Author: admin

Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

On Memorial Day yesterday, Americans were called upon to remember the American soldiers who have been killed in America’s many foreign wars. U.S. interventionists should have also used the day to apologize not only to the families of those veterans but also to the families who lost loved ones as a consequence of U.S. interventionism in their countries.

Let’s begin with the obvious.

Ever since interventionists turned America toward empire and foreign control and domination in the Spanish American War in 1898, there has been no nation-state that has invaded the United States. There is a simple reason for that: No nation-state in Europe, Africa, and Asia has the money, armaments, personnel, equipment, supplies, or even the interest in crossing the ocean and invading the United States. Moreover, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, the same holds true for Canada and Latin American countries.

While U.S. interventionism includes Latin America, America’s deadliest foreign wars have been waged “over there” — in countries thousands of miles away from American shores. Since none of them involved an invasion of the United States, none of them can be said to be have been waged in “self-defense.” They were all based on foreign interventionism.

What about the much-ballyhooed World War II, the big one waged by the so-called greatest generation?

Oh sure, Japan attacked U.S. battleships at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and U.S. troops in the Philippines, but let’s put things into context, something that interventionists are loathe to do.

Japan had no interest in going to war against the United States. What would have been the point in doing so? Japanese military forces had invaded China and had their hands filled attempting to subjugate that giant country. Why would Japan want to fight a two-front war, especially against a nation as powerful as the United States? Just for the fun of it?

Of course not. Japan attacked those battleships at Pearl because President Franklin Roosevelt maneuvered and cornered them into doing so. Even though Roosevelt had assured the American people, who were overwhelmingly opposed to entered World War II after the horrific debacle of World War I, that he would never send American boys into another foreign war, the fact is that he was lying. In fact, he was doing everything he could to get the United States into the conflict.

This was a time, however, when U.S. presidents were still complying with the Constitution’s declaration of war requirement. FDR knew that owing to the overwhelming opposition among the American people to getting involved in another foreign war, he had no chance of securing a congressional declaration of war, unless he could get Germany or Japan to fire the first shot, in which he could say, “We’ve been attacked! We are shocked by this act of infamy! Now, give me my declaration of war.”

After failing to get Germany to take the bait, FDR shifted his focus to the Pacific, figuring that if he could get Japan to fire the first shot, that could give him his entry into the European war. Even though Japan and the U.S. were not at war, FDR initiated an oil embargo on Japan that proved remarkable effective in threatening Japan with insufficient oil supplies to sustain its military occupation in China. At the same time, FDR illegally froze Japanese bank accounts in the United States. When Japan tried to settle differences with the U.S. without war, FDR issued settlement terms that he knew would be highly humiliating to Japanese officials.

Moreover, FDR’s code-breakers had broken the Japan’s diplomatic codes and possibly also its military codes, which enabled him to read Japan’s secret preparations for war. While FDR craftily removed U.S. aircraft carriers from Pearl, he left the battleships there. He did the same with U.S. troops in the Philippines, a nation 5,000 miles away from the continental United States that the U.S. government had acquired by conquest in the Spanish American War.

When Japan attacked Pearl and the Philippines, it was not with the aim of invading the United States. It was with the limited aim of knocking out the U.S. Pacific fleet so that it could not interfere with Japan’s acquisition of oil in the Dutch East Indies. Thus, if FDR had never engaged in his interventionist antics, Japan would never have attacked those battleships and those U.S. troops in the Philippines because there would have been no reason to do so.

Following World War II, the U.S. government was converted into a national-security state, a totalitarian form of government structure consisting of the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the CIA, and the NSA. The justification for abandoning America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic was that the U.S. could now wage a decades-long “cold war” against America’s World War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union and its “godless” communism.

Combining a national-security state with an interventionist foreign policy proved to be a disaster for the American people in terms of a never-ending series of foreign wars — wars that had nothing to do with defending the United States from an invading power.

The Korean War.

The Vietnam War.

The Grenada War.

The Panama War.

The Iraq War.

The Afghanistan War.

The Somalia War.

