Big Brother is closer than you think.

According to this disturbing report in the Epoch Times:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) purchased data from tracking companies to monitor compliance with lockdowns, according to contracts with the firms.

The CDC paid one firm $420,000 and another $208,000. That bought access to location data from at least 55 million cellphone users.

The contracts, approved under emergency review due to the COVID-19 pandemic, were aimed at providing the CDC “with the necessary data to continue critical emergency response functions related to evaluating the impact of visits to key points of interest, stay at home orders, closures, re-openings and other public heath communications related to mask mandate, and other merging research areas on community transmission of SARS-CoV-2,” the contracts, obtained by The Epoch Times, state.

The CDC said it would be using the tracking data to “assess home-by-hour behaviors (i.e. curfew analysis) by exploring the percentage of mobile devices at home during specific period of time.” The data could also be integrated with other information “to provide a comprehensive picture of movement/travel of persons during the COVID-19 pandemic to better understand mandatory stay-at-home orders, business closure, school re-openings, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions in states and cities.”

Ah, that vague purpose once again, but nothing malign.

We've seen this picture show before, in all the blather about the objective and claimed free-speech-guarding intentions of the Disinformation Governance Board, the FBI censorship recommendations to Twitter, the teachers' unions commanding the CDC what to "think" on school openings, the demonization of parents at school board meetings, the Obama-era "nudge" activity for our own good, the IRS obstruction of tea party groups, the Obama-era "unmaskings" of Americans in intelligence reports, and in all the COVID origin denials.

There's always some gobbledygook about wanting to "better understand" the public, or to look for "patterns" and "compliance," or to "study" the public, or or to ward off "foreign influences," or to "protect democracy" in these wretched spin efforts once the Orwellian news of an overly intrusive government using powers it has no right to use, is out.

What we have here is yet another government effort to spy on the citizens, given that the money quote within the Epoch Times article is that any of this data can be personalized, meaning, they can find out who left the lockdown to go to the store to buy a hot dog at Costco. Were you aware that the CDC was reading your cellphone data back during those lockdowns while you were masking up and trying to figure out how to use the Target app for contact-free shopping?

While the data is deanonymized, it can be used to identify people, researchers have shown.

“The data CDC received were aggregated and anonymous, had extensive privacy protections, and could not be used to identify individuals. They cannot be tied to an individual and have multiple layers of privacy protections to prevent misuse or re-identification,” [CDC spokesman Scott] Pauley said.

Sounds like the same old story and you can bet that story at some point will change. 

After it's found out that the data were personalized, we can look forward to the "accidentally destroyed" data stories.

It's ugly stuff and one more abuse of big government power for the House to investigate in its weaponization of government committees. The violations are coming fast and thick. Americans were given the same treatment as criminals get when cops put a bead on their cellphones to catch them in the act or apprehend them. That's what lockdowns (a prison term) amounted to, not just imprisonment in homes, but tracking as if we were criminals.

The House can't act on this soon enough because this amounts to the kind of unreasonable search and seizure explicitly prohibited by the Constitution itself.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License