that Google’s mobile app store “Google Play” has actually banned apps that utilize SafeGraph over privacy concerns.
While the CDC initially purchased the data for COVID monitoring, the documents explain that the CDC considers this type of data collection useful for non-COVID related endeavors, such as monitoring travel to parks and “green spaces,” monitoring “physical activity and mode of travel,” and analyzing “population migration before, during, and after natural disasters.”
“The mobility data obtained under this contract will be available for CDC agency-wide use and will support numerous CDC priorities,” added the documents.
Speaking about the impact of the CDC’s desire to continue and expand data collection and analysis, Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher, told Vice it seems as though the CDC “purposefully created an open-ended list of use cases, which included monitoring curfews, neighbor-to-neighbor visits, visits to churches, schools and pharmacies, and also a variety of analysis with this data specifically focused on ‘violence.’”
This type of personal monitoring is what many skeptical of the government’s approach to the highly survivable coronavirus have warned about since the onset of the so-called pandemic.
This was especially true in cities and countries where COVID vaccine passports were combined with QR-code technology, effectively creating a second class of citizens based on their digitally-monitored medical status.
For years now experts have been drawing comparisons between the direction the West is headed and the current Chinese Communist regime.
In an article for The Washington Examiner, Amby Conn Carroll observed that “China’s authoritarian regime ruthlessly deploys the very latest in surveillance and artificial intelligence technology to monitor and control its 1.4 billion citizens,” which she says “is unsurprising since any totalitarian communist state must exert maximum control over its people in order to survive.”
“What we have now in China is the nightmare of the world’s first truly totalitarian state,” said Steve Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute and a China expert, in 2019.
“The Left has always said that true totalitarianism is impossible to achieve because there are never enough minders,” Mosher told LifeSiteNews. “That’s no longer true.”