And more…

All with the consequence of placing American soldiers, who were made to believe that they were “defending” America, in a position of killing foreigners or being killed by them.

At the same time, the CIA engaged in a never-ending series of regime-change operations, many of which were based on state-sponsored assassinations of foreign leaders. Iran. Guatemala. Cuba. Chile. Brazil. Congo. Nicaragua. Iraq. And more.

It’s worth mentioning that all that interventionism in faraway lands ended up destroying the liberty and privacy of the American people, especially with the perpetual “war on terrorism” that interventionism has produced.

Okay, let’s keep Memorial Day as a way to honor those veterans. But how about adding Apology  Day the day after Memorial Day, when all U.S. interventionists would be asked to fall down on their knees, apologize to all the American and foreign families to whom they have brought death and suffering through foreign interventionism, and seek forgiveness from them?

Since the first coronavirus cases were confirmed in the US, Alphabet’s YouTube has been repeatedly criticized for deleting popular videos questioning the wisdom of “lockdowns”, Dr. Fauci or other “science-backed” conventional wisdom – or simply using the outbreak as an excuse to censor more conservative content, something that has been a priority for YouTube since long before this all started.

YouTube, like Facebook and Twitter, insists it doesn’t delete conservative content, though a handful of Congressional hearings have been held to investigate these allegations, and President Trump is reportedly looking into the creation of a panel to combat censorship of conservatives on these popular platforms.

But while YouTube’s political motivation to target conservatives is fairly obvious – a large cross-section of the contemporary American left is staunchly pro-censorship when it comes to ideas they don’t agree with or believe to be “offensive” – the company’s motives in this latest scandal hint at a more sinister political agenda for Alphabet and its peers.

A journalist and human-rights advocate has discovered that YouTube is apparently censoring two Chinese-language phrases that are extremely offensive to the Communist Party.

#YouTube “automatically” deletes a comment in Chinese, “Gongfei”, which means “communist bandit”, in 15 seconds.
This person tested 3 times, same result. #油管 15秒內自動刪除「共匪」留言，網友連試三次皆如此。
他們找了個比李飛飛更厲害的AI專家？ pic.twitter.com/MLCeko0SIY

— Jennifer Zeng 曾錚 (@jenniferatntd) May 13, 2020

Moved to investigate the suspicious mass-deletions, the Verge discovered that YouTube has indeed added these phrases to a spam filter that automatically deletes user comments containing the phrases, even if they’re used in a positive and politically irrelevant context.

As the Verge points out, the company’s reasons for censoring these phrases is “puzzling,” considering that YouTube is blocked in China (along with all other Google services).

It’s not clear why these phrases are being deleted, but it seems that they’ve been added to comment filters meant to automatically remove spam or offensive text. This is suggested by the fact that the comments are removed quickly (human moderation takes longer) and that they are removed even if the banned phrases are used positively (e.g., “The 五毛 are doing a fantastic job”).

Making the matter more puzzling is that YouTube is currently blocked in China, giving its parent company, Google, even less reason to censor comments critical of the CCP or apply moderation systems in accordance with Chinese censorship laws. We’ve reached out to Google for comment and will update this story when we hear more.

Even if there is a legitimate reason to be suspicious of comments containing these phrases, why would YT feel the need to remove them automatically, without even allowing an opportunity for human review?

The Verge said it has reached out to YouTube for comment. But as the publication also points out, Google has been “frequently criticized” for seeming to kowtow to the wishes of the CCP as the company’s leadership quietly negotiate the company’s return to China over the explicit objections of the company’s employees, and in contravention of the principles that prompted Google to pull out of China a decade ago.

Just remember this next time you see some Silicon Valley bigwig opining about the importance of the bilateral relationship with China, and Trump’s “politically motivated” persecution of China.

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

It’s pretty safe to say we’re living in a world where everything is dramatically different than it was a few months ago. Regardless of how we personally feel about the response to the coronavirus pandemic, we still have to live in a society that has adjusted the parameters of acceptable behavior and has changed irrevocably.

