The Biden administration, with whatever public-facing transparency it currently choses to disclose around its Covid-suppression policy goals – and that amount of transparency appears to be able to fill a very small cup at this time – seems like it has picked a University of Illinois “Covid passports” project as a way forward in this seemingly endless pandemic.
It would be a test-and-trace the university has devised as a way to keep people out of hospitality establishments, unless they provide specific health-related data to the scheme.
Reports in previous days have suggested that the Biden White House was looking for a federal solution to the problem of contact tracing and immunity passports. The university provides just such a “solution” – albeit critics are immediately branding it as intrusive.
The thing that the Biden administration is now considering is contained in a PowerPoint presentation, released under the title, “2020-12-14 Shield Biden Covid Team,” Free Beacon found.
This suggests that the scheme was both devised for possible future use by President Biden – and it also originated in mid-December, before he took office.
But the principle problem that those now looking at it now see is that as the system deploys an app to store test results, and more data to correlate suspected contact – this data is also shared with local hospitality businesses, who are now – perhaps as a localized test of the future shape of things to come in the US, at the federal level – deciding, based on this, which patrons to allow in.
And that, critics say, is eerily reminiscent of how everyday life and everyday surveillance of regular citizens is unfolding in China, too, these days.
Other than outright concerns over inherent democratic rights that are supposed to be guaranteed to everyone is a modern democracy, such projects also bring into question the reality of the US digital and government infrastructure available to its residents.
This means that as 11% of US residents are currently without any type of government ID, and as 19% don’t use smartphones – the Biden administration pushing this particular solution might mean that almost one fifth of the US population would be left outside it.
