CDC Tracked Millions Of Americans Using Cellphone Data
If you still harbor doubts about whether the CDC is a rogue government agency indifferent to civil liberties, here’s something that will put those doubts to rest.
A bombshell piece in Vice, “CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders”, reported that the Centers for Disease Control used your tax dollars to buy location data captured from the cellphones of private citizens and used it to track the movements of millions of Americans during Covid.
This isn’t the first time the CDC used the pandemic as an excuse to exceed its authority. First it ordered an illegal rent moratorium due to Covid and then it issued that unconstitutional mask mandate on public transportation. Both were struck down by the courts.
Now it looks like the agency may have run afoul of the 4th Amendment, violating our right to be free from unreasonable searches.
These lab-coated tyrants - who ought to stick to tweaking the food pyramid - used cellphone data to monitor compliance with lockdowns and curfews.
Worse, they did business with a “controversial” data collection outfit - SafeGraph - to get the information.
“SafeGraph initially provided the data to the CDC for free during the outbreak of the pandemic, the documents (obtained through FOIA by Vice) show. Then in 2021, the CDC reportedly hatched a deal to pay the company $420,000 for continued access.SafeGraph — which is backed by tech billionaire Peter Thiel and ex-Saudi intelligence chief Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, among other investors…Google banned all app developers on its app store from working with SafeGraph last year after critics raised privacy concerns, according to Vice.”
Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher, reviewed the documents for Vice and came to this conclusion:
“The CDC seems to have 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.’” (The document doesn’t stop at churches; it mentions “places of worship.”)
Chilling. All of it.
Oh, and those vaccine cards? They were issued by the CDC.
That means the CDC already has a databank of who’s been vaccinated and how many times. This, combined with SafeGraph’s location data, would have been useful if state or local governments had decided to go full-New Zealand and ordered the unvaccinated to stay home, something lobbied for by extreme members of Team Apocalypse.
It’s no exaggeration to say this is the road to Shanghai-style lockdowns.
While data collection companies claim their information is anonymous, that’s not always the case.
From The New York Post:
Data brokers like SafeGraph say that the information they sell represents the movements of groups of people rather than individual users. But critics have raised concerns about the data being less anonymous than data brokers claim.
In one example, a top Catholic priest from Wisconsin was forced to resign last year after a Catholic news site was able to de-anonymize data linked to his cellphone to reveal that he had allegedly used Grindr and visited gay bars. It was not clear whether that data had been obtained from SafeGraph or another data broker.
According to tech experts, turning off location services is not enough to keep a phone from being tracked, Neither is powering it down. In order to be sure that a phone is untrackable, it should be turned off and the battery should be removed.
You know what’s better than dismantling your phone to keep the busybodies at the CDC from knowing your whereabouts?
Dismantling the CDC.