While it’s impossible to guess precisely what comes next (I mean, were you really expecting aliens and murder hornets?), we can surmise from the things happening right now which way the future is headed. And we can use that information to prepare ourselves for it.

The following are some areas in which we may soon (or already) be facing difficulty, as well as some suggestions for meeting them head-on with resolve and preparations. If you’re looking for more information about the second wave of the virus and effects of that, go here.

The economy

It’s no surprise that the economy is in shambles – after all, it’s been all but shut down for months. Back when I wrote about the potential costs of COVID, I underestimated the total destruction of small businesses and the devastation of the workforce. I didn’t go deep enough in my analysis to foresee 40 million people becoming unemployed in the span of two months or that not just small businesses would suffer – that dozens of major corporations would also go under, taking even more jobs with them.

Few would have predicted the mass money printing for stimulus checks and small business loans and grants, putting our nature further in deficit than ever before. There’s even a possibility that the US could willfully default on its debt to China as the government struggles to handle the most exorbitant national debt in history.

Things that could directly affect individuals are:

• Unemployment: It may be difficult to keep your job or find another one.

• Inflation: As the government continues printing money for “stimulus” it weakens the dollar, reducing its value. This means that the price of goods will increase. So every trip to the store will cost you more money.

• The implosion of credit: As more and more people become unable to make their payments, massive swaths of the economy will suffer, including housing, banking, and the automotive industry. This will result in an inability to get future credit for mortgages or cars, and will also result in a loss of jobs.

What can you do about these things?

It’s more important than ever to have an emergency fund. That might be easier said than done when jobs are difficult to come by and when the money you do have doesn’t stretch as far. If you are getting that extra $600 a week from the CARE Act, I can’t stress this strongly enough: SAVE IT.

Now is not the time to try and pay off all your debts, particularly if your future is looking precarious. Continue making the minimum payments while you wait to see what’s going to happen. Put aside the money you would be using to pay off debt – you can always pay it off in a few months if things are looking up. Remember that the big banks get bailouts. Everyday people do not.  Paying off your unsecured debt should not be a financial priority right now.

Don’t get in over your head with expenses. If you can cut back, you should start doing so now. Don’t sign new phone contracts or expensive leases. Reduce your monthly cost of living as much as possible.

The public education system

The public education system was early to exit from normal operations. Children are currently doing “distance learning” online with their teachers and being guided by their parents.

While a lot of parents complain, many others have enjoyed reconnecting with their children. Some parents are also realizing that the education they thought their kids were receiving isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be when they find their children are far behind the curve and the teacher never even mentioned it.

After seeing some of the horrifying plans for schools reopening with “appropriate social distance,” many parents may decide not to let their children return to school at all. Here’s what the CDC is recommending.

Photo Credit: CBS 12 News

What can you do about the education situation?

While for many the loss of “free childcare” would pose a financial difficulty, a report on the Cato Institute suggests this could be a positive change.

Prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, we may be on the brink of a massive educational reset. With families back in charge of their children’s education, free from the constraints of compulsory schooling, they may increasingly demand more educational choice and freedom. Some of these families will choose to opt‐​out of schooling altogether, inspired by the learning, growth, and reignited curiosity they witness in their children during this time at home. (source)

It may turn out that educating kids at home is beneficial to the whole family. Here’s some advice for public schoolers from a homeschool parent and the first post of a series on getting started with homeschooling. It might be a good idea to begin looking into some homeschool programs to see what will might be a good fit for your family. In most states, you’re under no obligation to follow a public school curriculum when homeschooling.

The food supply

We’ve all see bare spaces on the shelves at the grocery stores. There’s a major problem getting food from the farmers to the people who need it. Our system has been designed around the centralization and processing of food.

Interestingly, this problem isn’t necessarily about actual shortages as much as it is processing and distribution.

Processing plants across the country are shutting down as more and more employees become ill. At least ten large meat processing plants have closed due to the virus. Distribution issues have farmers dumping thousands of gallons of milk, plowing under vegetables in the fields, and leaving potatoes to rot.

A lot of the food being produced was destined for restaurants, hotels, and cruise ships. Diverting it to grocery stores and the millions of people using food banks right now (because they didn’t get their money from unemployment yet, remember?) is unfortunately not as easy as it should be. This article explains some of the issues with getting food to hungry people.

One of the issues processing. With meat, in particular, this is difficult – most folks aren’t even going to be willing to process their own chickens and it’s wildly unrealistic to imagine a family in the city processing a cow or a pig. With produce, it becomes a little bit easier – anyone can wash fruits and vegetables – but employees are still needed to harvest the food.

A lot of that scarcity could be remedied if we could reallocate things – if janitorial supplies could be sold to the general public, if farmers could sell directly to stores or consumers, and if farmers could donate unpurchased items to food banks.

To summarize, farmers are losing billions of dollars and people are going without food, while the food we have is left to rot. Hopefully, President Trump’s new 19 billion dollar plan will allow the federal government to play matchmaker between frustrated farmers and hungry families. (source)

Governmental bandaids aside, this isn’t a problem that will be going away quickly. In fact, it may get worse.

What can you do about the food situation?

No matter where you live, you can produce or acquire at least some of the food you eat.

• Gardening – Grow food any way you can, from sprouting microgreens in smaller apartments to container gardens on a patio or balcony to full-on vegetable gardens that take up 90% of your back yard. With all the bare shelves at the grocery store, producing any of your own food will be helpful. Here’s some information on how to start a garden inexpensively.

• Livestock – If you live in a place where you can have livestock, now might be the time to do it. Many cities allow 3-6 hens in backyard coops, and of course, if you live in the country, it will be no problem to have chickens. Having fresh eggs at your disposal could be very important one of these days. Also, keep in mind that chickens are a great way to dispose of leftovers and vegetable scraps. Here’s some information on raising baby chicks. Rabbits are also a good animal to raise and can be farmed a lot more subtly within city limits because they’re so quiet. They can provide a very sustainable source of meat.

• Hunting – If you already have the equipment to do so, hunting can help you to acquire meat. A deer could provide your family with venison for months. Smaller game, like ducks or geese, are also good additions to your freezer. And depending on where you live, you can use snares for rabbit or other small mammals.

• Foraging – Even in the midst of the city, a park can be an abundant source of food in season if you know what to look for. Get yourself a good regional guide to the food growing freely in your area. It’s important that the book be regional because there are so many medicinal and edible plants in the US, you’ll want to narrow it down to what you can find where you are now. Makes sure your harvesting from an area not sprayed with toxic pesticides.

• Sprouting – The fastest and easiest way to grow something yourself is through sprouting. While supplies for orders are backed up, you can get excellent guidance on sprouting what you already have on this website. Sprouting can be done just about anywhere, in just about any home. They provide high nutritional value and some fresh veggies, any time of year.

The ability to locate or produce food is something that can mean the difference between keeping your family’s bellies filled or hunger. Grocery stores remain low on inventory and food banks cannot keep up with the demand of people who are out of work and who haven’t yet received their unemployment checks.

The supply chain of other goods

It isn’t just food that people are having difficulty finding. Nearly any store you visit right now has a lack of inventory. Some of it isn’t being produced, other things aren’t being imported, and still others are somewhere in limbo in the broken supply chain.

Some of the things that are missing are products that originate in China – see this massive list.

Other items, like paper products, are also sparse even though many of these things are made in the USA. It isn’t just because of so-called “hoarders” either, as the media wants us to believe. There have been shortages of TP across the globe and the main reason is the fact that everyone is now at home most of the time now. Previously, a lot of a person’s toilet paper usage was outside the home – so everyone was using those giant janitorial supply rolls. Most households are now using 40% more toilet paper than before. This interesting article goes into detail about why there isn’t a quick and easy fix for this. (source)

We can expect shortages of everything from medications to automotive parts to hygiene supplies in the near future due to the breakdown of the supply chain.

What can we do about the shortage of goods?

In reality, a lot of the things we used to run to the store and buy simply aren’t essential. We can begin to downsize and to focus on needs instead of wants.

We can begin to be more careful with the resources we do have. How many times have we said, “It’s cheaper to just replace it than try and fix it” when tossing something in the trash? We should be living by the adage, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

It’s also a good time to begin to be more creative with our reuse of things. Can you use the fabric from an item of clothing you’ll no longer wear to make something else that you need? How can you repurpose things? What multiple uses can you get from items? You can’t go wrong with learning new skills like making or repairing commonly used items.

Instead of making a dash to the store your first option, see how you can solve problems without buying anything.  Start looking for substitutes and make your items last as long as possible with careful cleaning and maintenance. This way of life has the added bonus of helping you to get a handle on your finances.

The increasing desperation

As Selco has often warned us, the biggest threat in an emergency is often not the emergency itself, but other people. Many of us saw this during the lockdowns, both within our inner circles as well as outside our circles, with the sometimes surprising behaviors of neighbors, coworkers, and friends.

As the financial catastrophe our nation is facing becomes more apparent, so will the desperation that people are feeling. And desperate people can behave irrationally and dangerously. Anyone who has ever considered the extreme measures that they would go to in order to feed or protect their children can understand that others feel exactly the same way.

Right now, during these early stages, we’re still in the “good” times. The government is doling out money hand over fist. Food banks are still operating, although supplies are very limited. A lot of people have looked at this as a “paid vacation” from their everyday lives.  Many are making more money staying home collecting unemployment than they made at work – for some it’s triple the amount.

But when that money stops coming in…when the food banks are empty…when the jobs don’t reappear…when supplies are short even for those with money…when there’s no more help?

That’s when people will begin to feel desperate.

What can you do about this?

First of all, it’s of the utmost importance that you practice good OpSec. That’s a military term that means “operational security.” Put simply, OpSec means that people outside your inner circle should be completely unaware of your supplies, your level of preparedness, and your willingness and ability to defend what’s yours.

Nobody needs to know you have extra toilet paper or canned goods. If you really want to help someone out, pick up a few things for them at the store and drop it off in the bag from the store saying, “I grabbed a few things for you while I was at the store.” Make sure they don’t think it came from your home because hungry people have very long memories.

Secondly, you need to be prepared so that you don’t feel this same desperation. We’ve been talking about preparedness on this website for almost a decade. If you haven’t put your plan into action, you are truly running out of time to do so, and quickly. Stock up and get ready because the future is going to be bumpy.

The outrage

Last but definitely not least, we can expect outrage.

Outrage will occur for a million different reason when times are tense, not the least of which are:

• Loss of constitutional rights

• Loss of freedom to move around as you want

• Loss of the ability to make a living

• Loss of loved ones

• Loss of security

• Loss of certainty about the future

We’re dealing with a scenario in which loss is rampant. One of the stages of grief is anger and we can absolutely expect this to erupt. We’ve seen some of this anger already, with protests across the country. Of course meeting those protesters are counter-protesters – everyone has a different story so they’re viewing this situation through a different lens.

The sides are being clearly drawn here – people are being cast into the role of caring only about the economy or only about public health. Those who are outraged aren’t looking for the middle ground – they’re furious due to their loss or their fear of loss. And don’t forget, this is an election year, so the media and the political parties will be out there in full force, stirring the pot.

What can you do about this?

You have to be prepared to protect yourself and your family from those who are outraged.  This might mean staying at home in order to avoid conflict, enhancing your home security, carrying a weapon (aren’t you doing that already?), or taking measures to isolate and protect the health of the people you love. It might also be staying “gray” and understanding the baseline mood of the place where you are. Regardless of your personal feelings, the best way to avoid drawing attention to yourself is by being just another person in the crowd/neighborhood/office.

I strongly encourage you to be proactive about this and take responsibility for your health. If you are in a vulnerable group (or have a loved one who is) are you really going to trust other people who don’t care to protect them?

If you are in a state with a lot of restrictions, it pays to be attentive. (Of course, it always pays to be attentive.) If you choose to go protest, that’s entirely up to you. If you hope to avoid potential trouble, when there are large, angry groups of people, don’t be there. It only takes a small spark for people who are already angry to erupt and you probably don’t want to be around when they do.

If there are large, angry groups of people, don’t be there. It only takes a small spark for people who are already angry to erupt.

Find things for which you can be grateful.

This may sound like crazy advice, but finding things for which you feel gratitude is the most life-changing thing you can do when you are trying to adjust. And adjusting is exactly what we must do as we prepare to meet a future that is different from what we ever expected.

You may find that your situation has dramatically changed since the beginning of the year. You may have lost one income or all income. You may be depending on checks from unemployment. Your business may not be able to withstand the extended shutdown. You may find yourself unable to pay bills that were never a problem before.

It’s a whole new world out there.

If you can find things to be grateful for, it will give you the encouragement you need to push forward. A full pantry, healthy loved ones, being together with the people you care for, being able to be present in your child’s education, making new and supportive friends online, a thriving garden, a delicious and filling meal, some free time after years of non-stop work–>activities–>bed only to get up and start it all over again – all of these are reasons for gratitude. Every day you’re on the right side of the grass is a good day if you can find things for which you are thankful.

Your attitude is everything. If you wallow in misery, you’re going to be miserable.

Everything has changed, but it’s still important to find reasons to be happy, grateful, and hopeful. These traits will help you find the resilience you need to survive and thrive, regardless of the challenges ahead.

Mere hours after Kara Swisher appeared on CNBC to call on Twitter to establish a panel of ‘content reviewers’ who can help the platform tag and remove “misinformation” – ie information that doesn’t neatly fit the narrative being pushed by one of Swisher’s employers, the New York Times – it looks like the company is taking a major step in that direction.

For the first time, Twitter has tagged tweets by President Trump as “misinformation”, and appended a link where readers can “get the facts” below the tweet’s primary text.

The tweet, sent earlier today by the president, was the latest in a series of missives opposing mail-in ballots, which the president has insisted would lead to widespread voter fraud.

According to Twitter spokesperson Katie Rosborough, who spoke to the Washington Post about the new policy, Trump’s tweets “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.”

Evidence of widespread voter fraud in the US has yet to materialize, despite the fact that half the country seems to think that Russia somehow rigged the election in President Trump’s favor. To be sure, there have been isolated incidences of voter fraud in recent years that have given some experts reason for concern – though these have been completely ignored, as they don’t fit the narrative that the crime is “totally nonexistent”

But instead of allowing readers to reason this out for themselves (something that shouldn’t be all that difficult given the thousands of replies calling Trump a racist liar), Twitter is stepping in to play the role of arbiter of truth.

An opinion column published in today’s WSJ hinted at a notion that has become increasingly obvious in the Trump era: An absolute truth is an extremely rare thing. Even the NYT has allowed a defined, liberal perspective infect its reporting over the years, as the column’s writer argued, and if the media wants to regain the trust of the public, it’s time to acknowledge that it doesn’t have some kind of monopoly on the truth.

Twitter has reportedly considered affixing warning labels to Trump’s tweets in the past, though Dorsey has insisted that Twitter would never remove a tweet from Trump, as Swisher urged the company to do. However, apparently, a letter sent to Dorsey by the widower of a former intern in then-Congressman Joe Scarborough’s office begging the company to remove several Trump tweets – tweets that allegedly perpetuated a ‘conspiracy’ about the death of the man’s wife – pushed the company over the edge. Though notably those tweets haven’t been touched.

Now, will Twitter apply the same scrutiny to Joe Biden?

And on issues of science, upon which science will twitter rely?

Though the company hasn’t said much, we suspect this won’t be an isolated incident. Will twitter now go full-on CCP and hire a ‘propaganda board’ to review all content on the site? We imagine we’ll learn more about the company’s plans in the coming days.

Authored by Sam Biddle via The Intercept,

Surveillance firms around the world are licking their lips at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cash in on the coronavirus by repositioning one of their most invasive products: the tracking bracelet.

Body monitors are associated with criminality and guilt in the popular imagination, the accessories of Wall Street crooks under house arrest and menace-to-society parolees. Unlike smartphones, de facto tracking devices in their own right, strapped-on trackers are expressly designed to be attached to the body and exist solely to report the user’s whereabouts and interactions to one or more third parties; they don’t play podcasts or tell you how many steps you took that day to sweeten the surveillance.

But a climate of perpetual bio-anxiety has paved the way for broader acceptance of carceral technologies, with a wave of companies trying to sell tracking accessories to business owners eager to reopen under the aegis of responsible social distancing and to governments hoping to keep a closer eye on people under quarantine.

Take AiRISTA Flow, a Maryland-based outfit that helps corporations track their “assets,” breathing or not. In an April 21 press release, the company announced it would begin selling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi trackers to be worn on an employee’s wrist like a Fitbit — or around their neck like a cowbell.

“When people come within six feet of each other for a period of time,” the company wrote in a press release, “the device makes an audible chirp and a record of the contact is made in the AiRISTA Flow software system.”

But the tracking goes far beyond audible chirps: AiRISTA’s platform allows employers to continuously upload a record of close encounters to a corporate cloud, providing an up-to-date list of presumed social distancing violators that would double as a detailed record of workplace social interactions.

The company’s marketing language is explicit in talking up the nonviral benefits of tracking your workers’ every move: By helping companies “Locate people and things in real time” (the two are seemingly treated interchangeably), they can expect a “Reduction in unplanned downtime,” “Improved asset utilization rates, [and a] reduced need for spares.”

In a press release published just a day after AiRISTA Flow’s, Boston-based Redpoint Positioning Corporation, another player in the business of tracking workers and inanimate objects, announced that it was taking its own “cutting-edge technology … already used by leading companies worldwide in third-party logistics, auto manufacturing, mine operation” and repackaging it for social distancing. Like AiRISTA, Redpoint offers companies the ability to “tag” their equipment and employees using ultra-wideband radio signals, a wireless positioning technology only recently added to the most advanced iPhones. Redpoint boasted in the announcement of its ability to use these tags to “track the location of people and equipment with extremely high accuracy, even in complex industrial environments,” now with a coronavirus-specific augmentation:

“If social distancing parameters, such as a 1- or 2-meter radius, are violated between workers, the tag alarm will alert them to the hazard.” The company will also collect a history of employee interactions:

“If an infection does occur, historical data from the system will allow for highly accurate contact tracing, as records can show the individuals who were near the infected party.”

A Redpoint spokesperson did not answer when asked if the company has any policies dictating or constraining how their technology can be used by clients.

While the AiRISTA and Redpoint trackers merely evoke the aesthetics of a police state in the workplace, Israeli surveillance outfit SuperCom is literally repackaging as a Covid-19 “solution” technology previously used on incarcerated or criminally convicted people. The security company has customers in 20 countries, including the U.S., and claims decades of experience with what it calls in a press release “secured boundaries projects,” like border crossings and home confinement. It’s the house arrest expertise that the company is now marketing as PureCare, described on the SuperCom website as a “state-of-the-art solution for quarantine and isolation monitoring to aid government efforts in containing and limiting the reach of infectious diseases” and, incredibly, as “a non-intrusive patient friendly system that constantly tracks patient location within buildings, vehicles and outside.”

SuperCom Americas President Ordan Trabelsi declined to tell The Intercept where the company’s ankle bracelets are currently being used for quarantine enforcement, but it named Central America as the location of one pilot deployment, and referenced a second pilot program in some other, unspecified region, in an April 6 press release announcing a “Coronavirus (COVID-19) citizen quarantine and containment tracking technology.” The company announced separately, on April 27, that it had begun selling tracking devices for prisoners released from an unnamed “United States of America correctional facility due to COVID-19.”

In the same press release, SuperCom claimed to see a spike in interest from “government agencies looking to restrict the spread of COVID-19 among their general population” and envisioned “additional potential industry demand for electronic monitoring services coming from the incarcerated American population.”

One might think that a company like SuperCom would shy away from proposing that those exposed to the novel coronavirus be in any way treated like literal criminals. But in a recent promotional YouTube interview, Trabelsi makes a point of stressing that it’s precisely the company’s work with criminal elements that makes its Covid-19 “solution” superior. “In the past, we have spent a lot of our time focusing on very accurate and state of the art tracking of offenders,” he said in the video. “Many customers and potential customers around the world asked us if we could use that same platform to do, you know, Covid-19 home quarantine tracking and compliance. And we thought, of course we can because it’s exactly what we do in the offender tracking space. But now we’ll just be tracking people that are not essentially offenders but unluckily were exposed to the virus.”

When asked in the YouTube interview about the privacy implications of SuperCom’s ankle bracelets, Trabelsi demurred — though he did note that the hardware is “very comfortable and goes underneath their sock.” He went on to say that how the company’s customers use the technology is their call, not his.

“We leave it to them to make their decisions on rules and privacy,” he stated.

In an interview with The Intercept, Trabelsi said interest in SuperCom’s coronavirus product has been “mostly government” so far. Should any of these intrigued governments decide to use SuperCom bracelets to enforce quarantines, Trabelsi said it’s up to them to do so responsibly.

“Everyone has their own rules,” he told me. “Some countries share that they want to put everyone who comes into the country into quarantine for 14 days, some want to put it onto people who are sick, or who have a confirmed case; it depends what [that government’s] regulations are. They define the rules exactly as they want. We just provide them with technology to track people.”

A laissez-faire approach to privacy and accountability will do little to persuade those who see SuperCom’s strategy as a cynical attempt to push lucrative police technology into the civilian world during a period of widespread social crisis. Leonard Rubenstein, a human rights attorney and bioethicist at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, told The Intercept that SuperCom’s stance has the distinction of being both dangerous and useless.

“I found the ankle monitor and other tracking methods described [by SuperCom] highly inappropriate and detrimental to a public health response in being unreasonably and unnecessarily coercive,” he said, “a serious invasion of privacy without any safeguards, and promoting an adversarial relationship to public health authorities when the relationship should be built on trust.”

Rubenstein, who is affiliated with the school’s department of epidemiology, said that an invasive technology like a tracking bracelet imposes “limitations on human rights to serve public health ends” and must be held to particularly high standards to determine if it’s worth the trade-off.

Jennifer Granick, an attorney specializing in surveillance and cybersecurity technologies at the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Intercept that SuperCom’s Covid-19 marketing efforts put a public health gloss on a police technology and thus helps it to “be normalized among the general population for medical reasons. … This should trouble us all.”

To Rubenstein, even SuperCom’s most humane use case for tracking bracelets, allowing temporary release of incarcerated people to spare them from a coronavirus prison outbreak, doesn’t pass muster. “In the case of released prisoners, less restrictive means are also available,” he said. An always-on surveillance bracelet might be defensible only “where there was an individualized determination that the person poses a high public safety risk upon release in the absence of monitoring/tracking,” he added.

Responding to these concerns, Trabelsi told The Intercept that despite the company’s own emphasis on monitoring criminals, its products shouldn’t be understood as intended only for that purpose. “The product vision [is] to track the location of people to verify they are following the rules in order to protect themselves and our society,” Trabelsi wrote via email. “The product wasn’t necessarily developed for offenders. The technology also tracks patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other issues that require monitoring for their own safety.” Trabelsi argued that tracking bracelets could allow people to avoid being confined to a hospital or “government controlled facility” while under quarantine. “This technology would give these individuals the option to be at their homes instead and be monitored to reduce the risk of causing harm to others,” he added.

When asked if SuperCom had consulted with any public health experts during the design or sale of its tracking hardware, Trabelsi was unsure — “In the past we probably have, I’m not certain.” But he also seemed to push back on the notion, perfectly framing Granick’s worry, that this is even a public health technology to begin with: “The technology is essentially for tracking people. It’s not a health solution. It can just tell you where people are. It’s not going to keep you from getting sick. It’s not going to heal you.”